New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland

Martin J. Mitchell, Martin J. Mitchell

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781788854009
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia scozzese

Irish immigrants and their descendants have made a vital contribution to the creation of modern Scotland. This book is the first collection of essays on the Irish in Scotland for almost twenty years, and brings together for the first time all the leading authorities on the subject. It provides a major reassessment of the Irish immigrant experience and offers social, cultural and religious development of Scotland over the past 200 years.

1 Irish Catholics in the West of Scotland in the Nineteenth Century: Despised by Scottish workers and controlled by the Church?

Martin J. Mitchell

The prevailing view among historians about the Irish in nineteenth-century Scotland is that the Protestant Irish immigrants were, in the main, welcomed and accepted – because they shared the same religious beliefs and culture as most of the Scots; whereas the Catholic Irish were despised by the bulk of the native population on account of their race and religion, and because they were employed mainly as strike-breakers or as low-wage labour. As a result of this hostility the Catholic Irish, it has been argued, were unwilling or unable to participate in strikes, trade unions and political movements with Scottish workers; instead, they formed isolated and self-contained communities, centred on their Church, in the towns in which they settled in significant numbers, and politically were interested almost exclusively in issues affecting Ireland, Catholics and the Catholic Church.¹ For example, Tom Gallagher, in his major study of the Catholic Irish in Glasgow, argued that prejudice towards them was ‘endemic throughout society’² and as a result they constituted a separate and isolated community.³ He added: ‘Finding religious intolerance and sectarian hate in many areas of nineteenth Century Scottish life, the immigrants preferred to remain expatriate Irish rather than strive to make common cause with the Scots in their midst.’⁴ Michael Fry claimed that in the late nineteenth century:

There was hatred in all classes for Irish immigrants. Scots workers were infuriated when they allowed themselves to be used as strike-breakers, keeping down wages and crippling trade unions. The higher orders deplored the squalid social habits to which they saw them irretrievably given up. The Irish, in the face of such bitter hostility were unassimilated, maintaining their own identity and institutions.⁵

A contributor to a popular academic history of modern Scotland argued that:

Irish Catholics … found themselves strangers in a strange land. Forced to take whatever jobs they could get, they remained firmly on the bottom rung of the Scottish social ladder. Herded into ghettos, and facing hostility from the local community, their identity focused on their church. Catholicism and Irishness mutually reinforced one another.⁶

Callum Brown maintained that ‘partly through the use of immigrants as strike-breakers and partly through sectarianism, Catholics were generally isolated from the trade unions and Labour movements before 1890’.⁷ Moreover, he concluded: ‘In the context of a hostile Presbyterian reception, the incoming Irish turned to the chapel and its activities for cultural and ethnic identity.’⁸

Other historians have argued or suggested that within the Catholic community the Church and its clergy exercised a considerable degree of power and authority over the Irish. In an influential article published over 30 years ago, William Walker detailed ‘the creation of an exclusive and intense Irish community life …’, in which the priest was the dominant figure, exercising almost total control. According to Walker: ‘Within their substitute society the immigrants were exhorted to the virtues of docility and resignation while, institutionally, the structure of parochial organizations compelled precisely this quiescence.’⁹ Tom Gallagher has described the creation of a ‘self-enclosed world’ by the Catholic Irish, which was presided over by ‘the parish priest, an undoubted figure of authority …’.¹⁰ Chris Harvie and Graham Walker argued that the Catholic Irish population in urban Scotland ‘was disciplined by its priests as well as the hostility of the native Scots into retaining an Irish identity which, until a very late date, resisted industrial and class pressures to assimilate’.¹¹ Graham Walker later claimed that: ‘There is little doubt that the Catholic Church functioned as the fulcrum of this immigrant community and exerted great influence in the social, educational, and political spheres of life …’¹²

Indeed, some have claimed that the Church was so powerful and influential that it was able to control and direct the political activities of the Catholic Irish. William Walker contended that in the late nineteenth century the Church was able to prevent the Irish from joining the ranks of the emerging labour movement.¹³ He suggested that one way in which the Church was able to do this was through the clergy’s deliberate – and perhaps ‘devious’ – promotion of Irish nationalism and Home Rule among the immigrant community, which co-existed alongside their continual attacks on Socialism and the cause of labour: ‘It is distinctly possible that priests fostered the politics of nationalism as a distraction from the politics of class.’¹⁴ In his recent history of the Scottish working class, Bill Knox is more forthright in his interpretation of the role of the clergy. He maintains that hostility and prejudice throughout society ‘saw the Irish Catholics retreat from the embrace of the Scottish labour movement and into the arms of a reactionary priesthood, which channelled Irish political energies into the struggle for Home Rule’.¹⁵

This chapter will critically assess these views of the Catholic Irish in the nineteenth century. The first section will determine whether the immigrant community was as isolated and despised as some have claimed. It will not deal with the attitudes of the Protestant churches and the middle classes, as these have been well documented.¹⁶ Instead, it will focus on the Catholic Irish and their relationship with those beside whom they lived and laboured – the Scottish working class. The second section will establish whether the Catholic Church and its clergy were able totally to dominate and control the lives of the Irish. The chapter will deal exclusively with the west of Scotland, as this is the region in which the majority of the immigrants settled.¹⁷ Moreover, the bulk of the research on the Irish in nineteenth-century Scotland relates to the west of the country.

I

It is undeniable that Irish workers – Catholic and Protestant – were used to break strikes, and, as a result, incurred the wrath of Scottish workers. However, most of the evidence of this relates to the coal and iron industries of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire from the mid-1820s to the mid-1850s.¹⁸ The vast majority of Irish workers in the nineteenth century were not employed in the mining industry and were not used as blackleg labour.¹⁹ Furthermore, even in the mining districts of the west of Scotland the Irish experience was more complex than some historians have suggested. In many instances Irishmen who were used as strike-breakers were not new to the industry but were already employed in and around the pits as labourers, and had apparently lived and worked alongside the Scottish colliers without incident.²⁰ Alan Campbell has argued that, once part of the mining workforce, most Irish workers during the middle decades of the nineteenth century were unwilling to join their district unions, for social, economic and cultural reasons.²¹ Yet there is, as he acknowledged, evidence that some Irish workers participated in strikes to protect or improve their wages and conditions during the 1840s and 1850s.²² Campbell and others have also shown that from the 1870s onwards Irish miners – Catholic and Protestant – were prominent both in the rank-and-file and in the leadership of miners’ trade unions in Lanarkshire. For example, it has been estimated that by 1900 the Irish made up almost three-quarters of the total membership of the Lanarkshire Miners’ Union. At this time at least one-third of the executive of the Airdrie branch of the county union were of Irish Catholic extraction, including its secretary, P. J. Agnew. By 1911 the Catholic Irish constituted the majority of the membership of the Lanarkshire branch of the National Iron and Steelworkers Union.²³ Catholic Irish miners also participated fully in industrial disputes during this period, including the major stoppages of 1874 and 1912.²⁴

Irish workers in other occupations also played a prominent role in strikes, in trade unions, and in the labour movement in the west of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century.²⁵ For example, Irish handloom weavers were involved in industrial action from the 1800s to the 1840s. In 1834 a Glasgow Cotton Manufacturer stated that:

With regard to combination among the weavers, the Irish are rather urged on by the more acute and thinking among the Scotch; but when the emergency comes the Irish are the more daring spirits; and as they are in themselves less reflective, and worse educated they are more prone to use violence, without regard to consequences.²⁶

By the late 1830s around 40 per cent of the membership of Glasgow’s weavers’ associations were born in Ireland. If weavers born in Scotland of Irish parents are taken into account, it is probable that the majority of the membership were Irish.²⁷

The majority of cotton spinners in Glasgow and Paisley during the first four decades of the nineteenth century were Irish or of Irish descent. These workers were the driving-force behind the Glasgow Cotton Spinners Association, which in the 1820s and 1830s was the most powerful and active workers’ organisation in Scotland.²⁸ Indeed, in the aftermath of the disastrous spinners’ general strike of 1837 a member of the association informed the authorities that ‘… almost all the jobs done in the union … were done or originated by Catholics and Irishmen’.²⁹ Two Irish Catholics, Patrick McGowan and Peter Hacket, were particularly active in the affairs of the union at this time. The association, which throughout its existence had a large Irish membership – Catholic and Protestant – was also an integral part of the labour movement in the west of Scotland in these years. It was represented on Glasgow’s Trades’ Committees during the 1820s and 1830s and was prominent in the various working-class agitations of those decades. The association was the driving force behind the campaign in the west of Scotland for a reform of working conditions for all workers in all factories, and appears to have been the principal backer of the Liberator, the newspaper for the Glasgow working class.³⁰

There is not much evidence, apart from that which relates to the Lanarkshire coalfields, of significant Irish involvement in trade unions and strike action in the west of Scotland from the mid-1840s to the late 1880s. As most of the successful unions in non-mining areas in this period were organisations of skilled workers, and most Irish men and women in these localities were unskilled or semi-skilled, this is not surprising. However, in Glasgow in the 1850s Irish labourers managed to form their own association, which was affiliated to the city’s Trades Council...