The problem of blaming it all on 'English Oppression', is that it doesn't hold water. It probably played a part, but is far too simplistic an answer.
Wales was under English rule for a similar period, and they are also a Celtic people. Yet Wales fully embraced Protestantism. The Welsh did not love the English any more than the Irish. There was nothing like the Plantation in Wales, but that was a consequence of Irish reticence to convert, so was frankly not needed.
There is a famous anecdote where De Valera spoke to David Lloyd George on the oppression of the 'English' and the latter suddenly started chattering to his secretary in Welsh. He then turned to the confused De Valera and said that the Irish weren't the only ones to have problems with the Sassenach, but the United Kingdom was hardly just 'the English'.
Portions of Ireland was under the English since the Norman conquest of Ireland under Marcher lords like William Strongbow. These had merged with the locals in like manner as they had in England. During the Reformation, we see almost the entire Irish aristocracy convert; the few that didn't eventually fled (such as the O'Neills during the Flight of the Earls) or were sidelined. Why didn't the people follow their example, for these weren't foreigners, but Irish Lords of Irish stock.
The Plantation and later Cromwell's harrowing, followed their failure to do so, as an attempt to force it or to insert a backboneof trustworthy Protestants within their midst. The Irish tendency to act as a Catholic Bogey that an usurper or Jacobyte claimant could count on, was the justification.
@Vicomte13 , the Israel/Palestine analogy is not a close one. The Ascendancy in Ireland was mostly Protestant, it is true, but not exclusively so. There were Catholics and Jews within it as well, and both sides saw the other as Irish. In fact, Protestant Irish started the calls for Home Rule in the 19th century.
Catholics served in British regiments, as Governors of Colonies and Generals, and ethnically Irish played a significant part in the British Empire - Wellington, who became Prime Minister, was Irish after all.
Ireland was largely peaceful from the Boyne till the Easter uprising in 1915, barring a few minor uprisings such as 1743.
The memory of Drogheda and such certainly played a role, and the Irish will never love the English, but the situation was radically different than modern Palestine. For one thing, Catholics had much the same individual position and after Catholic Emancipation could have the same offices as any Protestant.
To me, blaming it on ethnicity or opposition to England, fails to explain why Ireland did not Initially convert, when England did. We have examples like the Welsh who were in a similar position, yet did convert, and whose Protestantism then took different turns. Much of later English oppression of the Irish, such as the Plantations, were a consequence of their failure to convert and support for Catholic claiments, not the root cause thereof.
I will be more plain then. BEFORE the Ulster Planatation, Ireland was like any other imperial province in Europe, more or less. Nowhere was there any democracy at all. They were not thinking in those terms at that time. Everybody had lords, and somewhere, an overlord king. Ethnicity was primarily a matter of language and local custom. Nationalism, as such was a thing of the future.
But starting in 1606, something very new and very bad, and very SPECIFIC occurred - and it wasn't the English who did it. The very bigoted (and very gay) Scottish King of England, James I, who had been James the what? VIth? of Scotland, authorized the Scots, specifically the Presbyterian Scots, his OWN people, to literally invade Ireland and to take land and establish themselves there. This was not like the Anglo-Normans, who came to establish their lordship, as essentially French rulers of England, now as rulers of Ireland also, when everybody was Catholic.
The Ulster Plantation was a Presbyterian Crusade in Ireland against heathen (which is to say, Catholic) Irish. It was carried out with extreme arrogance and extreme violence, and it provoked an extremely violent response from the native Irish that hemmed in the Presbyterian invaders into one corner of Ireland.
The fighting never ended, the hatred never ended. THAT is the analogy to Israel. A bunch of Jews showed up from somewhere else with what was to them a completely valid claim to the land and what was to the existing residents a wholly spurious claim, and they won part of the land by conquest. The hatred between Jews and Muslim Arabs in the conquered lands WAS total, and it still IS total, because the Jews came in and attacked and took, and the Arabs fought back bloodily.
That's what happened in Ireland. The Irish distaste for the English comes from what happened later with Cromwell's Puritan Army - but that was, again, another Calvinist army that came in and murdered people because they were Catholic. The Presbyterian Scots did that too, with the authority and blessing of the King.
THAT is where the bitter, unyielding hatred came from, and why there was no hope of conversion. The Protestants came into Ireland as conquering murderers seeking to take the land, and treating the Irish as heathen Indians whose lands could be plundered rightly. They weren't there to CONVERT the Irish Catholics. They were there to KILL them and expropriate them. They were doing in Ireland what the Europeans were doing in America, and justifying it by their rabid belief that Catholicism was the religion of the devil.
The Catholics replied with equal hatred, and they held the conquerors to one province. Cromwell came and took another bite at the apple a few decades later, under the same bloody flag of conquering Calvinist Protestantism.
Irish Catholics hate Calvinism and hate Presbyterianism. They hate it the way that Indians who were murdered by European conquerors hated their conquerors, the way that black slaves hated their conquerors, and the way that Arabs hate their Jewish conquerors.
And the difference is that the Jews didn't really hate the Arabs when they came - they were in the WAY. And the Spanish didn't really hate the Indians - they were trying to convert them.
The Presbyterian Scots came into Ireland not to convert them, but to murder them and take their land and property. There was no love and no pretense of love, no "missionary work". It was "TO hell or to Connaught". The Irish Catholic response was, and is, a belief that the Presbyterians were Satan's little helpers, to be fought to the death. They murdered family, without any remorse, and it would have been best if they had all been pushed back into the sea and drowned.
The hatred of Irish Catholics towards Presbyterianism in particular is due to the way that the Presbyterian Scots, and then Cromwell's puritans, came into Ireland to kill. As far as the Irish Catholics are concerned, the Protestantism THEY encountered were murdering Nazis. There is no room in the Irish Catholic mind for the slightest room for any sort of intellectual sympathy for the evil that Calvinism wrought in their lands.
We hate you because you are Nazis. And because you slaughtered us because we were Catholics, we view you the same way that Jews view Nazis, and Palestinians view Jews: Protestantism in Ireland came to murder us all, and we had to defeat it, even though we were weak and poor peasants who just wanted to be left alone.
That's why Protestantism never had, and never will have, any chance of taking root in Ireland: its history was so violent and bloody and inexcusable - and the Irish Catholics will NOT see it your way, not ever, you have to see it THEIR way (and you won't, not ever). Ireland may go secular. It may go Muslim. It may stay a weak and flabby nominally Catholic. But there has been far too much bloodshed and horror that affected every single family in Ireland for the Irish to EVER consider adopting the religion of their murderers.
It will never ever happen, because of the way that the Presbyterians and Puritans conducted themselves in Ireland.
If the Palestinian example does not suit you, perhaps the example of the Cathars in Southern France in the Albigensian Crusade is a better one. There, the Catholics, under the auspices of the French Crown, completely wiped out an entire religious movement. They did so with fire, sword and expropriation. There was no mercy or understanding for the Cathars. It was in that war that the expression was actually uttered: "Kill them all. God will know His own." In other words "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out."
The French Catholics WON the Albigensian Crusade. They succeeded in wiping the heretics and their beliefs from the face of the earth.
The Presbyterian Scots and Calvinists failed in their military efforts against Irish Catholicism. They killed a lot of people, and bereaved the entire nation in the process. The Irish were rebellious after that, and the English kept intervening to restore their rule, which reopened the wounds each generation.
With the English gone, it became possible to rationally deal with the English, but the Presbyterian/Catholic hatred and bloodshed continued until only about a decade ago, and could explode forth again.
That's why: the pot was utterly poisoned, and the Catholics do not forgive and do not forget all of their sufferings, and who did it to them, and why.
Unfortunately, it's not very pleasant to hear that, so people generally don't say it directly. But sometimes being direct is necessary to get the point across.
I don't think I can be more direct than that. And that is the real answer to your question.
