COLIN: Ireland, a small island on the edge of Europe, between the Old World and the New.

As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.

The sea has allowed us to leave and it also has allowed us to come back.

And that really is the history of the Irish.

COLIN: Many came to these shores.

Many left, never to return.

The history of the Irish has long been a global one.

We would have had hundreds of Irish indentured servants working in the fields, often alongside African chattel slaves.

COLIN: The latter years of the 18th century would be known as the Age of Revolution.

LYONS: The Abbé Edgeworth, born in 1745 in Longford, who is at the centre of the story of Louis XVI's demise.

GEOGHEGAN: Ireland was a very combustible country, and that all came to a head in 1798.

COLIN: From That Small Island: The Story of the Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people who have truly left their mark on the world.

COLIN: The dreams of Gaelic Ireland had died in Europe in the early 1600s with the death of the exiled lords of Ulster, O'Neill and O'Donnell.

Their ancestral homelands in the north of Ireland were now ripe for English plantation.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: If you look around, you actually can see the mouth of the Bann, the Foyle, and the Swilly.

If you controlled these three great rivers, you controlled a huge swathe of Ulster.

Ulster until then had been the most Gaelicised of the Irish provinces, with the big families such as the O'Neills, the O'Donnells and Maguires.

Now, this entire ruling class had been cleared out.

For Ulster, it was an absolutely fundamental, transformative period.

OHLMEYER: The state now takes six of the nine counties of Ulster, confiscates them and reallocates them to colonists, the majority of whom are Protestants from Scotland, England and Wales.

COLIN: The fertile lands to the east of the River Bann were highly attractive to the new settlers.

But a different type of colonisation would be needed to deal with the heavily wooded and more isolated land to the west.

What the English Crown decided to do was to get the London companies involved in the plantation directly.

So these are all the various merchant guilds that would now invest in this plantation.

This was going to be in what became the County of Derry and because of this London connection became known as Londonderry.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: It was Doire Colmcille, the oak grove of Colm Cille, but it was refounded as Londonderry.

This is the Protestant citadel.

They built the walls, they built St Columb's Cathedral, which is the first purposely built Protestant cathedral in the three kingdoms.

And they also armed the city.

OHLMEYER: They do invest very considerable sums in developing not just the city of Derry, but they establish plantation towns, Draperstown for example.

You can see the wide street, always with a jail, with a church, these symbols of civilisation.

COLIN: For the Catholic Irish, the beacons of civilisation now lay overseas.

The established Irish colleges of Europe expanded as they attracted more students from Ireland than ever before.

One of the most famous and influential of these colleges was founded by the Franciscan order.

LYONS: So this college is hugely important for Irish culture in particular.

Firstly, because it provides trained Franciscans who return to Ireland, but it's also hugely important as an oasis for the preservation of Gaelic culture.

The Irish College in the early 1600s sets up the first ever Gaelic language printing press.

And it's one of the brethren of this community, Bonaventure O'Hussey, who produces the first ever Gaelic print catechism.

OHLMEYER: Louvain, with its Irish language printing press, is hugely important here in cultivating these ideas of an Irish nation.

They are explicitly rejecting these very negative representations the English are peddling against them.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] NARRATION: "They have displayed no inclination to treat of the virtues or good qualities of the nobles amongst the old foreigners and the native Irish, such as to write on their valour and on their piety."

LYONS: So, they're hugely important in forging this sense that all Catholics of Irish origin belong to a shared Catholic nation.

COLIN: One of the most important Catholic scholars of his day was Waterford-born, Luke Wadding.

Educated at Lisbon, he taught at Salamanca in Spain before arriving at the heart of Catholic Europe.

BINASCO: Luke Wadding was a very important Irish Franciscan.

In 1618, he came to Rome.

He was one of the prominent theologians of the Spanish embassy.

He was an extremely intelligent man, and he was very influential in building the first Irish Franciscan College, and the first Irish college in the city of Rome, which was opened in 1625.

COLIN: Although he was highly active in promoting the international work of the Franciscan Order, Luke Wadding never forgot his homeland.

BINASCO: He was the first who decided to insert the feast of St.

Patrick on the Roman calendar.

So every day when we celebrate St.

Patrick on the 17th of March, we have to thank Luke Wadding.

And he decided to do it because it was a way to represent Ireland to the global Catholic community.

COLIN: The main task for the Irish College in Rome, like Louvain and the others throughout Europe, was to train priests and friars to return to Ireland.

BINASCO: You have to think about what happened in Ireland in the 17th century.

Being a Catholic priest or an Irish Franciscan was extremely risky.

They could be killed, they could be jailed.

And so it was an extremely risky mission.

NARRATION: "We live for the most part in the mountains and often too, in the midst of the bogs to escape the cavalry of heretics.

The wild beast was never hunted with more fury through the mountains, woods, and bogs than a priest."

They're telling Ireland's story to their Catholic counterparts.

This is a story of persecution.

This is a story of loss, bloodshed, atrocity.

COLIN: Religious persecution was widespread during these years, and not only against Catholics.

The Catholic Inquisition also pursued heretics wherever they found them.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: We have the records of seven or eight Irish people who were either kidnapped or taken into custody and sold as slaves into North Africa, converted to Islam, and then later on in their lives, got back to the West and were processed back into Christianity by the Portuguese Inquisition.

We're looking here at one of the files and it's of a man called David Guade in Portuguese, but it's Wadding.

And he is Irish, he is a native of Wexford.

He's single, he's a sailor, he's taken into custody here in Lisbon in 1627, and the charge against him is Renegade.

He's a renegade from Christianity to Islam.

So, Wadding is being tried, if you like, for being a Muslim.

The marks of conversion, of course, are change of dress, change of name, he's given a Muslim name, and most importantly, he is circumcised.

COLIN: Having escaped from four years of slavery, he made his way back to Lisbon, where he was tried by the Portuguese Inquisition.

There is a record here where he admits his error.

He also says he's repentant and remorseful.

There is the certificate of his confession and his reconciliation with the church.

And then he's given leave to go wherever he wants.

And unfortunately for us, he disappears from the archive, but we have this laser beam of insight into these four or five years of extraordinary experience he had in Algiers and on the corsair high seas.

[seagulls squawking] COLIN: The corsairs, having long terrorized the southern shores of Europe, now extended their reach as far north as the Irish coastline.

KELLEHER: In the early hours of June in 1631, they came in under the cover of darkness.

And then all hell broke loose.

They had burning torches, they had iron bars, and they basically broke the doors in and completely surprised the inhabitants, taking them captive before they even knew it.

They took men, women and children captive, about 109.

They were loaded onto the main ships and they sailed to the Barbary Coast then, which is the slave markets of Tunis, Tangiers and Algiers.

And they were sold there as labourers.

They may have been sold for galley slaves for the Corsair galleys, or the women would have been sold, depending on the age, as concubines.

For the next number of years, relatives and government officials sought to try to ransom a lot of those people.

Only two ever made it back.

COLIN: As the 1600s progressed, religious tensions were growing.

Land in Ulster was now held predominantly by Protestant colonial settlers.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: In the 17th century, Catholics did not live in a walled city.

They were treated with suspicion.

They were a fifth column.

So the Catholics tended to live on the periphery of the city.

And that was the bog.

OHLMEYER: We're dealing with a Catholic population that has everything to gain and nothing to lose by rising in rebellion.

COLIN: The rebellion finally broke out in 1641.

It was particularly brutal in the heavily-settled regions in Ulster.

MICHEÁL Ó SIOCHRÚ: Attacks on both sides, both from the native Irish and Catholic Irish on the settler communities, and then from the colonial government as well.

OHLMEYER: Extreme violence and a bloodletting on a scale that has never been seen before.

Moments of what we would call today ethnic cleansing.

It's probably one of the darkest moments in Irish history.

Over 8,000 witness statements from settlers fleeing from the rebellion.

So it's a huge body of evidence, but it's a very problematic one because clearly it's only giving one side of the story.

NARRATION: "A hundred men, women, or children were driven like hogs about six miles to the river called the Bann.

There the Irish forced them to go upon the bridge naked and with their pikes and swords and other weapons, thrust them down headlong into said river, and immediately they perished."

COLIN: The bloody events of 1641 were never forgotten.

OHLMEYER: That siege mentality that we associate with the loyalist Protestant population, or elements of it, really dates back to 1641.

And what's so important is how these depositions stir up fear and hysteria in England.

And how they're then reprinted across time.

So, at moments of political crisis, this spectre of Irish treachery is sort of waved before the English public to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment.

It confirmed all their prejudices and suspicions about the Irish Catholics, and they were more determined than ever to crush all elements of Irish Catholic political and economic power in Ireland as a result.

COLIN: But the day of reckoning for the rebellious Catholics in Ireland was postponed, as English attention was now focused on a different conflict.

A civil war between the King and Parliament.

Following the end of the civil war in England, the Irish would now be faced with the most implacable of foes.

His name was Oliver Cromwell.

MICHEÁL Ó SIOCHRÚ: Cromwell has retained this macabre fascination for the Irish because really all the evils and sins of that period are placed on him.

He was the head of the army of conquest, there's no question about that, but he was one of many.

This was the English Parliament and the English nation at the time that was actually undertaking this conquest.

COLIN: Cromwell had arrived in Dublin in August 1649 at the head of one of the most feared armies of the age, the New Model Army.

He marched north and laid siege to Drogheda.

The town held out for eight days before cannons breached the walls.

NARRATION: "The enemy retreated.

Our men, getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them to the sword.

I forbade them to spare any that were in their arms in the town.

And I think that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men."

COLIN: Civilians, women and children were also put to the sword.

Cromwell and his army now marched on Wexford.

Cromwell instigated a massacre of men, women and children.

The thing that was emphasised again and again was Irish papistry.

That is absolutely allows us to obliterate you.

The lesser breed and the lesser creed.

MICHEÁL Ó SIOCHRÚ: This was an act of vengeance.

He was very clearly over, as far as he was concerned, to avenge the massacres of 1641 of Protestant settlers.

I think he was really laying down a marker.

Cromwell was saying, "I'm here.

There will be absolutely no deal or settlement or any kind of reconciliation.

I'm here to conquer."

Cromwell became a kind of a brutal shorthand for everything about the English colonisation, because it was so vivid, so cruel, so bloody, so absolutely outside the norms that it seared itself into people's consciousness.

COLIN: In May 1650, after nine months, Cromwell left Ireland, but the war carried on over the next three years.

Its effects were catastrophic.

NARRATION: "About 504,000 of the Irish perish and were wasted by sword, famine, hardships, and banished between the 23rd October 1641 and the same day in 1652."

MICHEÁL Ó SIOCHRÚ: There are elements of that conquest which are definitely genocidal in terms of simply wiping out entire communities, clearing entire areas of the country with a view to refashion Ireland into a new England and one that would be Protestant and loyal.

But the impact on the population of Ireland is absolutely disastrous.

COLIN: By 1653, the conquest was complete.

The Cromwellian settlement, which followed, would change the face of Ireland.

That then facilitates a revolution in landholding that was utterly unprecedented.

Something like eight million Irish acres are confiscated and then redistributed primarily to more Protestant colonists.

So this is the single largest transfer of land anywhere in Western Europe.

It is absolutely transformative.

Land equals political power.

Land equals wealth.

So this is the establishment of what becomes known as the Protestant Ascendancy.

OHLMEYER: One of the other consequences of the 1650s was the transplantation of populations really from the east coast of Ireland to the west.

In other words, "to hell or to Connacht."

You are talking tens of thousands of people who are being transplanted across the River Shannon effectively into a native reservation where they can be controlled.

COLIN: The move west had to be made mostly in winter.

The weather was very severe and the roads almost impassable.

Hundreds perished along the way.

Those who disobeyed were subject to being killed on sight.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] NARRATION: "Most generous God, Lord of all blessings, look at the Irish now left powerless.

As we travel westward to Connacht, our old friends, bereft, are left behind us."

COLIN: One Irish poet described it as... the war that finished Ireland.

While many were displaced and dispossessed at home, others found themselves transported thousands of miles to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Once they arrived in Barbados, the captives were sold as indentured servants and sent to work on the many sugar plantations on the island.

FARMER: So, when you hear the term 'indentured', it seems almost benign.

But what you're really dealing with are men, women and children from as young as five to maybe about 50s, 60s, being rounded up, like shanghaied and sent to an island that they know absolutely nothing about.

NARRATION: "We are stripped of our land, honour, and trades.

We are exiled from our homeland.

Children are separated from parents, husbands from wives, virgins from the arms of their mothers and sent to the remote islands of the New World."

FARMER: The way in which one seeks to oppress and suppress a native population and to exploit them both economically and politically, is transferred from Ireland to the Caribbean.

OHLMEYER: On this plantation, they are still cultivating the sugarcane, like they would have back in the 17th century.

And this is backbreaking work.

It's brutal.

It's hot, it's humid.

We would have had hundreds of Irish indentured servants working in the fields, often alongside African chattel slaves.

And it wasn't just the men who worked in the fields.

The women did as well.

A third of the indentured servants who came from Ireland were female.

We also had children, many of them were Irish speakers.

Over time, the white women would have taken on roles as domestic servants.

They would have worked in the big house, they would have found other roles on the plantation.

But it was the 1670s before they pulled white women out of labouring in the sugar fields.

FARMER: And when you take a look at the historical record in early documents, that sense of wanting freedom is shared by both the Irish indentured and the enslaved Africans.

To the point where some of the early rebellions in 1670s and 1680s are actually collaborations between Irish indentured and enslaved Africans.

COLIN: The final decades of the 17th century would also be filled with conflict back in Ireland.

As the Catholic King James faced a rival for the throne, his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.

The supporters of James were known as Jacobites.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: James is deposed.

Ireland rallies to James's cause.

The Catholics, the Jacobites, they support their king in the hope that when he is restored, that he would restore the states that most of them had lost fighting for his father and his brother against Cromwell.

COLIN: The battle for control of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland would be a European conflict fought on Irish soil.

It began with an advance by King James and his army on the Protestant citadel of Derry.

It's the apprentice boys, it's the young men of the city who take the fateful decision to close the gates.

They, at this stage, held the city for William, for the Protestant cause.

When James arrives, shots are fired at him.

A siege begins.

It's the longest siege in British and Irish military history.

COLIN: The siege lasted for 105 days until the city was relieved.

And the Jacobite forces retreated.

BARTLETT: The Siege of Derry is an iconic event in Ulster loyalist history and memory.

Derry became a symbol of Ulster Protestant resistance and resilience and determination never to surrender.

COLIN: William now left England and followed James to Ireland.

Their armies faced each other at the Battle of the Boyne.

Two kings, William III and James II meet at the Battle of the Boyne.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: William marches in.

James flees the field, leaves the Irish to stew in their juice.

BARTLETT: And the result is a win for William III.

Now, what that settles is who is to be king of England.

It doesn't really settle who's to be king of Ireland because the Jacobite forces, largely, are able to retreat in good order.

They meet their Waterloo at the Battle of Aughrim.

The Jacobite army is obliterated.

They are forced then to retreat behind the walls of Limerick.

COLIN: Patrick Sarsfield, the leader of the Irish Jacobite forces, now signs the Treaty of Limerick, which allowed the defeated army to follow King James to France.

Over 12,000 Irish soldiers and their families left Ireland.

They would be known to history as the Wild Geese.

NARRATION: "These men are leaving all this most dear in life, for a strange land, to serve in an army that hardly knows our people.

They are true to Ireland and have still hopes for her cause.

We will make another Ireland in the armies of the great King of France."

BARTLETT: Louis XIV forms several regiments.

These regiments are manned by rank-and-file Irish, officered by Irish in the 1690s and in the early 1700s.

LYONS: Les Invalides was established in 1671 by King Louis XIV of France.

He was very dedicated to the French army and he invested enormously in his army.

And this was part of that project, which was to construct a hospital where wounded soldiers could come to and recuperate and then be readmitted back into the field.

In the course of the period from its foundation until the French Revolution, a total of 2,600 Irish veterans came and stayed here.

We have evidence of Irishmen playing hurling out on the fields here.

So, a little bit of Ireland here at Les Invalides.

COLIN: The Wild Geese spread all over Catholic Europe, but in Ireland, new laws, called the Penal Laws, were introduced.

They would ensure the primacy of the new Protestant regime.

This code, as it becomes known, of Penal Laws, is imposed on the Irish statute that ultimately renders the Irish Catholic a second-class citizen in his own country.

They are the African-Americans at the back of the bus.

They were treated in the biblical sense, hewers of wood, drawers of water.

They were there to do the menial tasks, to put up and shut up.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: Catholics could not buy, hold land on long leases, or they could not inherit land from their father, unless given to one son if he took the decision to convert to Protestantism.

And many of them did.

OHLMEYER: So, in every way now, we're seeing the Protestant community control the political, the economic, the commercial infrastructure of Ireland.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: It's best encapsulated in a couplet from Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, he said, you know, [speaking Gaelic] "It's not the poverty, it's the indignity."

It's that idea that you are never, you are never under any illusion as to who the top dog is.

COLIN: Persecution in Ireland continued to drive away the Catholic Irish to more welcoming shores.

Spain was a place of great opportunity where the Irish became not only soldiers but also important merchants and powerful administrators in the empire.

LYONS: One of the fascinating things about Irish migrants in Europe in this period is the extent to which first generation Irish-born abroad see themselves very much as servants of their receiving country.

Ricardo Wall, for example, who becomes the de facto prime minister of Spain in the early 18th century.

Ricardo Wall, he's born in France.

His parents have left just after the Treaty of Limerick.

He's going to enter into the service of the Spanish Army who know a lot about how diplomacy is working, how the new ways of imperialism are working.

MARIAN LYONS: He's extremely important because he, on his coattails, brings in a whole group of other Irish.

TOSTADO: Ricardo Wall rises to the top in the mid-18th century, so the generation that Ricardo Wall opened the door to become the masters of the Spanish Empire.

COLIN: Some Irish sought to make their fortune from one of the most unsavoury and cruel aspects of empire.

OHLMEYER: The Irish are involved in the slave trade.

They are often a captain or crew on the actual vessels that shipped enslaved peoples across the Atlantic.

LYONS: The Irish were very heavily involved, uh, in the slave trade out of the major centres in France, in particular, uh, the port city of Nantes, with several Irish families involved in the trade: MacNamaras, Stapletons, Lees, Shields, Sheas.

But by far the most notorious was Antoine Vincent Walsh.

He has a dreadful reputation for overloading his ships.

He had one of the highest rates of mortality among slaves being transited across the Atlantic.

He himself had plantations in the Caribbean, and in a kind of an ironic twist, he ended up dying in penury on his plantation.

It's certainly a darker chapter in the history of Ireland and of Irish participation in the wider world.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: The Irish, of course, are present all over Europe and all over the world in large numbers, but what's distinctive about the Irish here in Portugal is that they actually form an entire community.

The Irish in Lisbon numbered between 6 and 7,000.

In 18th-century maps of Lisbon, the area around Remolares, which is just right beside the port, was known as the Irish Quarter, simply because so many Irish people made their home there.

COLIN: In 1755, Lisbon suffered a huge catastrophe, an earthquake which shook the city to its core.

The Irish community was hit badly.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: That community did survive, it didn't continue to grow as it had been before 1755.

And in a way, 1755 represents not just a break in the continuity of Irish contacts here with Portugal, but also the beginning of a shift in Ireland, away from continental Europe in general, and beginning to get into the to and fro of the great North Atlantic trade, which includes, of course, the giant which is North America.

COLIN: By the middle of the 18th century, instead of looking to Europe, more and more Irish were looking westwards.

Their destination: the British colonies of North America.

KENNY: Three-quarters of the migrants who came from Ireland to North America in the 18th century were Protestant, and three-quarters of those Protestants were Presbyterians from Ulster.

The British colonies in North America are not welcoming for Catholics.

They don't like Catholics at all.

Just about every colony has discriminatory laws against Catholics.

And Irish Catholics hit the bull's eye twice, A, by being Catholic, and B, by being Irish.

MIKE QUINLIN: At the end of the 17th century and into the 18th century, Catholicism was proscribed.

You could not be a practising Catholic.

If you were, you would be penalized.

If you were a Jesuit, you would be hung.

COLIN: Other Irish set their sights further north, drawn to the rich fishing grounds around Newfoundland, known to the Irish as Talamh an Éisc, the land of fish.

MANNION: After about 1720, the Irish began to arrive in some numbers.

The first were young men, almost entirely from around Waterford City and the hinterland, Southwest Wexford, South Carlow, South Kilkenny, Southeast Tipperary, all of County Waterford, and even Southeast Cork.

And they would fish as servants for the English masters.

Some of them did not have English, so they would learn their English here from the English planters.

And gradually, women joined, settled, so Irish families began to settle.

The Irish came in greater numbers after about 1780.

Today, two thirds of Petty Harbour at least is of Irish Catholic descent.

COLIN: The latter years of the 18th century would be known as the Age of Revolution in both the New World and the Old.

The most important revolution in the New World would be the American Revolution or the War of Independence.

When the colonists in America rose in rebellion against the British Crown.

The Presbyterians from Ulster were to the forefront of the American resistance.

The role that the Irish played in the Revolution is primarily the Ulster Presbyterian Irish.

They tended to be patriots.

They were on the American side, not the British side.

They had a real grudge against the British Crown.

So when the opportunity came, they joined the colonists and fought against the British.

COLIN: But the American Revolution would not be the only seismic event of the time.

The French Revolution would set Europe alight.

The French Revolution begins as a programme for reform, a radical reform, admittedly, but becomes quickly a revolution to overturn the French monarchy, and eventually to set up a Republic.

COLIN: Many of the Irish elite were closely aligned with the deposed King Louis XVI.

His execution and that of his wife Marie Antoinette stunned Europe.

A first-hand account of Louis's execution is preserved in the library of the Irish College in Paris.

LYONS: These are the letters from the Abbé Edgeworth.

Edgeworth was born in Edgeworthstown in Longford, 1745.

The young Edgeworth moved to Paris where he was educated and became a priest.

And as the revolution developed, he became the confessor to Louis XVI and indeed attended him on the scaffold at the time of his execution in January 1793.

And in his letters, he describes the aftermath of the actual execution.

NARRATION: "All that I can say is that as soon as the fatal blow was given, I fell upon my knees and thus remained until the vile wretch, who acted the principal part in this horrid tragedy, came with shouts of joy, showing the bleeding head to the mob, and sprinkling me with the blood that streamed from it."

LYONS: This means that an Irish person is present for probably one of the most tumultuous events that marks the watershed and the transition from Ancien Regime Europe to the modern period.

COLIN: Inspired by revolutionary events abroad, a new movement, the United Irishmen, was founded in Ireland by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant radical.

Their aim to unite Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter, and to break the link with England.

They wanted to separate Ireland from Britain, establish an Irish Republic, and give full political, religious, civil rights to everyone on the island of Ireland.

WHELAN: The British, they were always afraid that the French would come and use Ireland as a soft back door to take out Britain.

And of course, that was a reasonable thing for them to think because Theobald Wolfe Tone and other United Irishmen, who had been kicked out of Ireland, ended up in France and were trying to persuade the French to do exactly that.

COLIN: Theobald Wolfe Tone set out to persuade Napoleon to send a military expedition to Ireland.

WHELAN: They did a great job of getting the French interested in Ireland, and eventually the French did send a very significant fleet to Bantry Bay.

COLIN: The attempted landing at Bantry Bay in West Cork was foiled by bad weather and mountainous seas.

But this failure did not extinguish the flame of rebellion.

GEOGHEGAN: I think in the 1790s, Ireland was a very combustible country, and that all came to a head in 1798 then, when the United Irishmen attempted a rebellion.

It broke out in Wexford.

WHELAN: The guerrilla hit-and-run stuff that they were doing was working really well.

The British cavalry and the yeomanry and whatever were absolutely terrified of pikes, the long pikes.

The cavalry never went near pikemen.

They were very successful in the fields the barley fields of North Wexford.

And were very successful in doing that.

But fighting a pitched battle where the British were able to bring in their cannon and so on, as what happened here on Vinegar Hill, that was foolish.

NARRATION: "On Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave, 20,000 died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin, and in August, the barley grew up out of the grave."

GEOGHEGAN: Each part of the rebellion was isolated and crushed by the British.

And it failed because they were able to use their superior military power to crush it.

COLIN: The brief but bloody rebellion had been defeated.

The unity that had been seen between Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter was now broken.

GUY BEINER: In Ulster, most of the rebels were from a Presbyterian background, Ulster Scots.

They sided with Catholics, and yet these Presbyterians, after the rebellion was brutally suppressed, many of them changed their political allegiance.

Within one generation and subsequent generations moved towards unionism, Orangeism, loyalism.

COLIN: The Act of Union made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom.

Irish Catholics were hopeful that the British Parliament at Westminster which was now in control, would repeal the Penal Laws and grant Catholic emancipation.

This was another betrayal by the British.

And so there was huge resentment.

COLIN: This resentment would be expressed not in violent rebellion, but on a mass movement under a charismatic leader.

Daniel O'Connell is a massively important figure in moulding this new concept of a modern Ireland and what it meant to be Irish.

GEOGHEGAN: He was the great civil rights leader of the 19th century, and he raised Irish Catholics.

He raised Irish nationalists from their knees.

He gave them back their self-respect, and he also won them their freedom.

COLIN: Daniel O'Connell finally won Catholic emancipation for his people, but his fight for civil rights was not confined to Ireland.

GEOGHEGAN: Daniel O'Connell was a liberator who believed that everyone should be free.

And the plight of men, women, and children born into slavery, being whipped, being abused, being raped, being tortured, that moved him deeply.

Because he knew what it was like to be an oppressed people.

And he was going to make himself a champion of freedom, whether that was in Ireland or Britain or in the United States.

COLIN: Among the people that Daniel O'Connell inspired was Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous Black abolitionists of the 19th century.

Douglass, who had escaped from slavery himself, visited Ireland in 1845.

And the first place he visited was Dublin because he wanted to meet his great hero, Daniel O'Connell.

Frederick Douglass said that he learned as a child to love the name of Daniel O'Connell because his master used to spit out the name with a curse.

BROWNLEE: When he got to Ireland, the reception that he got was so welcoming and different from his experience in the United States.

He didn't experience any discrimination, and when he would walk down the street, people would shake his hand.

And for the first time, he felt truly free.

And he said, "For the first time in my life, I feel like a man and not like a colour."

COLIN: Before he left Ireland, Douglas saw firsthand the suffering and strife of the people experiencing the first months of what was to become known in Irish as An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger.

NARRATION: "I have heard much of the misery and wretchedness of the Irish people.

I must confess my experience has convinced me that the half has not been told.

Here you have an Irish hut or cabin, such as millions of people of the Irish live in, in such the same degradation of the American slaves.

I see much here to remind me of my former condition."

COLIN: Frederick Douglass was witnessing a calamity that would devastate Ireland.

JACKSON: The Great Famine is a monumental disaster.

At least one million people die who might otherwise have lived.

At least a million and a half, perhaps two million migrate, that would have stayed otherwise in Ireland.

And it's the Irish poor who are the victims of this ghastly tragedy.

NARRATION: "On this very day, a cry of famine, wilder and more fearful than ever, is rising from every parish and county in the land."

The famine was a huge failure of the British state, and I think there's no way around that, that I think if the exact same thing had been happening in any part of England, Scotland, or Wales, the response of the British Parliament would have been different.

There was huge inaction when a million people were dying.

NARRATION: "The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people."

There was a belief effectively that the Irish character and attitude needed to be totally changed if Ireland was to be developed properly.

NARRATION: "For our part, we regard the potato blight as a blessing.

When the Celts once cease to be potato eaters, they must become carnivorous with the taste of... NARRATION: "...Improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of the civilised world."

The cancer of dependency had to be cured.

The curing in question proved to be extraordinarily cruel.

Curing dependency meant effectively the government not responding in a timely, generous or adequate way to the subsistence crisis.

And the result was a horrific calamity in which a million people plus died.

WHELAN: You essentially had a society which was disappearing.

Whole valleys, whole hillsides turned silent.

Massive transition from being a- essentially a very loquacious, bilingual culture into one which was increasingly monoglot, Anglophone, but which had also turned quiet.

The singing, the dancing, the young people, the vibrancy had gone.

Many people never really recovered from the trauma of the famine.

SINGER: [singing in Gaelic] [singing in Gaelic continues] NARRATION: "The black potatoes scattered our neighbours, sent them to the poorhouse and across the sea.

They are stretched in hundreds in mountain graveyards.

May the heavenly host take up their plea."

SINGER: [singing in Gaelic] [singing in Gaelic continues] [singing in Gaelic continues]