Protestant Ascendancy

The Protestant Ascendancy (also known as the Ascendancy) was the sociopolitical and economical domination of Ireland between the 17th and early 20th centuries by a small Anglican ruling class, whose members consisted of landowners, politicians, clergymen, military officers and other prominent professions. They were either members of the Church of Ireland or the Church of England and wielded a disproportionate amount of social, cultural and political influence in Ireland. The Ascendancy existed as a result of British rule in Ireland, as land confiscated from the Irish Catholic aristocracy was awarded by the Crown to Protestant settlers from Great Britain.

During the Tudor conquest of Ireland, land owned from Irish nobles was gradually confiscated by the Crown over several decades. These lands were sold to colonists from Great Britain as part of the plantations of Ireland, with the province of Ulster being a focus in particular for colonisation by Protestant settlers. These settlers went onto form the new aristocracy and gentry of Ireland, as the Gaelic nobility had either died, fled or allied with the Crown. They eventually came to be known as the Anglo-Irish people. From the 1790s the phrase became used by the main two identities in Ireland: nationalists, who were mostly Catholics, used the phrase as a "focus of resentment", while for unionists, who were mostly Protestants, it gave a "compensating image of lost greatness".^[1][2]