To the four corners of the world
CORMAC Ó GRÁDA commends an ambitious and accessible overview of the Irish diaspora, seen through the ordinary people who travelled to countries all over the world to nd new lives
Like the Irish diaspora itself, the literature on the topic is enormous. Of what is written, some is straight history; some is quantitative; while some dwells on particular sources, such as emigrant letters or banking records. Sean Connolly’s ambitious and highly successful synthesis embraces all these angles. Hitherto there has been no single go-to source about that diaspora in its temporal and spatial dimensions, spanning four centuries and four continents. Not far off is Tim Pat Coogan’s Wherever Green Is Worn (2000), but Connolly is more scholarly and fair-minded (if less humorous), and whereas Coogan’s focus is mainly on the “Green” (or Catholic) Irish, Connolly gives their Orange (ie, Protestant) brethren their due share. Indeed, more of the cameos in On Every Tide seem to refer to emigrants from Antrim or Derry/Londonderry than, say, Kerry or Tipperary.
e book is carefully pitched at the general reader – there are no tables or graphs to put them off. Connolly focuses most on the Irish in America, which makes sense, but has lengthy accounts of the Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Irish, and South Africa and Argentina are not forgotten either. One can’t have everything, but there is a lacuna as the Irish in Britain get short-changed. Of the 3-million-plus Irish-born living abroad by 1880, nearly 800,000 were in Britain, with 2 million in North America and some 300,000 elsewhere. And since the 1920s, emigration to Britain has dwarfed the rest.
Connolly writes fluently, and enlivens his generalisations with telling anecdotes. While these greatly add to the book, one might have wished for more on how the immigrants lived their mostly mundane daily lives and how they passed their spare time. Music was surely a big part of it, as was sport (for the men, at least). Francis O’Neill from Bantry, chief of police in Chicago and collector extraordinaire
Family ties were strong: in 1888, two-thirds of those travelling to the US had their fares paid by relatives who had left before them
of Irish traditional dance music, would have been worth a mention; so too would athlete Jim Fahey, known as the “Irish kangaroo”.
Connolly’s emigrants come across as ordinary people who got a cold welcome wherever they went, but most of whom lived out lives immeasurably better than they would have faced at home. Moreover, their leaving made life easier for the majority who remained behind. Family ties were extremely strong: the statistic that in 1888 two-thirds of those travelling to the US had their fares paid by relatives who had le before them says a lot. It helps to explain the continuity of the Irish presence in certain locations.
On Every Tide builds on recent research on the Irish in America, which is more upbeat on how the immigrants fared while not ignoring those who did not “make it” either. But in marginalising the Irish in England, it sidelines one group of immigrants who really struggled: people with Irish surnames have remained at the bottom of the pile in England since the mid-19th century.
Nonetheless, writing this book – a new departure for one of Ireland’s most eminent historians – was an inspired choice on Connolly’s part, and it deserves to be widely read.