Some Parliamentarians had argued that all the Irish should be deported to west of the Shannon and replaced with English settlers. However, this would have required hundreds of thousands of English settlers willing to come to Ireland, and such numbers of aspirant settlers were never recruited. Rather, a land-owning class of British Protestants was created in Ireland, and they ruled over mostly Irish Catholic tenants. A minority of the "Cromwellian" landowners were Parliamentarian soldiers or creditors. Most were pre-war Protestant settlers, who took the opportunity to obtain confiscated lands. Before the wars, Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland. During the Commonwealth period, Catholic landownership fell to 8–9%. After some restitution in the Restoration Act of Settlement 1662, it rose to 20% again.