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Today’s banner:
Harvest scene, Sutherland, last weekend
by Islay McLeod
Irish emigrants fleeing their country
The historian Tom Devine has called the Irish famine ‘the greatest human disaster in 19th-century Europe’. He is on solid empirical ground when he makes this statement. The famine and related diseases killed around one million people and forced an estimated 2.1 million men, women and children to leave Ireland between 1845 and 1855.
A full meeting of Glasgow City Council will today (Thursday) discuss a proposal – backed by both the SNP and Labour – to create a memorial to the Irish who settled in Scotland during the terrible 19th-century famine. The motion, put forward by SNP councillor Feargal Dalton, reads:
Council notes the significant cultural, economic and social impact of Ireland’s An Gorta Mor and the Scottish Highland Potato Famine on the modern day character of our great city. Council recognises the efforts made by Glaswegians at the time to provide relief and sanctuary to those affected; a tradition that continues now as our city and its citizens provide hope and assistance to those throughout the world affected by famine today.
It goes on to propose the creation of a working committee to consider the feasibility of and recommendations for such a memorial. The committee will also have to grapple with the potentially vexed issue of choosing a site.
Despite what feels like a tacked-on reference to the contemporaneous potato blight in the crofting regions of the Highlands and subsequent unspecified global famines, the focus to date has largely been on the Irish dimension. It is right that consideration should be given to some form of memorial dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Irish people who settled in Scotland. The Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, made significant contributions to the development of the Scottish labour movement, the Orange Order, Scotland’s industries and they sustained both the Scottish Catholic and Scottish Episcopal churches. There are, however, some issues that deserve to be considered while plans are at an early stage.
The famine was clearly a traumatic event for millions of Irish people, less so for those in the receiving towns and cities who nevertheless faced daunting demands on public resources and generosity. In 1841 there were 126,321 Irish born in Scotland (4.8% of the population) and by 1851 this has risen to 207,367 (7.2% of the population). The famine therefore accelerated patterns of migration that were already established and migration from Ireland to Scotland continued at significant levels for decades afterwards. The census of 1901, for example, recorded virtually identical numbers of Irish-born in Scotland as its 1851 equivalent.
Inter-communal tensions might have been shaped in a troublesome and enduring way during the famine but a memorial focused on that specific period risks excluding previous and subsequent waves of immigration that were numerically more significant. Is there not a case to be made for the creation of a memorial that reflects Irish migration in all its multi-generational complexity?
The Irish impact on ‘the modern day character of our great city’ was certainly not confined to one decade. Indeed Danny Boyle, the project manager at the Irish Heritage Foundation, was quoted in the Herald as saying ‘the multi-generational Irish community are part of the fabric of the city and the country’, suggesting that he is thinking of the memorial representing more than simply a single decade in a centuries-long story of population movement.
The other issue that might be raised at this early stage is the relationship between the memorial and Irish Protestant movement to Scotland. During the 19th century, Protestants accounted for between a quarter and a third of all the Irish immigrants who arrived in this country. During the famine, however, Protestant migration would have been relatively less significant because the heavily Protestant eastern parts of Ulster escaped the worst of the crisis. On the other hand, there is evidence of considerable Irish Protestant poverty in the east-end of Glasgow in the years following the famine.
In a letter to the Herald in June 2011, the composer James MacMillan supported the idea of a secular memorial recognising that ‘many of us, of both Catholic and Protestant Irish heritage, have historical connections to the famine’. But there has to be some concern that the Protestant Irish experience might be marginalised to the point of negligibility by a memorial that focuses on a period of overwhelmingly Catholic immigration. Again, this suggests a need to consider a memorial with a broader, more inclusive approach to the history of Irish immigration. MacMillan’s reference to ‘a secular memorial’ serves as a reminder that there is already a famine memorial at the Catholic Carfin Grotto that was unveiled in 2001 by the then Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
An article on Irish Protestant migration in the current issue of the Irish Studies Review journal claims: ‘For the past decade or so, awareness of Irish Protestant ancestry has grown markedly in North America, Australasia, South Africa, and other areas that have welcomed non-Catholic emigrants from Ulster and other parts of Ireland’.
Some of those who have been most vocal in supporting the creation of the proposed memorial have noted that Glasgow lags behind cities such as Boston, Liverpool, New York, Sydney and Toronto when it comes to commemorating the Irish famine. Will they show the same enthusiasm for using the memorial to acknowledge the Irish Protestant experience in Scotland, and, in so doing, bring us yet another step closer to the countries and continents mentioned above?
Alasdair McKillop is a writer based in Edinburgh
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