The Ulster Plantation was implemented with considerable co-operation from the Ulster Irish...

The Ulster Plantation was implemented with considerable co-operation from the Ulster Irish - at least from those who had disliked the aggrandising policies of Hugh O'Neill. The Irish elite responded as it had always done: as individuals, using England when it suited them against their enemies. It was the Gaelic system of overlordship and all its trappings which England sought to destroy. Bringing the Irish into the benefits of the common law, granting rent relationships and leases in place of the customs tying man to lord in the Gaelic system was as important as planting British settlers in Early schemes. The widespread dispossession of the Ulster Irish was not envisaged. A roll-call of the main Irish beneficiaries under the Plantation settlement reads like a list of the rivals of the O'Neill, O'Donnell and Maguire lords who had fled in 1607. The O'Hanlons who had fought against O'Neill were rewarded with a total of 1,340 acres. Maolmhuire MacSweeney, who had testified against Hugh O'Neill and attacked the crews of the ships taking the chieftains to the Continent, received 2,000 acres, as did Turlough O'Boyle and two other MacSweeneys. The various O'Neill branches in Tyrone and Armagh who had suffered in Hugh O'Neill's lineage expansion received grants. Notable among these were the O'Neills of the Fews in south Armagh, frequent allies of the Dublin administration in the 16th century. Turlough MacHenry O'Neill had been pardoned in 1603 and received a grant of 9,900 acres (the largest grant to any Gaelic lord), on which he was to settle considerable numbers of British tenants.

it was not government policy to replace one overlord with another...

In Fermanagh the senior Maguire, Conor Rua, had expected to be rewarded for his loyalty and surrendered his three baronies in Fermanagh. But it was not government policy to replace one overlord with another. Usually the great were lowered and the middle-ranking consolidated. Conor Rua received less than a third of his territory back and lost the ancestral seat at Lisnaskea to a Scottish undertaker. Paradoxically it was the junior Enniskillen branch, which had fought on O'Neill's side in The Nine Years' War and participated in the 'Flight of the Earls', which became most reconciled to the new situation. Brian Maguire received 2,000 acres in the Plantation scheme and by pragmatically avoiding future involvement in rebellion transmitted it to his descendants. For this he was posthumously damned by later nationalist tradition, a fate awaiting all the Irish landowners who survived the Plantation. Other Maguires received smaller grants, a practice repeated in all the Plantation counties to reconcile a handful of key 'deserving Irish' to the scheme.

Cavan was already settled by many Englishmen ...

The descendants of Shane O'Neill, thwarted in their succession to the O'Neill title by successive Earls of Tyrone, likewise received recognition in the new scheme with land grants in Armagh and Fermanagh. But their position was a pale shadow of their former glory and resentment at continuing decline (even if started long before the Plantation) was undoubtedly a factor in Sir Phelim O'Neill's drift to rebellion in 1641. Cavan was already settled by many Englishmen and the county's position had accustomed its chiefs to Pale ways. They were accordingly the first to use the English common law to argue their rights to the land, engaging a Pale lawyer and travelling to London to push their claims. Grants of land totalling 13,950 acres raised the O'Reillys to a position second in importance to the O'Neills in the new order.