‘The refugees arriving today are poor and disease-ridden. They threaten to take jobs away and strain welfare budgets. They practice an alien religion and pledge allegiance to a foreign leader. They are bringing with them crime. They bring with them the threat of rape.’
This is not a quote from Conor McGregor, the Irish Freedom Party or any of that ilk, though it could easily be. It is in fact not even about the refugees and immigrants in Ireland today, but is the observations of an American commentator in the mid-19th century about the Irish arriving on America’s shores. These were views largely held and widely shared.
Nor was anti-Irish hostility limited to the United States, or to the 19th century.
I have a very early childhood memory of my father bringing me from Cork to England for a visit. We stayed with relatives in Ilford in East London. On our way to their house we passed a number of guest houses, and a lot of them had signs in the windows. I had just about learned to read and saw that the signs said ‘No Pets, No Blacks, No Irish’. I remember asking my dad why they didn’t want us, and for the first time in my young life saw him struggle to give me an answer to a question.
This memory never really left me, and it has been revived by observing the growth of anti-immigrant activity and influence in Ireland. What fascinates me is that many of those most vocal in the movement claim to be ‘great Irish Patriots’ (whilst ironically complaining about a porous border and marching alongside northern loyalists), and in doing so they go out of their way to deny any equivalence between our historical experience over the centuries as a ‘nation of emigrants’ and the circumstances facing those immigrants arriving on our shores.
Ironically, I first heard the argument from a cousin (who like me emigrated to England, where they remained for years before returning). They explained to me that we weren’t like the immigrants who are arriving in Ireland today: we worked hard, adapted to the culture of wherever we went, and were respected and welcomed for those reasons.
It turned out my cousin was not alone in this piece of self-delusion. It is an argument that, in a number of versions, appears on the social media pages and websites of these new right-wing ‘Irish patriots’ trying to win influence through relentless anti-immigrant scapegoating. It is an argument so ill-informed and inaccurate that it is breathtaking.
Emigration in Irish History
Emigration has played such a huge role in Irish history. Yet those attacking immigrants in Ireland today seek to deny it, or minimise it, or else paint a rosy picture of the industrious, integrated and well-liked Irish immigrant. This is pure fiction.
Even prior to 1845 and the onset of the famine, Ireland was undergoing rapid growth in emigration. Throughout the 1820’s and 30’s there were reports of influxes of Irish emigrants to Britain, and to a lesser extent America. Unable to scrape a subsistence from the land, tens of thousands of landless tenants boarded the boat to England and Scotland, where they worked as seasonal farm labourers: most returned home in the off-season; some settled permanently and started new lives far from home, making their way into densely-packed hovels in the factory towns. In England and Scotland violent anti-Irish attacks on these new arrivals were reported. Engels famously wrote that ‘Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.’
The famine of course produced one of the greatest exoduses in history. Some 2 million left Ireland, mainly bound for America. They left on ‘coffin ships’ every bit as dangerous and then some as small boats today. Thousands died in overpacked, disease-ridden ships, many arrived ill, weak, and desperately hungry. Some had had their fares paid by landlords glad to see them off their land, and caring little for the safety of the journey their tenants would take.
‘No Irish Need Apply’
Their arrival was not greatly welcomed. Anti-Irish hostility was combined with a sectarian detestation of Catholicism. Much of what was written and said about their Catholicism could easily be confused with the rantings of the Islamophobic right in Ireland today.
It’s worth noting that the number of immigrants from Germany around that time was not greatly different to the number of Irish, and although undoubtedly they too faced bigotry, the extreme anti-Catholic prejudice of WASP-dominated American society meant the Irish were seen as a much greater threat. Their religion and their ‘strange’ customs, their large families were seen by their opponents in precisely the way the far right see Islam and Muslims today, with the addition that the Irish were often seen as violent alcoholics.
They experienced prejudice in all walks of life, and were often on the receiving end of violent attacks. When it came to employment the signs ‘No Irish Need Apply’ were common-place.
In 1849, a clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were called the ‘Know-Nothings’ because they claimed to ‘know nothing’ when questioned about their politics. Party members vowed to elect only native-born citizens—but only if they weren’t Roman Catholic. ‘Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values,’ writes Jay P. Dolan in The Irish Americans: A History.
In both Britain and America the Irish were often portrayed as being genetically inferior, ape-like creatures somewhere lower down the evolutionary chain. This depiction had most famously been publicised in Britain in the pages of the supposedly satirical magazine Punch; in the US these stereotypes drew upon the deep wells of anti-Black racism that had been concocted to justify slavery.
Indeed the prejudice and violence that took place in America resembled closely the treatment of immigrants in Britain at that time. In Liverpool where large numbers of Irish had arrived the local Tory MP complained that ‘The influx of the Irish into Liverpool brought poverty, disease, dirt and misery; drunkenness and crime, in addition to a disturbance of the labour market, the cost to ratepayers of an enormous sum of money’.
The city became rife with anti-Irish prejudice. Anyone with an Irish name or Irish accent could find themselves barred from jobs, employment opportunities and even pubs. They were often also victims of physical violence.
Nor was this prejudice restricted to the political margins. In 1836 future British Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote that ‘The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.’
Emigrating from Conservative Catholic Ireland
All of this is swept under the carpet or denied outright by those who claim ‘We Irish were different’—that those forced out of Ireland by poverty and oppression over the past few centuries easily assimiliated into welcoming host countries. The irony is that the script being rehearsed by self-described ‘patriots’ of the present-day Irish far right has been borrowed almost word-for-word from the record of prejudice and racism used against their own ancestors.
Their version of history around this is as fake as their weird version of ‘Make Ireland Great Again’. As with America the question has to be asked: when exactly is the ‘again’ referring to? Let’s assume that despite their desire for a closed border between North and South, the far right are not claiming the period before independence. Indeed they seem to want to wrap the tricolour around themselves and claim some links to the founders of the Irish state.
So what era are we talking about? The era when the Catholic Church dominated southern society, and its clergy were given free rein to sexually and physically abuse children? The era when young unmarried mothers were locked up in the likes of the Magdalene Laundries, and their children forcibly taken from them, sent off to orphanages or worse? The era of DeValera’s ‘comely maidens’ bollocks?
It should be remembered that while it is true that there was little or no immigration into church-dominated Ireland, throughout much of that time there was emigration on scales that, looked at today, were staggering. Whole generations of young people sought escape—from desperate poverty, but also from the stifling repression imposed by a conservative state working hand-in-hand with the Church.
It is estimated that in the years between 1931 and 1944 four out of every five children born in the 26 counties emigrated. In the 1950s it’s estimated that half a million people left the country, though that’s almost definitely a low number: the government of the day was keen to play down the problem. In the 1980’s another massive wave of emigration took place, and even today—with the government boasting of prosperity—tens of thousands make their way to Australia and elsewhere, unable to make ends meet in a vastly unequal 21st century Ireland handed over to vulture landlords and corporate multinationals.
These earlier generations left—and their descendants continue to leave—because there was no work, no future, and little to no support from the state. The government often implied that emigrants were being unpatriotic by leaving, whilst in reality knowing they had no choice. They mainly went to England where, as I witnessed, they were greeted with signs saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Pets’ and where they faced many of the same prejudices their ancestors had. Where they were denounced for ghettoising areas, for failing to adapt and integrate, for overbreeding, and of course for being thick. Popular culture was awash with ‘thick Irish’ jokes.
Who Lives Here Belongs Here
They did so whilst often having to cope with the culture shock of having left small rural towns they had never strayed more than a few miles from, and now finding themselves in huge, impersonal and apparently unfriendly cities far away from loved ones. Many dreamt of returning sooner or later: the vast majority never did.
Even later when long-time immigrants could be seen as a more integrated part of British society, they could suddenly find themselves under attack. The rise of the republican movement and IRA bombings were followed by attacks on Irish pubs and clubs: following the Birmingham bombings, there were even attempts to drive Irish workers out of some factories.
Then there were the huge miscarriages of justice: those completely innocent of any involvement in the bombings they were accused of perpetrating; The Birmingham 6, the Guilford Four, the McGuire family. The latter had ‘integrated’ even to the extent that Mrs. McGuire had a picture of the Queen on her wall, but it didn’t matter: she was Irish and so presumed guilty.
All of this is the reality: our forebears and even our contemporaries suffered prejudice and bigotry simply because at one stage starvation—and later poverty, hopelessness and desperation—had caused them to tear themselves away from all that they knew and were familiar with, from all those they loved, and to go and find refuge elsewhere.
That we have a history and memory of that makes it all the more shameful when the far right urges that we should greet those from elsewhere who are fleeing for similar—and sometimes even more desperate—reasons with the same bigotry earlier generations of Irish faced in every corner of the globe.
Their racism is often accompanied by the nonsense that ‘We were different’. That myth won’t wash. We were just like them. If the far right want to get all dewy-eyed about history we need to remind them that our best allies, our heroes, those we should look up to, were the ones in Liverpool and London, Boston, New York and Melbourne who stood firm against anti-immigrant xenophobia and racism and said ‘You are welcome here!’ Our enemies—then as now—are the bigots who seek to divide working people, who try to make scapegoats out of our friends, neighbours and workmates. Say it plain: all who live here belong here.
