In October 1767 a Tipperary landowner named Daniel Ryan of Inch passed away. Word of his demise spread beyond the immediate locality, and eventually newspapers as far away as Belfast would recount how his ‘plentiful estate’ had been in the family ‘above 500 years’. Based on the surviving records, there is good reason to believe that Ryan’s ancestors first arrived in County Tipperary during the thirteenth century, when they settled on the frontier between two worlds, that of the native Gaelic Irish and Norman newcomers. Although the religious and ethnic character of the region evolved over the ensuing centuries, the Ryans continued to inhabit a divided world. Daniel Ryan was a Catholic landowner who had lived in an area and on an island governed by what would become known as the Protestant Ascendancy. Three wars of conquest and associated bouts of land confiscations during the seventeenth century brought this confessional minority to power, while penal legislation introduced after 1691 sought to maintain their dominance over Ireland and its largely Catholic population. However, what distinguished Daniel Ryan from a number of other Catholic gentlemen whose obits were reported in the press was the fact his family had retained their landowning status.4 The apparent interest shown in Belfast towards Ryan and his heritage further hints at a more complex picture and process of interaction. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis is to explore the Ryans’ world in greater detail, and in so doing to ascertain how the family maintained their status as members of the landowning Catholic gentry during the period c.1650 to 1831.