The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  The Young Irelanders tried to foment a rebellion in 1848. They weren’t prepared for it, and it fizzled quickly. Some of their leaders were captured and transported to Australia; others fled to the United States. Prominent among them were William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher (MAH-her), John Mitchel, and John Boyle O’Reilly. These men and others like them were responsible for spreading word throughout the world of Britain’s handling of the famine. They also became prominent citizens of the New World and Ireland; for example, Meagher fought as a general for the Union Army in the American Civil War and went on to become governor of Montana. Mitchel later returned to Ireland and became mayor of Tipperary.

  The famine did a lot to foster a feeling of unity among the Irish against the English. Dedication to the Catholic Church increased and priests grew more powerful. The Irish especially hated the landlordtenant system, which had forced so many of them out of their homes. People across the country formed societies to protect tenants by fixing rents and getting farmers to promise not to take over the lands of evicted tenants. Irish politicians began pushing the tenant agenda in Parliament, and their efforts formed the start of Ireland’s independence movement.

  On St. Patrick’s Day 1858 a former Young Ireland leader named James Stephens founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Around the same time, another rebel named Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa founded a similar Phoenix Society in Skibbereen. These movements spread rapidly during the late 1850s. Though they were strongly condemned by the Catholic Church, these independence movements continued to gather steam and plan insurrections that would lead to an Irish republic.

  The great famine has inspired more than its fair share of historical interpretations, many of which are wildly contradictory. The Irish used to say, “God gave us the potato blight, but the English gave us the famine.” There is some truth to this statement, but it’s not entirely fair to the English. They didn’t understand the scope of the problem, and some of their policies made matters worse, but the fact remains that many people would have starved even with better help.

  Part 4

  Emigration to Modern Life

  Irish demographics reveal two startling facts: There are around 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish descent, and Ireland today has barely half the population that it had 160 years ago, a decline unmatched in the modern world. These facts are explained and connected by the undeniable social reality of nineteenth-century Ireland — emigration.

  73 { Why the Irish Left — and Where They Went

  No one kept careful track of how many people left Ireland in the nineteenth century, but it certainly was a large number. People started leaving long before the Great Famine began in 1845; in the thirty years that preceded it, at least 1 million people left Ireland. Between the start of the famine and 1870, another 3 million or so emigrated. A decreased population and a lower birthrate decreased the flow of emigrants in the following years, but a significant proportion of the population continued to leave well into the twentieth century.

  The two overpowering causes for emigration were hunger and poverty. The Great Famine and the half-dozen other potato failures of the nineteenth century sent millions of Irish people overseas. People saw the death and suffering around them; rather than wait for death in a land with no food, they picked up everything and sailed across the Atlantic.

  But long before the famine struck and years after its end, young Irish people were leaving their homeland. The basic economic facts of Ireland were not promising: the island was small, with few natural resources beyond farmland; most of the best land was tied up in the hands of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and the rest was split up among more people than it could support; and English policies inhibited the development of Irish industries, which might have provided a way off the farms. Young Irish men and women realized that if they wanted any hope of a better life, they had to go overseas. If families were lucky enough to own land, younger sons often emigrated in order to clear the way to inheritance for the oldest.

  Some young people left Ireland as seasonal migrants. Instead of setting up a new home in the New World, they would travel to another country for seasonal work, in agriculture or the fisheries, and then return home when the work was done for the year. The sons of small farmers were especially likely to do this; their periodic wages helped the family hold on to its property.

  There were also non-economic reasons to leave Ireland. Some people, particularly a number of Nationalist revolutionaries, emigrated to avoid legal trouble and to drum up support for their cause in the New World. Others left to join family and friends overseas.

  Where people went changed over time. During the nineteenth century, the vast majority of Irish emigrants went to the United States. Many also went to Canada, with a substantial proportion of those winding up in the United States after a few years. England and Scotland were always viable options, because the trip over was less expensive and less permanent. More distant English colonies, like Australia and South Africa, also saw a good number of Irish immigrants, although many of the newcomers to Australia weren’t there of their own free will — the English sent prisoners and rebels to Australia.

  Where people were from in Ireland played a part in where they wound up. Most of the people from the southwest and west ended up in the United States, while families from the north more commonly went to Canada. A long-standing tradition of migrant laborers going seasonally from Donegal to Scotland made Scotland the favored destination for Ireland’s northwest. People in the east were more likely to head over to England.

  The number of emigrants dropped significantly in the twentieth century. A trend of anti-immigrant sentiment swept the United States, making it less popular as a destination. From the 1930s on, an increasing percentage of Irish immigrants moved to British cities such as Liverpool, London, and Edinburgh. These cities offered the job prospects of an industrialized society, but they were close enough to home that people could make the trip back for the holidays. Large Irish communities developed in these cities, offering emigrants cultural continuity, a chance to practice their religion, and a degree of political influence.

  74 { The Hardships of Emigration

  Choosing to emigrate was not an easy decision. In a culture in which family and community ties were so strong, the decision to leave it all behind was heart-wrenching. Emigrants knew that they would probably never see their loved ones again. Friends and family often held mock wakes for emigrants on the night before their departure, symbolic of the permanent separation that was coming between them.

  The price of the passage was the first difficulty most emigrants faced. Tickets for the overpacked transport ships weren’t very expensive, but the people who wanted to leave were usually poor. Sometimes landlords and government programs assisted poor people with the price of a ticket.

  The voyage overseas could be perilous, and it became especially dangerous during the famine years. The ships carrying emigrants during the famine became known as “coffin ships.” The death rates onboard these ships were appallingly high; for example, one-fifth of the people who traveled from Cork to Quebec died in the process.

  The owners of ships that specialized in transporting poor passengers fleeing the famine did not pay much attention to shipboard conditions. Dozens or hundreds of emigrants were packed into cargo holds with poor ventilation, little light, and rudimentary sanitation at best. Food was generally inadequate — think rancid meat and flour full of weevils. Under these conditions, diseases such as typhus and cholera ran rampant. Their immune systems already weakened by hunger, poor emigrants fell easy prey to the pathogens that lurked in the murky cargo holds.

  Reaching port was just a first step; many Irish died after arriving in the New World but before they could legally set foot on the mainland. Canada was closer to Ireland than the United States, and many ships docked there. It was easier for ships to land in Canada for another reason — the United States put far more restrictions on emigrant ships, particularly in the matte
r of health. A ship full of feverish passengers couldn’t land in the United States, which didn’t want to take care of ailing paupers.

  Many ships traveled up the St. Lawrence River to the quarantine island of Grosse Île, near Quebec City. In the summer of 1847, thousands of Irish immigrants crowded into the small hospital there; many of them died quickly, which freed up beds for the next round of sick people. Bodies were stacked high in the hot summer sun. Towns on the river would try to send boats to the next place upstream; no one wanted to keep these crowds of sick Irish.

  Surviving the voyage and the quarantine didn’t guarantee further survival. Immigrants who wanted to continue to Boston, New York, or other U.S. destinations would sometimes walk across the border from Montreal. This finished off many more people, especially those faced with a Canadian winter.

  75 { The Immigrant Experience in the United States

  For centuries, the United States has loomed in the Irish consciousness as the place to go for a new life. The United States offered the things that the Irish could not find at home: land, economic opportunities, and freedom from English control. With land resources vastly greater than those of Ireland, the United States seemed like a place of limitless possibilities. For people who chafed under British rule, the United States stood out as the colony that had made itself free.

  After Cromwell sacked Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, he sent Irish prisoners over to the West Indies as slave labor. Many of these forced immigrants eventually made their way to the English colonies in the New World; the Catholic colony of Maryland was a popular destination.

  Irish immigrants had arrived in America in a steady stream throughout the eighteenth century. Most of the first voluntary Irish immigrants came from Ulster in the north of Ireland. These immigrants were generally, although not exclusively, Protestants. They were known as “Scotch-Irish” or “Scots Irish,” because of the large number of Scots who settled in Ulster during the plantations of the seventeenth century. They quickly became an established component of U.S. society. Several U.S. presidents, including Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Woodrow Wilson, were of Scotch-Irish descent.

  In the nineteenth century, when a rapidly expanding population combined with a series of potato failures, millions of Irish decided to make the trip to the New World. Although the Scotch-Irish immigrants continued to arrive, the vast majority of the new arrivals were Catholics from the south of Ireland. Irish immigrants began to arrive in the United States’ eastern cities in large numbers in the 1820s and then flooded in during the years of the famine. They headed for the big cities — New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago — and they usually stayed there.

  These new immigrants tended to have a tougher time of it than their Protestant predecessors, and they faced a great deal of anti-Irish prejudice from the people already living in the United States. This was for a number of reasons: they came in far larger numbers; they were mostly poor farmers and unskilled laborers; they came at a time when most land in the East was already settled; and they were Catholics moving into a mostly Protestant land. Immigrants who deluged U.S. cities in the late 1840s were especially unwelcome because of their extreme poverty and frequently poor health.

  The massive influx of newcomers caused a strain with the existing populations. In the years when the majority of the Irish arrived, U.S. cities had not yet figured out how they would handle immigrants. Consequently, the immigrants wound up figuring it out for themselves.

  Most of the immigrants were uneducated and unskilled, so at first they could only take on menial tasks. But hard work in the United States was better than starving to death back in Ireland, so the Irish immigrants quickly developed a reputation as hard workers. The great wave of Irish immigration happened at a time of tremendous growth in U.S. cities and industries. Factories, apartment buildings, bridges, and railroads all needed to be built, and Irish immigrants were there to build them. In 1847, a New York newspaper wrote, “There are several sorts of power working at the fabric of this Republic: waterpower, steampower, horse-power, and Irish power.”

  Because so many Irish-Americans were in the building trades, they quickly took hold of a tool that was still rare back in Ireland — labor unions. The strong Irish sense of community allowed them to quickly grasp the strength of unity and collective bargaining. Irishmen soon led unions for bricklayers, carpenters, and plumbers. Many Irish families are still active leaders in the labor movement.

  Irish immigrants arrived in cities that often did not want them and did not have an infrastructure in place to take care of them. To address these problems, immigrants fell back on the tribal cohesiveness that had governed their rural communities in Ireland. While the Irish newcomers did not have status, they did have numbers. This allowed them to focus their power on a political level, almost exclusively through the Democratic Party. The resulting political organizations were the first of America’s political “machines” — organizations that used tight community organization to take power over local government, and then used government patronage to maintain their power.

  The Tammany machine in New York was the prototype for this style of politics. Bosses Tweed and Croker oversaw tightly controlled political organizations that offered favors — food, clothing, social services — in exchange for votes. Once in power, they exchanged jobs for kickbacks. The patronage jobs were largely in law enforcement and construction, which contributed to Irish dominance in the building trades. It was during this period that the stereotype of the Irish police officer became popular. The machine organizations were undeniably corrupt, but they did provide services to immigrant communities that they would not have had otherwise.

  While some immigrants responded to their tough conditions by becoming cops, others chose an alternate path. The Irish mob sought to make money from the chaos of the United States’ fast-growing cities. The Irish relied on old traditions of family and community loyalty, as well as a tradition of rural terrorism. Irish mobsters organized gambling, prostitution, and protection rackets in urban immigrant communities.

  The Irish mob families never achieved great success, but they did manage to survive through the twentieth century. The Irish mob operated alongside the Mafia in several cities, notably Boston and Chicago. Many of them were active rumrunners during Prohibition.

  The progressive gentrification of the Irish immigrant community, however, tended to undercut the appeal of crime. As more and more Irish families moved into the middle class, the gangsters lost the support networks and opportunities offered by an insular immigrant community. Once second- and third-generation Irish-Americans found that they could go to college and become professionals, the power of the mob began to die out.

  Catholic Irish immigrants often met with hostility and contempt from the more established American populations. The Irish represented competition for jobs and political power. Also, as Catholics, they presented a challenge to a predominantly Protestant country. Many employers refused to hire the Irish, and some landlords wouldn’t rent to them.

  One area where the Irish clashed with established groups was the question of alcohol. The Puritan tradition in the United States generally frowned on alcohol, whereas Irish culture viewed it as a harmless indulgence. When the Temperance movement arose in the mid-nineteenth century, Irish saloons were some of its first targets. Political cartoons of the time depicted Irishmen as red-face buffoons, enslaved by the bottle.

  Interestingly, some of the worst anti-Irish discrimination came from the Scotch-Irish, who wanted to make clear that they were a different group from the impoverished newcomers. They created social organizations that specifically excluded Irish Catholics, and they derided the social pretensions of the “lace curtain Irish” — Catholic immigrants who had managed to make it into the middle class.

  Although the Irish had to overcome a great deal of social stigma, they eventually became a part of the American mainstream. This was partially due to the influx of more immigrants, but it was most
ly due to economic advancement.

  76 { Irish Communities in Other Lands

  As mentioned, Irish emigrants didn’t restrict themselves to America. Many simply crossed the Irish channel to Great Britain. Others traveled to the opposite side of the globe to settle in Australia and New Zealand.

  After the United States, England and Scotland were the top destinations for Irish emigrants. The trip was shorter and cheaper, so it was easier to get there and easier to get back. The Irish went there in great numbers to pursue jobs in the textile mills, coal mines, and other businesses of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. They primarily went to the industrial cities, like London and Liverpool. The total Irish population in England — including both immigrants and their children born in England — numbered as much as 1.5 million people by the late nineteenth century.

  Like America, England offered jobs. Unlike America, however, it did not offer much social mobility. English society had strong class lines, and elements of old anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices still operated. Irish immigrants usually lived in large city slums. They rarely exercised much political power, and they generally remained in low-level jobs. This situation did not begin to improve until the early twentieth century.

  Irish people had been settling in Australia unintentionally for decades before large-scale emigration began — Australia was Great Britain’s biggest prison, and many Irish were sentenced to life there. Their crimes often seem paltry compared to such a major punishment. For the offense of stealing clothes or threatening a landlord, an individual could be sentenced to exile on the other side of the Earth for the rest of his or her life — a sentence known as “transportation.”