The policy was to confine the remaining Catholic landowners into the peripheral province of Connacht, where they would no longer be a military threat. The confiscated lands throughout Ireland were awarded to the Parliament's creditors, Parliamentarian supporters in Ireland and military colonists. In practice, those Protestants who had fought for the Royalists avoided confiscation by paying fines to the Commonwealth regime, but the Irish Catholic land-owning class was utterly destroyed. In some respects, what Cromwell had achieved was the logical conclusion of the plantation process.