Pre-independence Irish Emigration

Historic Emigration

Emigration became an intrinsic part of Irish life before independence, especially from the Famine onwards. In the 1600s, approximately 25,000 Irish Catholics left – some were forced to move, others left voluntarily – for the Caribbean and Virginia, while from the 1680s onwards Irish Quakers and Protestant Dissenters began to depart for Atlantic shores.[1] Sizeable Presbyterian emigration from Ireland’s northern Ulster province took place from the 1710s onwards, alongside smaller Anglican Protestant and Catholic emigration from Ulster and the southern Munster province.[2] This pattern continued until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814. Ireland had largely benefited from price rises associated with war on the European Continent but duly suffered from the drop in export price levels following Waterloo. From 1815 to the start of the Great Irish Famine (1846-1852), between 800,000 and 1 million Irish sailed for North America with roughly half settling in Canada and the other half in the United States.[3]

Regularly forgotten is the fact that it was only from the early 1830s onwards that annual departures by Catholics began to exceed those of Dissenters and Anglicans combined.[4] Irish Presbyterian and Anglican migrants who moved to America in the first half of the nineteenth century felt little animosity from locals because of their limited numbers and, in the case of the Irish, their religion. Thereafter, Catholics greatly outnumbered Protestants. The successful development of the linen industry in north-east of the country throughout the nineteenth century meant that Ulster became a major player in the British industrial revolution. This led to many people moved from the surrounding Ulster countryside to Belfast as the century progressed. The lack of industrialisation elsewhere in Ireland meant that most people living in rural areas went to the urban centres across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea to find employment.

For many Irish people, the Famine was the final ultimatum before deciding to leave Ireland.[5] Of the 1.8 million who arrived in the United States in 1845-55, many were much poorer than those that had gone before them; as the fact that almost one third of the new arrivals were from the poorer Irish speaking areas suggests.[6] The emigration of so many during the Famine led to the establishment of huge Irish communities abroad, particularly in the United States – the destination of choice for the vast majority. These vast networks helped to facilitate millions of more Irish to emigrate in the decades following the Famine. To give an indication of the colossal nature of Irish emigration, consider that roughly one in two people born in Ireland in the nineteenth century emigrated.[7] In the late nineteenth century, nearly as many people born in Ireland lived outside the country as lived in it.[8] No other European country contributed as many emigrants per capita to the New World during the so-called ‘age of mass migration’ between the mid-nineteenth century and the start of the First World War as Ireland.[9]

Irial Glynn, Dec. 2012

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