Ulster Massacres: The Long-Harm Consequences Of The Ulster Massacres

Ulster massacres
There is speculation around number of planters killed in the early months of the uprising. Early English Parliamentarian pamphlets claimed that over 200,000 settlers had lost their lives. This is most likely an act of propaganda, as recent research has suggested that the number significantly lower, in the region of 4,000, though many thousands were forced from their homes. It is estimated that up to 12,000 Protestants may have lost their lives in total, after being exposed to the elements during the current winter.
The general pattern around the country was that the attacks worsened exponentially, the longer the rebellion went on. To begin with, there were beatings and larceny towards the local settlers, then house burnings
Dr. Mary O'Dowd states, 'To look at the long-term consequences of the Plantation, it's very difficult to do that without also taking into consideration the long-term implications of the 1641 rebellion: because the massacres of 1641, in the winter of 1641, really were very traumatic for the Protestant settler community in Ulster, and they left long-term scars within that community.”
Contemporary Protestant accounts depict the outbreak of the rebellion as a complete surprise; one stated that it was 'conceived among us and yet we never felt it kick in the womb, nor struggle in the birth'. After the rebellion, many Protestants in Ireland adopted the attitude that the native Irish could not be counted on to remain peaceful. The Protestant narrative of the rebellion as a preconceived plot to massacre them was constructed in the Depositions of 1641, a collection of witness statements by victims assembled between 1642 and 1655
Many settlers massacred Catholics, particularly in 1642–43 when a Scottish Covenanter army landed in Ulster. William Lecky, the 19th century historian of the rebellion, concluded that, "it is far from clear on which side the balance of cruelty
Trevor Royle quotes James Turner who in his memoirs reported that after skirmish in Kilwarlin woods, Irish prisoners were given "no quarter, being shot dead", but two other eyewitness accounts of the skirmish, (a letter by Roger Pike and the dispatches of Major-General Robert Monro, a Protestant commander), do not mention the killing of prisoners. Turner records in his memoirs that the following day English soldiers entered Newry and captured its castle; after the defeat, Catholic soldiers and local merchants were lined up on the banks of the river and "butchered to death ... without any legal process".
On Rathlin Island, Covenanter Campbell soldiers of the Argyll's Foot were encouraged by their commanding officer, Sir Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreck, to kill the local Catholic MacDonalds, near relatives of their arch Clan enemy in the Scottish Highlands Clan MacDonald; this they did with callous efficiency, throwing scores of MacDonald women over cliffs to their deaths on rocks below. Various accounts of this massacre puts the total death toll to somewhere between 100 and 3000