The more than three century-long religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland came in waves, caused by an overreaction by the State to certain incidents and interspersed with intervals of comparative respite.

"[2] According to historian and folklorist Seumas MacManus, "Throughout these dreadful centuries, too, the hunted priest -- who in his youth had been smuggled to the Continent of Europe to receive his training -- tended the flame of faith.

"[5] The 1975 canonization of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales raised considerable public interest in other Irishmen and Irishwomen who had similarly died for their Catholic faith in the 16th and 17th centuries.

On 22 September 1992 Pope John Paul II beatified an additional 17 martyrs and assigned June 20, the anniversary of the 1584 martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, as their feast day.

Numbers of the monks and religious were killed at their expulsion from their houses, but the King's adhesion to many articles of Catholicity made it too hazardous for his agents in Ireland to resort to the stake or the gibbet.

This, in addition to the King's religious policy, ultimately triggered Old English aristocrat Silken Thomas, 10th and last Earl of Kildare, to launch a 1534-1535 military uprising against the rule of the House of Tudor in Ireland.

Travers also had no political or financial dependency, familial links, or nationalist feelings of loyalty towards the Earls of Kildare and his involvement in the uprising was motivated only by a desire to defend the independence of the Catholic Church in Ireland from being lost to control by the State.

There upon being condemned to death, amongst other punishments inflicted, that glorious hand was cut off by the executioner and thrown into the fire and burnt, except the three sacred fingers by which he had effected those writings, and which the flames, however piled on and stirred up, could not consume.

Charles Reynolds (Irish: Cathal Mac Raghnaill), the Hiberno-Norse Archdeacon of Kells, was posthumously attained for high treason in the Attainder of the Earl of Kildare Act 1536 for successfully urging Pope Paul III to excommunicate King Henry VIII over his divorce, his uncanonical remarriage, and the Caesaropapism of his religious policy.

While reviving Thomas Cranmer's prayerbook, the Queen ordered the Elizabethan religious settlement to favour High Church Anglicanism, which preserved many traditionally Catholic ceremonies.

They were hunted into the Mass rocks in mountains and caves; and the parish churches and few monastic chapels which had escaped the rapacity of King Henry VIII were also destroyed.

According to Philip O'Sullivan Beare, "Being surrounded there [Willis] surrendered to Roe by whom he was dismissed in safety with an injunction to remember his words, that the Queen and her officers were dealing unjustly with the Irish; that the Catholic religion was contaminated by impiety; that holy bishops and priests were inhumanely and barbarously tortured; that Catholic noblemen were cruelly imprisoned and ruined; that wrong was deemed right; that he himself had been treacherously and perfidiously kidnapped; and that for these reasons he would neither give tribute or allegiance to the English.

This state of comparative tranquility was not, however, suffered to continue..."[21] A Royal edict issued on 4 July 1605 announced that Elizabethan era Recusancy laws were to be rigorously enforced and added, "It hath seemed proper to us to proclaim, and we hereby make it known to our subjects in Ireland, that no toleration shall ever be granted by us.

Charles, with the proverbial fickleness of the Stuarts, when pressed by the Puritans, persecuted the Irish, while he encouraged them when he hoped their loyalty and devotion would be the means of establishing his royal prerogative.

Upon landing with the New Model Army at Dublin, Oliver Cromwell issued orders that no mercy was to be shown to the Irish, whom he said were to be treated like the Canaanites during the time of the Old Testament prophet Joshua.

"[27] After taking the island in 1653, the New Model Army turned Inishbofin, County Galway, into a prison camps for Roman Catholic priests arrested while exercising their religious ministry covertly in other parts of Ireland.

Writing in 1668, Janvin de Rochefort commented, "Even in Dublin more than twenty houses where Mass is secretly said, and in about a thousand places, subterranean vaults and retired spots in the woods".

[33] Irish victims of the Titus Oates witch hunt included: Despite their exposure and public disgrace in 1681, the anti-Catholic witch hunt masterminded by Titus Oates and Lord Shaftesbury laid the foundation for the second overthrow of the House of Stuart in 1688, the creation of the anti-Catholic Whig political party, and, despite the best efforts of those who fought in the Jacobite risings, to decades of the British Empire being governed as a Whig single party state.

During the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, a painting of Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted had been removed by Bishop Walter Lynch from Clonfert Cathedral to protect the image from desecration by the New Model Army.

Signed statements remain and bear the signatures of many non-Catholic eyewitnesses, including local Lutheran and Calvinist ministers, the Orthodox Jewish Chief Rabbi of Győr, and Count Siegebert Heister, the Captain General of the town's military garrison.

[35] A copy of the image was presented in 2003 to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert by Bishop Pápai Janos of Győr and now hangs inside St Brendan's Cathedral in Loughrea, County Galway.

[39] Irish nationalist John Mitchel, a Presbyterian from County Londonderry, later wrote, "I know the spots, within my own part of Ireland, where venerable archbishops hid themselves, as it were, in a hole of the rock...

Imagine a priest ordained at Seville or Salamanca, a gentleman of a high old name, a man of eloquence and genius, who has sustained disputations in the college halls on a question of literature or theology, and carried off prizes and crowns -- see him on the quays of Brest, bargaining with some skipper to work his passage... And he knows, too, that the end of it all, for him, may be a row of sugar canes to hoe under the blazing sun of Barbados.

[43] Another oral tradition version of the same events credits the killing to a Yeomanry unit from Clogher and gives the slain priest's name as Father Milligan.

Peig Minihane-O'Driscoll also revealed that her husband had been born before Catholic Emancipation and that her in-laws had twice carried their baby son up into the mountains, seeking to secretly make contact and request his baptism from one of the two outlawed priest known to be in hiding locally, one near Ballycrovane Wood and another near Castletownbere.

There was a long delay by the Holy See in opening an Apostolic Process into the Sainthood Causes of the Irish Catholic Martyrs for fear of escalating the ongoing religious persecution.

[7] Plunkett was certainly targeted during the anti-Catholic witch hunt connected to Titus Oates and was executed following a show trial motivated solely in odium fidei ("out of hatred of the Faith"), instead of being in any way guilty of than any real crime against the state.

John O'Neill, during Mass, beheading him, and bringing his severed head to Cork city, the six conspirators learned that Catholic Emancipation had just been signed into law and that no reward would be given.

O'Neill's clerk was also arrested at the scene and delivered as a prisoner to Anglo-Irish landlord and infamously anti-Catholic Church of Ireland vicar Denis Mahony at Dromore Castle.

Daly's insistence,[58] Inse an tSagairt has been a site of Christian pilgrimage and is still used by the local parish for an open air Annual Commemorative Mass every June.