The repatriation of Irish migrants during the Famine years
The role of the Irish migrant, and in particular the Irish pauper, as an ‘other’ in England, Wales, and Scotland, preceded the Famine by several centuries. However, the scale of the movement across the Irish Sea between 1845 and 1851, and the demographic changes that took place in those port cities in which the destitute Irish arrived, led to demands for whole-scale repatriation of the Irish from Britain on an unprecedented level. Essentially, this discourse consisted of two interlinked strands. The first viewed mass Irish migration primarily as a logistical and administrative strain that could simply not be borne by local government, a burden that would be alleviated by the large-scale deportation of the very poor immigrants. The second was a continuation of a characterisation of the Irish Catholic as intrinsically ‘foreign’ and, through an alien religion and revolutionary politics, a threat to British stability and the Protestant ascendancy. This dated back to at least the eighteenth century. The latter of the two views was a potent one, and continued to manifest itself well into the twentieth century. The first narrative, that Irish paupers were simply too expensive to care for in existing institutions, is more apposite when examining the cases of Irish migrants who were (often forcibly) removed back to Ireland. It should also be noted that this view of the Irish settler as a problem that would be best solved by straightforward expulsion did not end with the conclusion of the Famine, but continued into the last third of the nineteenth century and beyond.
The repatriation of Irish migrants in the nineteenth century differed from all of the other instances examined in this book in that, following the Act of Union in 1801 between England and Ireland, the deportees were actually being moved from one part of the United Kingdom to another. As John Belchem, in comparing the experiences of the Irish with Puerto Ricans in the United States, put it: ‘Both groups were technically citizens, not immigrants’.1 This made things simultaneously more straightforward and more complex. The language used in both press and Parliament about the removal of Irish migrants stressed an innate alien character to the Irish, no matter the nature of the relationship between London and Dublin at the time. These fears were reflected in the legislation passed at the time. In 1845, just preceding the impact of the potato blight in Ireland, a law was enacted that attempted to make more explicit the formal procedures for the removal of non-English paupers from English parishes. Although also applying to Scottish people and those from the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, this was clearly a response to Irish migration.2 Another crucial piece of legislation was passed the following year that established the principle of irremovability from a parish – that if a person could prove they had been resident in an area for a period of five years or more, they could claim relief without fear of deportation. The problem, of course, was proving this five-year residence.3
Before examining a number of case studies concerning the removal of Irish families from England and Scotland, it is worth considering general responses to mass Irish migration in the acute period of 1845 to 1850, and the discourse used about solutions to the posited ‘crisis’. As might be expected, Liverpool was the site of the most acute anti-migrant sentiment, followed by Glasgow. In those two cities, both of which already were points of disembarking for Irish voyagers prior to the mid-1840s, the Famine influx was transformative.4 London in terms of overall numbers received the most Irish immigrants during the Famine years, but did not experience the level of angst apparent in Liverpool – London’s population was large enough to ‘swallow up’ the Irish pauper migrants without dramatic and readily apparent demographic change (although, this did not mean that deportations from London did not take place).5 Point of departure from Ireland tended to influence destination in Britain; those from the north-east often disembarked in Glasgow, those from Dublin in Liverpool, and those from Munster in London and Bristol.6 As well as this, Irish arrivals in the 1840s and 1850s settled in a number of smaller cities and towns, often after disembarking in London or Liverpool. This spread is reflected in the geographical range of the local Poor Law Boards who submitted regulations for the removal of Irish (and Scottish) paupers, from Bury St Edmunds to Reading to Northampton.7 The Famine years would witness the most concentred deportation of migrants from ‘mainland’ Britain in peace-time. Between 1849 and 1854, over 50,000 Irish paupers were removed from London and Liverpool alone.8
In Liverpool and Glasgow, protest at the numbers of Irish migrants arriving, and demands for repatriation, came predominately from local government (‘the Vestry’) and the local (Protestant) churches. In correspondence between the Home Office and the Select Vestry of the Parish of Liverpool, both the spiritual and the practical case for the repatriation of Irish arrivals was considered. At the beginning of the letter from A. Campbell, the Rector of Liverpool, the clergyman engaged in some moral gymnastics:
The position of the select vestry is therefore very painful to them. They know that it is their duty, as guardians of the poor, and it must be their desire as Christian men, to relieve real destitution, and prevent the probability of starvation; but while they owe this duty to the casual Irish poor, they feel, that they owe a higher duty to their own settled poor.9
Campbell then went on to cast doubt on the scale of the collapse of the Irish economy, querying that:
one of the most fertile islands in the world, with a landed rental, as is said; of twelve or thirteen millions a year, and which in the last year exported, as said, 1,300,000 quarters of grain, besides other provisions, valued at several millions sterling, really cannot at present support its own poor.10
Campbell effectively articulates here what will constitute two of the key threads that will run through this book. First, although the sufferings of the migrant are acknowledged, the needs of the homegrown poor must come first. The ‘higher duty’ in this case is towards the English Protestant working class, rather than the Irish pauper. Second, the severity of whatever situation has compelled the migrants to leave their homeland is questioned. The famine, the pogrom, the disenfranchisement is therefore framed as resembling something like a ‘trick’, used by the migrant to prevent their (in this narrative deserved) return to their homeland.
In a subsequent letter Campbell went on to consider the practicalities of forced removal of Irish settlers in Liverpool, ultimately concluding that it would be ‘impossible to compel’ migrants who did not wish to return to Ireland to do so. The process of expulsion was long, costly, and ultimately easy to prolong or entirely evade. As long as life was better in England and Scotland than back in Ireland, the migrants would come, and ‘it will be nearly impossible to send them back again’.11
Further correspondence on the ‘pauper Irish’ in Liverpool between local and national government stressed the negative results of mass Irish migration on public health. Cholera was already popularly known as the ‘Irish disease’, and a letter from W.H. Duncan to the Home Department discussed outbreaks of typhoid fever in those districts of the city with large Irish populations. Duncan also considered (and rejected) repatriation as a solution to what was increasingly being seen by the Liverpool authorities as an uncontainable medical crisis:
I do not venture to suggest the most effectual remedy of all, i.e. the sending back the surplus already here, simply because I am ignorant of the condition of the Irish towns in which they would disembark; but it is impossible that it can be worse than that of the districts of Liverpool in which they necessarily congregate.12
The efficacy of deporting Irish migrants en masse was also discussed in the Liverpool press. The Liverpool Mercury detailed the supposed criminal inclinations of the immigrants. Crime amongst the migrant communities, the newspaper reported, had increased sharply since the passing of the 1845 Act that brought together dependence on poor law institutions and subsequent deportation back to Ireland. Irish delinquency and vagrancy formed the subject for a debate organised by the Mayor of Liverpool. Among various responses to the ‘crisis’ one speaker made the point that: ‘During the whole pressure of last winter there was scarcely a case amongst these poor people [the Irish], but since the passing of the act, rather than become chargeable to the parish, they had become thieves.’13 The threat of repatriation had, it appeared, had the reverse effect to what had been desired – the Irish poor in Liverpool, aware of the dangers of deportation following the claiming of relief, had instead turned to other means of providing a subsistence. It was also claimed at the meeting that Irish women were...
