IIRC, the protestants aren't Irish, they are Brits, the remainder of the brit
occupying forces. The Irish were essentially slaves of the brits for centuries.
You don't remember correctly. Most of the Protestants in Ulster were moved there in the 1700s from Scotland during the conquests there. It took care of two problems at once - displacing a lot of the Irish, and getting a lot of uncooperative Scots out of Scotland.
> But of course, the problems really pre-date all that, going back to when the
christer Romans came and killed off the Druids and Wiccans who wouldn't bend the
knee to conversion, as they did in the rest of Europe.
While there was some of that, there wasn't much, particularly in Scandinavia - Norse Odinism was a pretty depressing religion, and the population converted at least nominally very quickly, though it took a while to get concepts like "Don't kill" and "Don't steal" accepted as widely as "Don't sacrifice people to the old gods", given that viking was a standard part of the Viking economy.
