We thought it would be helpful to give a little more background to the Irish Diaspora and in particular “the Irish famine” of the mid-1800s – some of the harrowing accounts below show perhaps why it has remained in the public’s consciousness in the intervening years.

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This is an approved extract from John Gibney’s A Short History of Ireland: 1500 – 2000 by kind permission of the Publisher, Yale University.

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Prologue– The Famine:

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Private charity went some way towards plugging the gap (in the official response to the famine). Quakers, for example, organised charity drives across the United Kingdom and North America to alleviate, to some degree, the desperate human reality of the famine. A harrowing account of a visit to Belmullet in Mayo—the county most badly ravaged by the famine—was left by the English Quaker William Bennett:

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The scenes of human misery and degradation we witnessed will haunt my imagination, with the vividness and power of some horrid and tyrannous delusion, rather than the features of a sober reality . . . perhaps the poor children presented the most piteous and heart-rending spectacle. Many were too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated—except when the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation—beyond the power of volition when moved. Every infantile expression entirely departed; and in some, reason and intelligence had evidently flown. Many were remnants of families, crowded together in one cabin; orphaned little relatives taken in by the equally destitute, and even strangers . . . they did but rarely complain. When inquired of what was the matter, the answer was alike in all—"Tha shein ukrosh" —"indeed the hunger”.

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We truly learned the terrible meaning of that sad word, ukrosh.

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It is only through such testimonies that the voices of famine victims can be heard.

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While deaths from starvation were widespread, malnutrition opened the door to the most assiduous killers: diseases such as typhus, dysentery; and cholera. The precise death toll was almost certainly higher than that suggested by the 1851 census, on which details of deaths outside the public institutions were to be recorded by family members. But what if an entire family was dead, or had emigrated?

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Racist and sectarian attitudes can be discerned in some British responses to the famine. What was deemed to be the callous stance of British officialdom was roundly condemned by Irish Nationalists and indeed by many other British and Irish contemporaries.

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The highest death rates during the famine were to be found in the south and the west, the areas that also saw the highest confirmed deaths from outright starvation. Massive migration into major coastal ports such as Belfast, Cork, and Dublin provoked unrest in the form of riots over work and food, while also placing great pressure on the existing infrastructure of the cities: in Dublin, disease seems to have been a bigger killer than outright starvation. The impact of the famine mirrored the east-west divide between a relatively literate, Anglophone, mixed economy and a largely illiterate, Irish-speaking agricultural region. The western half of the country had the worst dwellings, the lowest rates of literacy; and the highest proportion of people employed in agriculture; areas with more mixed economies, such as the northeast, were better equipped to deal with the crisis. But the sheer scale of the catastrophe and its repercussions—the depopulation, the subsequent shift in land use, the triggering of emigration and its consequences—had a profound and irreversible effect on Irish society. Nowhere was left untouched.

 

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The Irish Diaspora

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Between 1801 and 1921 perhaps as many as 8 million people emigrated from Ireland. Even before the famine, the Irish were the major source of overseas labour for both Britain and the United States. The vast majority of these migrants were under thirty, and between 1820 and 1845 migration by families was relatively low. Yet this changed dramatically during and after the famine: between 1845 and 1852 perhaps 1.4 million people left Ireland. There was occasional state assistance for emigrants from the 1820s to the 1890s, and landlords sometimes paid for emigration in order to free up land occupied by unprofitable tenants. But the bulk of the financial aid that facilitated emigration came from those who had already left: perhaps £34 million was sent to the United Kingdom, mostly to Ireland, between 1848 and 1887.

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The famine migrants were drawn largely from the poor; more of them were Irish speakers than not, and more were Catholics than Protestants. The poorest areas of the country along the western seaboard, from Mayo to Cork, were the most drastically affected by the famine, yet they had strikingly low rates of emigration; the inhabitants were too poor to leave. Assisted passage, whether by public or private means, accounted for only a small number of migrants. Their impact in their destination was huge, though there were common denominators within the experience of famine emigrants in their various destinations: they lived in poor conditions, tended to find employment as manual labourers, and were often the victims of prejudice. The majority of emigrants, like the majority of famine victims, were from the lower social classes. Seasonal migration now hardened into permanent departure.

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Britain was a crucial and often unavoidable destination for Irish emigrants: in 1846, of 301 ships carrying Irish migrants to New York, 214 had come from Liverpool, though as time went by the necessity to travel via British ports to the United States and Canada lessened, as direct crossings from Ireland became more common. In the decades after the famine, ongoing emigration ensured that Brit- ish cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow acquired substantial and prominent Irish communities; the existence of Celtic Football Club in Glasgow today is an enduring legacy of this.

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For those who kept going, the northeastern United States was a key destination, with port cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore acquiring an enduring Irish complexion. New York received 900,000 Irish immigrants between 1845 and 1855, and eventually had more Irish born residents than Dublin, with districts such as Five Points and institutions like Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the city, becoming dominated by the Irish. It should also be noted that the Irish language became part of the vernacular of the American cities to which the Irish flocked. The impact of the famine was registered within the dwindling Gaelic scribal tradition, and large numbers of such manuscripts emigrated with their owners.

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The massive rates of emigration witnessed during the famine were never replicated, but mass emigration had begun and did not cease. Although the scale of emigration might fluctuate—a recession in the United States in the 1870s resulted in a dip—it remained a fact of Irish rural life that was impervious to the views of priests and politicians. One consequence of the famine was a change in manner in which land was inherited: there was a definite shift away from the subdivision of smallholdings into even smaller, uneconomical units. This lessened the options available to members of the next generation in rural Ireland who would normally have expected to inherit something; the fact that they were now faced with the prospect of inheriting nothing helped to push people out. Emigration became an integral part of Irish life in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Irish population declined at a remarkable rate.

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In the aftermath of the famine the widespread migration of children was noted from western counties like Cork, Galway, and Kerry. In the forty years before the First World War, the United States was the main destination for emigrants from the west of Ireland; emigrants from the north and northwest favoured Canada, and the phenomenon of "chain migration" saw families, and sometimes whole communities, slowly move en masse. The Irish migration to the states coincided with the expansion of many U.S. cities that now became homes to the new arrivals, who mainly became labourers and servants in their new land; domestic service accounts for the very high rates of female emigration to the United States in the decades after the famine, and also the prominence of Irish women in those occupations. When the incendiary English author James Anthony Froude travelled to America on a lecture tour in 1872 after publishing a history of Ireland that many deemed to be little more than a extended diatribe against the Irish, it was noted that Irish servants refused to deal with him on his travels, a small indication of how prevalent they had become on the eve of the gilded age.

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The Irish in the Empire

There was, however, another obvious destination for Irish migrants: the British empire itself.

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The empire received its share of Irish migrants during and after the famine: 70,000 Irish settled in Australia in 1845-55 (many of whom, including the Young Irelanders George Gavan Duffy and William Smith O'Brien, were transported as convicts); an additional 175,000 emigrants arrived in Australia from 1855-60. Even aside from deported convicts, there was another factor that meant migration within the empire was not always a person’s choice: very often it was an unavoidable requirement of the particular jobs that many Irish people were doing, as soldiers or administrators. One consequence of the repeal of the eighteenth-century penal laws was that Catholics could now enter the service of the state, and for the majority of those Catholics, the most obvious state institution to offer employment was the army.

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In 1830, 42.2 percent of the British army - 40,979 soldiers - were Irish, when Ireland made up only 32.2 percent of the United Kingdom's population (though by 1898 the number had dropped to 26,376). The Irish were also overrepresented in the armies of the East India Company prior to 1857. They were most common in the infantry (many emigrants enlisted outside Ireland), though the famine affected both the quality and quantity of recruits. The army offered a path out of poverty, and sometimes perhaps an alternative to judicial punishments.

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Even aside from the rank and file, the Irish Protestant elite was well represented amongst the officer class: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was born in Dublin (though he reputedly dismissed his place of birth on the grounds that being born in a stable did not make one a horse). Religious division was an issue that the army sought to avoid in the nineteenth century, and sectarianism in the ranks was not encouraged; the Orange Order was banned from the army in 1822, and Catholic chaplains were gradually accepted. By the second half of the nineteenth century any lingering wariness about the loyalty of Irish soldiers had to be reconciled with basic military requirements. If stationed in Ireland, the army was obliged to deal with law and order. The foundation of the Irish Constabulary in 1836 had taken the army off the front line, but soldiers re- mained a vital adjunct to the civil power.

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Military service was not just confined to Ireland; there was also an empire to be fought for. In the Indian mutiny of 1857, perhaps half of the East India Company's army of 14,000 strong was Irish. The Irish remained prominent in the British army after the company's rule in India was ended— reflected in the fact that the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling's famous novel Kim (1901) was the son of an Irish soldier—and also in the new Indian Civil Service which opened the door to new applicants on a meritocratic basis, 1857 one-third of all recruits to the Indian Civil Service were Irish, a proportion that made the government in London sufficiently easy that it rigged the recruiting procedure in favour of Oxbridge and away from the Queen's Colleges in Ireland, all of which, alongside Trinity College, were offering courses in Indian languages and history. Between 1886 and 1914, 80 percent of such Irish recruits to the bureaucracy of the Raj were Catholic.

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Catholic (and, to a much lesser degree, Protestant) missionary activity also took place under the auspices of the empire; Catholic missions were especially important in sub-Saharan Africa, though the Irish presence did not restrict itself to the jurisdiction of the British empire. At home, the material culture of British rule became increasingly evident in Irish cities and towns; the British empire was an essential backdrop to Irish life, but the traffic went both ways. British rule in Ireland became an important reference point for British rule in India; the office of the Indian viceroy, established in 1858, was apparently based on the Irish version.

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Likewise, the application of scientific techniques to imperial rule followed precedents set in Ireland; the Irish Ordnance Survey of the 1830s was the model for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India conducted between the 1850s and the 1870s. Yet this transmission of people and ideas within the empire does not mean that the Irish population was reconciled to membership of it. Some Irish nationalist commentators were critical of the British response to the Indian mutiny and were sympathetic to what they interpreted as a revolt against oppression; they also drew unfavourable comparisons between British rule in Ireland and imperial rule elsewhere. The widespread and understandable assumption that the catastrophe of the famine was the product of British misrule left a potent legacy at home and abroad; a legacy that, at the same time as the Irish were becoming prominent in the British Raj in India, began to manifest itself in militant and influential ways.

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Reference

Gibney, J., 2018. A Short History of Ireland, 1500-2000. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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About the Author

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John Gibney completed his doctorate at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of a number of books including The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory.

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