Irish immigration to North America

The story of the massive Irish immigration to North America between 1820 and 1924 has its roots in the nature of the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain after 1800, when the Act of Union, creating the United Kingdom, was instituted by the English Parliament and ratified by an almost entirely bought-off Irish Parliament ("Act"). The Union, as far as Ireland was concerned, was rescinded in 1922, by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State and which reserved Ulster Province, or Northern Ireland, for the UK (Boland and Ranelagh). The years between the two treaties were marked by almost unrelieved contentiousness over the status of the Irish. The Act of Union, designed to assert the legality of British supremacy forever, had the effect of causing Catholics to agitate for "Irish civic and religious freedom and for separation from Great Britain" ("Ireland" 414). For some 30 years, a series of armed revolts occurred, but by 1829, Irish Catholics were allowed religious freedom and ultimately to sit in Parliament. By 1886, a bill calling for Irish home rule had been introduced, but it was defeated by British and Irish Protestant opposition.

Irish people had migrated from Ireland to America before the Revolutionary war, often as indentured servants (Lennon). Crevecoeur's 1770 description of Americans as a "promiscuous new breed" comprising "English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes" positions the Irish as an integral part of the growing pop

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ding to Quinn and MacManus, was to prevent farmers farming more than a quarter acre from benefiting from famine relief, which "left many tenants with the choice of abandoning their holdings or condemning their families to starvation," and which had the effect of clearing or "tumbling" the land and consolidating control of it with the capital-rich Anglo-Irish landlords (Quinn 42). Meanwhile, a "Coercion Bill" provision put strict limits on the movement of indigenous Irish, whether tenant or freehold farmers, such as a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Violation was punished by 14 years of transportation. MacManus quotes from the Cork Examiner the effect of this provision in the law: Our town presents nothing but a moving mass of military and police, conveying to and from the court-house crowds of famine culprits. I attended the court for a few hours this day. The dock was crowded with the prisoners, not one of whom, when called up for trial, was able to support himself in front of the dock. The sentence of the court was received by each prisoner with apparent satisfaction. Even transportation appeared to many to be a relaxation from their sufferings (MacManus 604). One important feature of transportation of the famine-plagued Irish is that

Category: History - I