Irish Emigration
[This article by Desmond Greaves was carried in the October 1976 issue of “Labour Monthly”, under the title “Emigration”]
Irish settlement in Britain is of immense antiquity. One need no more than note the early invasions. When the Saxons arrived the Irish held substantial parts of Scotland and Wales, giving one country a language and the other place names like Bala and Bangor. Later the Irish missionaries brought Christianity, literacy and classical learning to Scotland and northern England. And Irish harpers were familiar in mediaeval Wales where their settlement was encouraged by the princes.
After the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 relations between the two islands changed. Half-Gaelicised lordlings of the Pale, if we are to believe Shakespeare, fought with England in the French wars. Next the Irish merchants arrived in London, Bristol and Liverpool, the last expressly incorporated as a supply base for Anglo-Norman expansion in Ireland and Wales. Readers of 18th and early 19th century literature will be familiar with the impoverished absentee squireen, to whom Thackeray attributes a mincing accent which its possessors no doubt thought made them sound English
From the completion of the invasion the ordinary Irish were slaves in their own country. The English people never saw them. Then came the industrial revolution straining the polarity of the two countries to crisis point. Property relations changed ever more rapidly. The slave became superfluous for home requirements and was now available for slavery abroad. Solicitous entrepreneurs facilitated his departure. Shipping companies transported him at a nominal charge, recovering the loss by overcharging those who returned. But from now on there was a special relation not only between the privileged classes of the two islands, but between the peoples also. It was as complex as the emigration and as disharmonious as its causes. In a short article it is impossible to do more than touch upon a few aspects of a subject essential to the understanding of the political life of these islands.
In the section on Ireland in the chapter of Capital that deals with the general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx shows how, despite a constant decline in population, rents and profits in that country rose. The reason was that, though the people departed, they left their means of production behind. Even the great starvation of 1846, which killed a million and led to the immediate emigration of another million- and-a-half, did not the slightest damage to the wealth of the country.
While during the 19th century the most spectacular emigration was to the United States, Britain’s expanding industries called for constant additions of manpower. Her foreign adventures required recruits for the army. Innocent Irish youngsters to whom the only known crime was violence and the only sin pride, were hurled into a hell of degradation. I recently examined the medical records of a regiment which recruited Irish soldiers in the 1880s. Nearly 50% in a small sample had records of venereal disease. The conditions of the Irish in Manchester in the 1840s were described by Engels.
In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8½ million. That of England was 15 million. Today the figures are 4½ million and 54 million. A ratio of one to two has been replaced by one of one to twelve. The expropriation of the Irish was an example of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”, and means were devised to transfer a due proportion of the spoils to England. It has been estimated that between 1801 and 1922 no less than £1000 million was extracted from Ireland in the form of rent, interest, profit and taxation, and another £400 million at least in manpower. In such circumstances Britain – and the USA – became great.
The effect of such a drain on a small country can be imagined. In 1841 Ireland had its lowest ever cattle population of 1,803,000 and its highest human. A hundred years later the number of cattle had trebled and the number of people all but halved. The country had been larger transformed into a ranch, its internal market minimal.
The crises of the Irish agrarian system and the immense demand for labour in the USA and Britain were of course interrelated, but it was the misfortune of the Irish that the interrelation was so accordant. Just at the time when textiles, railways, docks and shipping were expanding, the flood of Irish labour became available. The agrarian system, based on potatoes for consumption and corn sold off to pay rent to the landlord, would have disappeared in 1798 had the revolution not been so bloodily put down by the London colonialists. Had the opportunity to emigrate to America or Britain, or “take the King’s shilling” not been available, the struggle of the Irish people would not have been constantly deprived of the youngest and most vigorous in each generation.
With those considerations in mind one can record with some satisfaction that there is now no net emigration from the Republic. Figures drawn from the British census of 1971 show that, apart from the war years, the year 1960 saw the biggest influx of 25,080, though there came a rapid decline to 14,310 in 1966 and approximately 8000 in 1971. The decline has continued, so that now the number emigrating is balanced by those returning.
What has occasioned the change? First there is the depletion of the small farm districts. Whole counties in the west of Ireland are all but derelict. Second, there is the growth of native industry, now threatened by the EEC. Third, there is Britain’s poor economic showing, and fourth there is an imponderable. Two generations of national independence, despite certain limitations, have bred in the Irishman of the Republic a new self-confidence which has fuelled and been fuelled by the spread of socialist ideas. The Republic has the highest birthrate in the EEC. Forty per cent of the population is under 25. The returning emigrants are taking back children with them, thus increasing the demand for educational facilities and ultimately for jobs.
It is this danger which the progressive movement in Ireland accuses the government of not having understood. Unemployment stands at its highest level since the war. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be required in the next 20 years. The government would find them in working for export. Irish socialists stress the supreme importance of the home market, of an economy designed primarily to satisfy the needs of the people. The young people will not indefinitely wait in the dole queue. Nor will they take themselves off to Germany. The trade union movement is particularly conscious of the need for a change of direction and has refused to cooperate with the government in its pay policy, which would further restrict the home market.
Despite the cessation of net immigration from the Republic into Britain, the Irish population remains very large, and those who leave are replaced by younger immigrants. There is also a continuing substantial emigration from the six counties of Northern Ireland, partly economic in origin, part due to the Troubles. According to the 1971 census there are now in Great Britain 957,820 persons born in Ireland and they form about 1.8% per cent of the population. In the larger centres they are, so to speak, embedded in a considerably larger community of Irish descent. About 3.5% of the population of Greater London is of Irish birth, and the corresponding figure is 3% for the Birmingham, 2% for the Liverpool and 1.8% for the Glasgow areas.
For every two immigrants from the six counties there are five from the Republic. Glasgow is the only centre where six-county immigrants outnumber those from the Republic. In the south-east the overwhelming majority of the Irish are either from the Republic or are Catholics from the six counties. The emigration rate is greater for six-county Catholics than for Protestants, the discrimination in that territory being designed to induce this. A further factoring increasing the importance of those coming from the majority of the Irish people is that the Unionists, except in Glasgow and Liverpool, readily disperse in the British population
What is the attitude of the British workers towards the Irish? In 1870 Marx could write:
“Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working-class population divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lower the standard of life …. The Irishman pay him back with interest … he regards the English worker as sharing in the guilt for the English domination of Ireland, and at the same time serving as its stupid tool.”
That some of this remains is shown by the Birmingham bombing of November 1974 and the reaction to it. But the development of trade unionism over years of relative prosperity has trust it into the background. There is even a danger that some of the most backward Irish workers might join with the most backward English in opposition to the coloured community.
There are very many Irish workers who do not belong to a trade union. This might seem surprising in view of the fact that a greater proportion of the working class is organised in Ireland than in England. But it must be remembered that when an Irishman emigrates he usually changes his occupation. The problem is not one of unorganised Irishmen but of unorganised industries, and the great need is to enlist the support of the Irish in getting them organised. An improved attitude by the majority of the British workers to the supreme issue remaining in Anglo-Irish relations, namely the British claim to sovereignty in Ireland, would greatly assist. And in turn the Irish population, still numerically at a very high level, can be one of the strongest natural factors in bringing about an understanding of Ireland by the British workers.