Yep, the native Irish landholders were completely dispossessed and destroyed by the Tudors (who targeted mainly the Gaelic nobility) and again in the English Civil Wars (this time targeting the Hiberno-Normans, the descendants of Norman knights who had gone native). Ireland at this time was in the grip of the
Protestant Ascendancy, which explicitly aimed to reduce the Irish to serfs completely at the (nonexistent) mercy of the empowered Anglican aristocracy (and to a lesser extent, their mostly Presbyterian Scots-Irish footsoldiers, who also got a raw deal but one that was less shitty than the one handed to Irish Catholics, comparable to how poor white enforcers & employees were obviously better-treated by Southern planters relative to black slaves).
As late as 1870, 97% of the land in Ireland was owned by absentee English landlords who didn't even live in Ireland. And that was after some emancipatory reforms made by the British once they decided it might've looked a little bad to keep being mega-cunts to the Irish right across the sea when they were fully getting into their Victorian humanitarian phase & sinking slaver ships throughout the Atlantic or characterizing the Tsar of Russia as a cruel despot lording it over an empire of slaves and imprisoned nations (presumably Russian lampooning of the British treatment of the Irish whenever London tried moralizing to them about the plight of their own serfs, the Poles, etc. was the 19th-century precursor to Soviet accusations of 'you are lynching negroes!' every time a 'Murican started talking about their famines or the Great Purge in the Cold War).
There was definitely a racial & religious element to it all though. The idea that the Irish weren't 'really' white was definitely not unique to America, it was very much in vogue in Britain as well and the stereotype of the Irish back then was not some redheaded hottie or fun leprechaun: it was that of dark-haired, thuggish, bestial and superstitious Papist savages who yearned for a return to the Dark Ages in-between drinking themselves to death and breeding armies of children with FAS, and the enlightened Anglo aristocrat would be shocked & offended at the suggestion that he was of the same stock as them.
The Irish founding myth of descending from 'Milesians' who came from Iberia was reappropriated by the Brits to form theories like this famous one:
The famine was further used by Protestant missionaries as an opportunity to convert Catholic Irish to the new, ascendant church. Don't want to starve? Great, just forsake the last scraps of your heritage and you can have this soup. Suffice to say,
'souper' remains basically the Irish equivalent for race traitor/Uncle Tom/hanjian/etc. to this day. The Great Hunger was 1000% an English op to genocide the Irish, whether physically or spiritually, I don't think Sir Charles Trevelyan and those above him in the British government particularly minded either way.
Tl;dr the more one reads about Anglo-Irish history, the harder it gets to fault the Irish for wanting to get the Brits to fuck off by any means necessary and to dissociate from the English identity being pushed on them so rabidly, whether it was by becoming more Catholic than the Popes or reviving their ancient Gaelic language. (You can and should, however, still blame them for thinking turning to Communism was a good idea starting around the mid-20th century.)
