"To Hell or to Connacht" 

The saying "To Hell or to Connacht" refers to the 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland, which mandated the transplantation of Irish Catholics to Connacht (west of the River Shannon) and County Clare by May 1, 1654. This action was part of the Cromwellian Plantation, a policy of land confiscation and resettlement. The Act stipulated that those remaining in other provinces after the deadline would face death, though the phrase "To Hell or to Connacht" was not used in the actual wording of the Act.

The above phrase has been in constant use in Ireland ever since and everything from the plight of the Galway hurlers to a 1981 court case when uttered by Mary Robinson, later president of Ireland.

Yet it is most associated with a certain Oliver Cromwell who probably never uttered the words.

But if you have heard it you probably have also heard the saying ‘The curse of Cromwell on you’ which is largely used in an Irish sense to criticise somebody else.

In June 1895 the Kerry Sentinel newspaper reported on plans to erect a statue of Cromwell in London and the objections to the proposal from Irish MPs:

On the vote to complete the sum required for the Houses of Parliament buildings, Mr. Hayden said he rose to move that the vote be reduced by £500, the item for the erection of a statue of Oliver Cromwell (Irish cheers). There was nothing to justify such a use of public money, so far as Ireland was concerned, where, down to the present day, his name was regarded with hatred and bitterness. Nothing could exceed the butchery carried out by his troops in Ireland, where, at Drogheda, the loyalists were put to the sword after they had surrendered. The loyalists were butchered as they stood in the market place, and especially the Papists, Irish Papists in particular. No less than one thousand of them were slain in and round about St. Michael's Church in Drogheda, and a recent historian who has written on the action of Cromwell in Ireland stated that some eighty persons who sought refuge in the tower of the church were brought down, and after they had summarily surrendered they were killed on the spot (hear, hear). That was only one of the terrible horrors that were perpetrated in Ireland by order of Oliver Cromwell, and he (Mr. Hayden) ventured to think that this did not afford a good reason why the Irish members, at all events, should be asked to vote public funds for the erection of a statue to such a man (hear, hear).

The motion was defeated.

For more information search the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive (www.irishnewsarchive.com )