The Irish Diaspora

Andrew Bielenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317878117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This book brings together a series of articles which provide an overview of the Irish Diaspora from a global perspective. It combines a series of survey articles on the major destinations of the Diaspora; the USA, Britian and the British Empire. On each of these, there is a number of more specialist articles by historians, demographers, economists, sociologists and geographers. The inter-disciplinary approach of the book, with a strong historical and modern focus, provides the first comprehensive survey of the topic.

Part One
Great Britain

Chapter 1
The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939

GRAHAM DAVIS

(Irish Studies Centre, Bath)

Leaving Ireland

The Liverpool Times in reporting emigration from Ireland in 1846 made a distinction between what it chose to call ‘the emigrants of hope’ and ‘the emigrants of despair’. The former consisted principally of small farmers with some capital ‘who go to seek means of improving their condition in Canada and the States’; while the latter were the poorest of the poor who cannot afford the trip to America but ‘who beg or borrow the trifle which is necessary to bring them over to this country’. Reporting a very great increase of pauper emigration in recent months from Ireland to Lancashire, the paper noted that the Irish tramping the roads from Liverpool to Manchester were of all ages and from every part of Ireland. When interviewed, ‘they all say they cannot get a living of any sort in Ireland, and that they are coming over to England to see if they can find work for their children in the factories, and for themselves in any other way. Many of these poor people are most decent and respectable in their manners and language.’ While the tone of the piece was clearly sympathetic to the plight of ‘these poor creatures’, there was no mistaking the ‘fear that they will long produce a considerable effect on wages and poor rates in the country’.¹

Here we have the classic British perspective throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century which continued to associate Irish migrants with a whole host of problems: social, religious, economic and political. The story of the Irish in Britain is dominated by details of strikebreakers and slum conditions, sectarian riots, ‘poor Paddy’ on the railway, and sporadic incidents of political violence. It is argued in this chapter that what is at work here is a cultural filter that mirrors the values of the host nation without fully reflecting the variety of Irish migrant experience.

The migration and settlement of the Irish in Britain between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 forms part of a wider movement throughout the Irish diaspora, and can be best understood in its relation to a global network. Before 1841, when mass migration had already seen an annual exodus of 50,000 from Ireland, Britain was the major destination ahead of Canada and the United States. From the 1840s until the 1920s the United States received about 75 per cent of the 5 million total of Irish migrants, while from 1851 to 1921 the proportion who settled in Britain was around one-fifth of that total world-wide. Finally, from 1921 to 1939 Britain resumed its role as the major destination for Irish migrants and this pattern has continued through to the end of the twentieth century.²

More significantly, the British experience remains unique within the Irish diaspora, firstly because it was ‘the nearest place to home’, and geographical proximity induced a sense of temporary presence among all Irish migrants with the ease of an anticipated return to Ireland. Secondly, Britain received an annual influx of thousands of seasonal workers, and facilitated the departure of several million Irish migrants from British ports to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. So, as Donald Akenson has argued, Irish migration to Britain represents ‘a very large, very special case’ because it was involved in Irish migration throughout the English-speaking world.³

Donald Akenson has also pointed to the inadequate statistical basis available to study the Irish in Britain. Following the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801, no adequate figures were kept before 1852 and it was only from 1876 that a tally was made of Irish migrants to Britain. With the partition of Ireland in 1920, separate figures were no longer recorded, so paradoxically the information is least reliable for the periods of highest migration to Britain. Reliance on census totals of the Irish-born, with all the limitations of not recording second and subsequent generations, provides the main guide to the scale of the Irish presence. The common identification of the Irish with the Catholic population of Britain has also tended to marginalize the estimated 20 per cent of the total who were, nominally, Irish Protestants. In 1841, the first census to include the Irish-born in Britain recorded a figure of 415.000. By 1861, the peak figure of 806,000 was reached and from then on the numbers declined so that by 1901 the total of Irish-born was down to 632.000. While the middle decades of the century saw the bulk of mass migration to Britain, the presence of the second and third generations born of Irish parents meant that a full definition of the Irish in Britain would place the numbers at over a million by the end of the century.⁴

Contrary to the exclusion of emigrants of hope and the restriction to emigrants of despair, there is every reason, because of the special relationship with the rest of the Irish diaspora, to include the Irish in Britain within a broad analysis of the explanations for all migrants leaving Ireland. These changed over time subject to changing conditions in Ireland and to new opportunities abroad.

Traditionally, pre-Famine emigration has been explained in terms of increasing population pressure and the system of land utilization that left some 3 million poor cottiers and labourers, out of a population of 8.2 million in 1841, vulnerable to a series of poor harvests and food shortages. A chronic lack of employment in rural Ireland (available for less than half the year in western counties) was compounded by what proved to be a fatal dependence on a subsistence agriculture based (especially in the south and west of Ireland) on the monoculture of the potato.⁵ Structural change within Irish agriculture involving a move away from labour-intensive arable farming towards pastoral farming, in response to good prices available for cattle and dairy products exported to Britain, provided less employment for the large class of landless labourers in Ireland.

At the same time, increasingly from the 1820s, peripheral Ireland was losing ground in its textile industry (with the notable exception of linen manufacture in the Belfast region) to the core centres of cotton and woollen cloth manufacture in the industrial belts of Scotland, Lancashire and Yorkshire. The increasing difficulty of combining domestic textile work with agricultural husbandry in Ireland led textile workers in the north midlands to migrate to Scottish cities and drew others from Queen’s County (Laois) and towns like Bandon, County Cork, to Bradford in Yorkshire.⁶ Distressed weavers found themselves heading for Lowell, Massachusetts, or the cotton towns of Lancashire.⁷ Ireland’s geographical situation as a relatively underdeveloped and over-populated economy located between two, dynamic societies in Britain and the United States created the conditions for the country to become an emigrant nursery, supplying labour to support the growth of industry and infrastructure on both sides of the Atlantic. Even before the famine years (1845–52), emigration became established as a permanent feature of Irish life, with children reared in Ireland but destined to settle abroad.

The evidence of an extensive enquiry of 1,500 witnesses in 1835 provides firm evidence of the reasons for emigration.⁸ Local landlords, magistrates and clergy throughout Ireland identified a number of key, explanatory factors. What was pushing the main body of small farmers towards the contemplation of emigration was the pincer effect of high rents and low prices on income levels. The decline in textiles limited the possibilities of diversification, and improvements to farmholdings were not compensated by landlords at the expiration of leases when their renewal inevitably meant still higher rents. So emigration was considered as a viable alternative to be financed by the sale of leases and all the farm stock. In the long run, there was a genuine belief in the prospect of families bettering their condition and securing a future for the next generation. The most persuasive pressure came in the form of emigrant letters conveying news of relatives and neighbours abroad with very precise details of the cost of land, the wages of labourers and servants. Even before the famine years, successful migrants were sending back remittances to Ireland, a system that later developed into a huge traffic in pre-paid passage tickets that was to finance the great majority of voluntary migration. Emigration formed part of a family strategy of economic betterment, especially for the benefit of the next generation.⁹

A climate that fostered emigration was in place in Ireland during the 1830s when mass movement spread from the north-east and south-east of Ireland to affect all classes and both Catholics and Protestants throughout all parts of Ireland.¹⁰ Cheaper steam navigation and the greater dissemination of appropriate knowledge from shipping agents facilitated travel to Britain. Employers were sending agents to Ireland to recruit labour for the Lancashire cotton mills and the evidence of the Commission into the State of the Irish Poor in Britain in 1836 points to higher expectations among labourers through emigration. Samuel Holme, a Liverpool builder, provided one such example:

I had a conversation last week with an Irish labourer, named Christopher Shields: he said that the reason of his leaving Ireland was, that in the county of Wexford, his own county, he could only get 6d. a-day and his own meat: that at one time he rented a small cabin with a potato patch, and worked for the landlord. He then got 1s. a-day but the landlord charged him £3 for his holding. He told me that there was a general impression among his countrymen that if they came to England their fortunes would be made, wages are so much higher here. He told me that he could get his clothing as cheap here as at home, and generally all the things he wanted. He now gets 16s. a-week. He stated likewise that it was a great inducement to them to come here that they can get situations for their children, which they could not get at home. He told me likewise that he could more easily get his children educated here than in Ireland. This man lives in a cellar. He will never return to Ireland: he has no wish to go back.¹¹

Taking into account the additional earnings of his children, Christopher Shields would have probably received at least three times the household income available to his family in Ireland. More pertinently, we should consider such labour migration not merely in terms of impersonal economic forces but accept there was also a process of self-selection among would-be migrants who made a rational decision about their own economic prospects.

This chapter explores some ideas for moving beyond the cultural filter that viewed the Irish presence in Britain as a problem. This perspective has been reinforced with the parallel tradition of ‘oppression history’, concerned to demonstrate that Irish migrants were outcast victims and were continually subject to racial discrimination. It is offered as a complement to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Great Britain
• Part Two: The Americas
• Part Three: The Empire
• Part Four: General Studies
• Index