the view that Catholicism was the driving force behind the resistance to the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, the 1641 uprising against the English Crown, the idea of “true” Irishmen as a Catholic “race”, the Great Famine of Ireland of 1845–50, the “land war” of 1879–82, and what Moody called the most pernicious “myth” of them all, the idea of Irish history as one of a continuous struggle for freedom from Great Britain. Moody argued this “myth” of Irish history that depicted in Manichean terms the entirety of Irish history from 1169 to the present as a struggle between the morally pure Irish vs. the utterly evil British was being used by the Provisional Irish Republican Army as the main reason for its struggle in Northern Ireland, and ruled out any possibility of a compromise solution to "the troubles" of Northern Ireland. Moody argued that many Irish historians distort the struggle against Queen Elizabeth I's efforts for the conquest and colonisation of Ireland by treating the resistance as entirely Gaelic-speaking and Catholic, which ignored the role of the "Old English" community in Ireland, who were also Catholic, spoke English, and were willing to be loyal to the Crown provided the Crown respected their traditional privileges in Ireland, which it was not under Elizabeth. Moody attacked the "Anglican" myth of Irish history that the Church of Ireland was the "true" church, a continuation of the church founded by Saint Patrick, which argued created a smug sense of Protestant superiority to the Catholic population that was used to justify "the Ascendancy" in Ireland. Moody stated about the Irish Rebellion of 1641 that were indeed massacres of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland by the Catholic Irish who resented being pushed off their land to make way for the Anglo-Scottish colonists, but that the numbers of dead were vastly exaggerated with some contemporary pamphlets claiming about 200, 000 massacred while the real number appears to be about 4, 000 killed. Moody further argued the claim there was a genocidal plan by the Irish elite to exterminate all of the Protestant settlers has no basis in fact, and the massacres were spontaneous explosions of hate. Moody argued that the "myth" of the 1641 uprising had been, and was still being used by the Protestant community of Northern Ireland (who are the descendants of the Anglo-Scottish settlers) to portray the "wickedness and savagery" of all Irish