FROM SOUTH DONEGAL TO SYDNEY
As the housing crisis drives more people from these shores, a new book explores our relationship with emigration
IN my home town of Ballyshannon, there is a memorial to the Famine Orphan Girls. These were 19 young women who left the local workhouse for Australia under the Earl Grey scheme. Each of the girls, who were aged between 14 and 18, was supplied with clothing, footwear, a Bible, and a seachest for the journey from south Donegal to Sydney.
When they cut the ribbon on the memorial back in 2014, it was the only monument in the country to the thousands of young girls who fled the Famine in this way. As historian and author Seán Connolly points out in his study of 200 years of Irish emigration, this initiative was ‘probably the best organised scheme of assisted emigration provided by any 19th-century agency’.
Those 19 teenagers from the Ballyshannon workhouse were among 4,175 young women who made the journey to Australia in this way. Not only did they get a full set of clothing and square meals every day of the voyage, the ship also had a matron and surgeon. As such, the mortality rate was less than 1%.
Once they arrived in Sydney, the girls were employed as domestic servants in households that were desperate for maids, cooks and child-minders. From there, as Mr Connolly relates, many of them progressed quickly to establishing households of their own. Two out of every three of the arrivals were married within three years of setting foot in Australia.
Despite the success of the scheme, it drew criticism from some quarters, with one Irish newspaper equating it to ‘white slave traffic’. But of the two million emigrants who left Ireland between 1845 and 1855, few, it seemed, adapted better to the new life than those orphans from the Earl Grey scheme. There was hostility in their new home, but within a few years, they had made a full life for themselves.
As you would expect, the Famine forms the base of On Every Tide, Mr Connolly’s detailed and challenging history of the Irish diaspora. The ordeal of many of those fleeing is skilfully described but, as the author points out, even though the voyages were often made on what were termed ‘coffin ships’, most of those who crossed the Atlantic survived to set foot on a new land.
The mass migration to America forms the central plank of this book. In the ten years after 1846, almost half of the 2.8million immigrants to the US were Irish. They were the single biggest group and many arrived with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. Unlike immigrants from Germany and Sweden (the second and third biggest groups), the Irish had little or no experience of urban life and had little education. But importantly, they could speak English and would often take the jobs nobody else wanted. Such was the influx of Irish that it was only natural there would be resentment, especially in a country where the Wasp (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) ascendancy had already established itself. In the rest of the world, the Irish could be part of a population trying to develop a new country, such as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Even in Argentina, where the fifth-largest Irish diaspora set up, they quickly adapted, learning Spanish and farming beef, settling into a life thousands of miles from home. By the mid-1860s, an Irish priest in Buenos Aires, Fr Anthony Fahy, claimed that there were 30,000 Irish emigrants in Argentina. Conditions were favourable to them, with sheep and cattle farming widespread.
The country benefited from chain migration, with clusters of people arriving from Westmeath and Longford, in particular, because Thomas Armstrong, from a landed family in Mullingar, and William Mulhivill, a grocer in Ballymahon, acted as agents for the River Plate Steam Navigation Company, which would take them from Liverpool all the way to the Argentinian capital.
The emigration to Argentina is fascinating, but it forms only a small part of Mr Connolly’s book. Mostly, he focuses on America, which is understandable as it is where most of the eight million people who left Ireland between 1821 and 1961 ended up. It remains a remarkable dispersal of people – over a century and a half, eight million inhabitants of a small island on the edge of Europe ended up all over the globe, from Argentina to the northern edge of Canada, from California to New Zealand’s South Island.
Emigration returned in the grim 1980s, which led to the late Brian Lenihan making an ill-judged remark about how we can’t all be expected to live on this small island. He would later lose the 1990 presidential election to Mary Robinson, who understood the nuances of the diaspora, even placing a candle in Áras an Uachtaráin for all those who left the country to find a new home.
Ms Robinson’s attitude towards emigrants also spearheaded a change in official policy. She was also the right President at the
The Irish had little experience of urban living
Robinson said she represented 70million
right time, as Mr Connolly argues ‘changing economic fortunes also made possible a new attitude to the country’s diaspora’.
Up to the 1970s, even in the US and UK, the official stance of denial cast emigrants as having needlessly abandoned their country. But Ms Robinson changed that, even suggesting when she became President that she was representing the ‘70million people around the world who claim Irish heritage’.
Mr Connolly has tried to pull together many strands of a nuanced and difficult subject. With 200 years of history and more than eight million people, there is a lot of ground to cover and scant attention is paid to how Irish culture, such as Gaelic games and traditional music, thrived in some of these emigrant enclaves,
But it is still a worthy attempt at telling the Irish story through the mass movement of so many of the country’s people.
With emigration rearing its head again as this generation sees no other solution to an endless housing crisis, it is no harm to remind ourselves why so many had to leave here in the past.
On Every Tide: The Making And Remaking Of The Irish World by Seán Connolly is out now, priced at €15.99 on Easons.com