Professor Bríona Nic Dhiarmada

up for, I suppose, periods of maybe seven to 10 years.

And then they were replaced.

They weren't getting enough of them.

So they were being replaced then by enslaved Africans.

So the Atlantic slave trade took off at this period.

So you had thousands upon thousands of Africans

who were sent as slaves, sold as slaves, as chattel slaves to Barbados.

They sometimes were given a small plot of land or often they went on maybe perhaps to the Carolinas, to America.

But the situation changed.

That was the situation.

up to, say, the 1650s.

Things changed dramatically then for the Irish.

They were still treated as indentured servants, which meant that after seven to ten years, they were freed.

However, in the 1650s, under Cromwell, under the Cromwellian conquest, these people didn't willingly sign off at all.

They were actually gathered up, Shanghai press ganged.

There were roving press gangs going all over Ireland

Ireland was in a terrible state during the Cromwellian Rebellion.

You had many orphans, you had women whose husbands had been killed.

You had soldiers who had been defeated.

And these people were what they called Barbados.