Penal laws (Ireland)
In Ireland, the penal laws (Irish: Na Péindlíthe) were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy.