Our collective memory has blanked out slavery

CultureShock:We have forgotten that St Patrick was a slave, that slavery was practised here until recently and that the sex industry is its modern incarnation

A few years ago, when I was researching my book White Savage, I received a shocking reminder of something I had barely considered.

The book is about the 18th-century Irishman, William Johnson, who interested me because his extraordinary career on the American frontier seemed to say something useful about the flexibility and openness of Irish culture. He was inducted into the Mohawk nation, had a Mohawk wife and children and became, over time, the acknowledged master of Iroquois ceremonials. He was deeply influential among the Indians, in part because he had the capacity to sympathise with them as people, in a way that was largely free of the standard racial assumptions of his era.

But, going through a dry legal document in which Johnson was itemising a legal claim on his uncle's estate, I came across a chilling entry: "Negroes Handcuffs charg'd Boston Money 18/-". The tools of enslavement were listed casually, as just another expense of the business. Just as routine was an account of his activities from one of Johnson's stewards that mentioned, as a matter of course, "flogging slaves". The extreme violence of slavery was a mundane aspect of life in the New World and it should not have been surprising that the Irish were as much a part of it as everyone else. Yet we have so successfully suppressed all knowledge of these crimes within our own culture that it has no place in our collective memory.

Consider, for example, this year's St Patrick's Day celebrations. There is an obvious connection between St Patrick and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, of which we were then a part. Patrick came here first as a slave, reminding us that the institution was an Irish one as well. And he wrote the oldest extant protest against enslavement, the Letter to Corocticus. Dublin, which hosts the main parade, was at one time the major centre of the Viking slave trade. It would seem obvious that slavery should have been the theme of this year's parade. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.

One reason slavery wouldn't have been on the horizon is that it has such a light presence in our culture. We remember it, perhaps, as something that happened to us, as when Cromwell sent hundreds of Irish prisoners as slaves to Barbados. But Irish involvement on the other side of the slave trade seldom breaks through the surface.

One startling exception is the stunning 19th-century broadside ballad, The Flying Cloud. It is very specifically Irish, narrated by Edward Holohan "from County Waterford in Erin's lovely land". He signs up with a Waterford slaver called Arthur Moore: "We sailed away one summer's day, and to Africa we came, 'Twas there we stole 500 blacks, it was there I learned that game, We marched them all along the deck, and stowed them down below, Scarce eighteen inches to a man was all they had to go. We sailed away the very next day, our hold was full of slaves, And better far that they were dead and buried in their graves, For death and sickness came on board, and stole them half away, We dragged the dead upon the deck and threw them in the sea."

What is striking about the song, apart from its vivid honesty, is that it was collected in the US and was part of the repertoire of the Gateshead singer Louis Killen, but not, so far as I know, of Irish ballad-singers. Such tales, perhaps, don't suit the Irish voice.

Irishness, in fact, has tended to soften or obscure the memory of slavery. We think it very jolly that most of the population of the Caribbean island of Montserrat have Irish names and celebrate St Patrick's Day and imagine that the slaves on the island were peculiarly fortunate in having mostly Irish masters. Yet, as Donald Akenson showed in his brilliant book, If The Irish Ruled the World, Irish plantation owners were no better than any others, and St Patrick's Day was significant for the black population in part because it was the day when, since the masters were drunk, the slaves tended to stage their sporadic revolts. Nevertheless, in the great mythologising of American slave-holding, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, the Irish origins of the planters - they are O'Haras and the plantation is called Tara - is used to give slavery a romantic tinge.

This cultural amnesia matters for two reasons. We find it very hard to accept that institutionalised, officially sanctioned, slavery was practised until very recently in Ireland. The Magdalen women were imprisoned without any judicial process and forced to work in laundries for no pay. Children were thrown into industrial schools and forced to work on farms or make rosary beads. What else can we call this unfree labour if not the one thing we don't call it: slavery?

And there are new slaves in Ireland now: trafficked women forced to work in the sex industry. By ignoring the past, we obscure the present.