The flight from the land

The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the 19th and 20th Centuries edited by Donald M. MacRaild

The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the 19th and 20th Centuries edited by Donald M. MacRaild. Irish Academic Press, 303pp, £35

Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades by Liam Kennedy, Paul S. Ell, E.M. Crawford and L.A. Clarkson. Four Courts Press, 220pp, £39.50hdb/£19.95pbk

The Waterford Rebels of 1849 by Brendan Kiely. Geography Publications, 151pp, £7.50

The Irish community in Britain is now sufficiently confident to write its own history. As we know, the Irish in Britain did not fare as well as their transatlantic cousins. They tended to be anchored more firmly at the bottom of the social and occupational hierarchy. Psychological and racial issues aside, Britain was not a nation of immigrants like the United States. Rapid strides have been made since the 1980s in a scholarly study of the Irish in Britain. A more varied understanding of migrant experiences has replaced the once dominant perception of "outcastness". The Irish, coming from a variety of backgrounds, met a variety of receptions in British cities.

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The Great Famine and Beyond presents some of the most important findings. Many of the essays in this collection challenge the assumption that the Irish assimilated relatively easily into British society: reports of "ethnic fade" have been exaggerated.

In his essay, Dr MacRaild offers fresh perspectives on the Irish in Britain and America. While noting key differences in the nature of the two migrations - size being the most obvious - he also suggests points of similarity. In both countries, the Irish encountered native hostility and anti-immigrant violence (which, hopefully, we will not revisit on today's asylum-seekers).

As the post-Famine haemorrhage continued, by 1890 some 40 per cent of all Irish-born people were living outside Ireland. The Irish-born population in Britain peaked at 800,000 in 1861, having doubled in 20 years. The number of Irish emigrants in England and Wales also doubled between 1931 and 1951. There are approximately 2 million second-generation Irish people in Britain today.

In his study of the diaspora in north-east England, Frank Neal shows that the Irish settled in regional clusters next to people from their native counties, suggesting the importance of "chain migration". He traces seven serious disturbances to the activities of the Orange Order.

For Irish emigrants in mid-19th century Manchester, the world's leading industrial city was a profound culture shock. Although never reaching the level of bitterness found in Liverpool, some other parts of northern England or central Scotland, a tradition of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice persisted. Victorian attitudes to the Catholic Irish were at best ambiguous and frequently hostile.

Sheridan Gilley affirms the centrality of religion in the world-view of Irish Catholics in Britain; the church sustained their human dignity; distinctive Irish working-class communities survived until the 1960s.

Mapping the Famine illustrates the variegated experience of Irish migration through cartographic representation. This splendid volume is drawn from the Database of Irish Historical Statistics in Queen's University, Belfast. It indicates the kind of world that Famine refugees left. For instance, according to the 1841 census, in Mayo, Galway and Kerry more than four out of every five females were classified as illiterate (in English, of course).

This book surveys the impact of the Famine - encompassing 1841-71 - by means of maps, graphs and text. Secondly, it charts the regional effects of the Famine, focusing on county, barony and poor law union. Mapping the localities before and after the Famine watershed, the authors point out, is a useful way of detecting changes, particularly incipient changes which might be missed in a more aggregated view of Ireland. They conclude that the Great Famine convulsed society at all levels and confounded the optimistic assumptions of modernity.

Tom Keneally's The Great Shame is a hard act to follow. The Waterford Rebels of 1849 attempts to do so on a modest scale. Subtitled "The last Young Irelanders and their lives in America, Bermuda and Van Diemen's Land", it contains new material from Australian archives.

London could have been thrown in, too, as Brendan Kiely has something interesting to say about Chartist links with the Irish struggle. A disjointed plot was hatched to rise in London on August 16th, 1848.

But he exaggerates the significance of the 1849 outbreak in Co Waterford. As Desmond Ryan said, it proved that the embers of revolt still glowed, however faintly. Despite elaborate preparations, the attack on Cappoquin constabulary barracks lasted an hour; the intervention of Sir Richard Keane's mountain ranger "decided the night".

One of its leaders, Joseph Brenan, had the measure of the Young Irelanders who attempted to rise the previous year: they mistook the cheers of Dublin for the applause of Ireland, and were "more a reunion of literati than an assembly of revolutionists". Nonetheless, Smith O'Brien and his friends remained "in the field", however lethargically, for a week.

While Kiely's book is excellent value, he uses the term "Young Irelander" rather loosely. References to an Irish-speaking army are also misleading. More accurately, with his local insight, he describes the 1849 rebels as "lovers of the factions".

Brendan O Cathaoir is a historian and Irish Times journalist