The 1641 rebellion was usually depicted as a brutal sectarian massacre, perpetrated by Irish Catholics upon the British Protestant settlers who had supplanted them. Hearsay was not the same as proof, but what made these allegations distinctive was not the issue of what had happened it was the issue of who it had happened to. Some deponents mentioned specific victims by name others, how they had heard that these ‘massacres’ were carried out by Scotsmen from the vicinity of Ballymena. In 1653 the Cromwellian authorities collected a number of testimonies – ‘depositions’ – that referred to killings at Islandmagee during the 1641 rebellion. As one Dublin preacher told his congregation on 23 October 1735 (the anniversary of the rebellion), the Penal Laws ‘are only to be justified on the grounds of civil self-defence’ presumably, against any future repeat of 1641. Fears of a repeat of 1641 flared up again in the reign of James II (1685-88), and were later invoked as a justification for the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. After the restoration of the monarchy, the 1662 Act of Settlement largely confirmed the Cromwellian land confiscations on the grounds that 1641 witnessed ‘a formed and almost national rebellion of the Irish papists…to the destruction of the English and Protestants inhabiting in Ireland’. The assumption that thousands of those Protestants were slaughtered helped to secure English support for the reconquest of Ireland in 1649 one justification used by Oliver Cromwell was that the massacres of 1641 had yet to be avenged. But this prompted a popular uprising aimed at Protestants who had settled in Ireland during the plantation of Ulster. They did so to strengthen their hand in prospective negotiations with the king, Charles I, on issues relating to their rights as landowners, and as Catholics. The rebellion broke out in October 1641 when members of the Catholic nobility seized key positions in Armagh and Tyrone. A cynic might assume that the Catholics of Islandmagee were outnumbered in the present because they had been victims in the past. On the other land, there were only 46 Catholics: less than 2% of the total. The collectors noted that Islandmagee was a woodless but fertile place, less than eight miles long and two miles wide, and overwhelmingly populated by Presbyterians, who made up two thirds of the inhabitants of the peninsula (1727 out of 2549). Antrim in 1840, to collect information for the memoirs that were to accompany the survey, they took the view that one of ‘the only remarkable events of which there is either local record or tradition as to their having occurred in this parish’ was ‘the alleged massacre of the Roman Catholics by a part of the Protestant garrison of Carrickfergus on the 8th of January 1641 ’. When agents of the Irish Ordnance Survey arrived at the small peninsula of Islandmagee in Co. But as John Gibney explains, Irish Catholics had their own views on what had happened in 1641. The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. Published in 1641 Rebellion, 18th–19th - Century History, Confederate War and Cromwell, Cromwell, Early Modern History (1500–1700), Featured-Archive-Post, Features, General, Issue 1(Jan/Feb 2013), Volume 21 ‘What about Islandmagee?’ Another version of the 1641 rebellion