Irish diaspora Totally Explained

Everything about The Irish Diaspora totally explained

The Irish diaspora (Irish: Diaspóra na nGael) consists of Irish emigrants and their descendants in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and states of the Caribbean and continental Europe. The diaspora, maximally interpreted, contains over 80 million people, which is over fourteen times the population of the island of Ireland itself (6.11 million in 2007) .
   The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. One, preferred by the government of Ireland, is defined in legal terms: the Irish diaspora are those of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases where they were registered as Irish citizens in the Foreign Births Register held in every Irish diplomatic mission. Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller than popular belief - some 3 million persons, of whom 1.2 million are Irish-born emigrants. This is still an extraordinarily large ratio for any nation.
   However, the Irish diaspora is generally not limited by citizenship status, leading to an estimated (and fluctuating) membership of 80 million persons - the second and more emotive definition. The Irish Government acknowledged this interpretation - although it didn't acknowledge any legal obligations to it - when Article 2 of Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland) was amended in 1998 to read "[f]urthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage." The Irish government recognizes all people with a heritage on the island of Ireland.
   This was demonstrated, in 2002, when a group of Argentineans with Irish great-grandparents attempted to register themselves as Irish citizens. Their applications were rejected because the right to register as an Irish citizen terminates at the third generation. This contrasts with citizenship law in Italy, Israel, Japan and other countries which make no legal reference to cherishing special affinities with their diasporas but which nonetheless permit legal avenues through which members of the diaspora can register as citizens.

Britain

The Irish have traditionally been involved in the building trade and transport particularly as dockers, following an influx of Irish workers, or navvies, who built the canal, road and rail networks in the 19th century. This is largely due to the flow of immigrants from Ireland during The Great Famine of 1845 - 1850. Many Irish servicemen, particularly sailors, would settle in Britain; during the 18th and 19th century a third of the Army and Royal Navy were Irish. Since the 1950s and 1960s in particular, the Irish have become assimilated into the indigenous population. Immigration continued into the next century; over half million Irish came to Britain in World War II to work in industry and serve in the British armed forces. In the post-war reconstruction era, the numbers of immigrants began to increase, many settling in the larger cities and towns of Britain. According to the 2001 census, around 850,000 people in Britain were born in Ireland and much of the working class has some Irish heritage.
London once more holds an official St. Patrick's Day. St Patrick's Day, public celebration of which had been cancelled in the 1970s because of terrorist activity, is now a national celebration, with over 60% of the population regularly celebrating the day regardless of their ethnic origins.
   The largest Irish communities are located predominantly in the cities and towns across Britain, with the largest by far being in London, in particular from Kilburn (which has one of the largest Irish-born communities outside of Ireland) out to the west and north west of the city, closely followed by the large port cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Portsmouth. Coventry and Birmingham also have large diaspora populations due to the strength of the motor industry in the 1960s and 1970s. As with their experience in the U.S, the Irish have maintained a strong political presence in the UK, most especially in local government but also at national level. Prime Ministers Callaghan and Blair have been amongst the many in Britain of part Irish ancestry, with Blair's mother from County Donegal.
   Central to the Irish community in Britain was the community's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, with which it maintained a strong sense of identity. The Church remains a crucial focus of communal life among some of the immigrant population and their descendants. The largest ethnic group among the Catholic priesthood of mainland Britain remains Irish. As with in the United States, the upper ranks of the Church's hierarchy are of predominantly Irish descent. The current head of the Catholic Church in England & Wales is His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. In Scotland it's Cardinal Keith O'Brien.
   Scotland experienced a significant amount of Irish immigration, particularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. This led to the formation of the Celtic Football Club (as today close to 50% of the Glaswegian population has some Irish ancestry ) in 1888 by Marist Brother Walfrid, to raise money to help the community. In Edinburgh Hibernian were founded in 1875 and in 1909 another club with Irish links, Dundee United, was formed. Likewise the Irish community in London formed the London Irish rugby club.
   The 2001 UK Census states 869,093 people born in Ireland as living in the UK, with over 10% of the country population (over 6 million) being of Irish descent.

Elsewhere in Europe

Irish links with the continent go back many centuries. During the early Middle Ages, many Irish religious went abroad to preach and found monasteries. Saint Brieuc founded the city that bears his name in Brittany, Saint Colmán founded the great monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy and one of his monks was Saint Gall for whom the Swiss town of St Gallen and canton of St Gallen.
During the Counter-Reformation, Irish religious and political links with Europe became stronger. Leuven in Belgium grew into an important centre of learning for Irish priests. The Flight of the Earls, in 1607, led much of the Gaelic nobility to flee the country, and after the wars of the 17th century many others fled to Spain, France, Austria, and other Catholic lands. The lords and their retainers and supporters joined the armies of these countries, and were known as the Wild Geese. Some of the lords and their descendants rose to high ranks in their adoptive countries, such as the French royalist Patrice de MacMahon, who became president of France. The French Cognac brandy maker, James Hennessy and Co., is named for an Irishman. In Spain and its territories, many Irish descendants can be found with the name Obregón (O'Brien), including Madrid-born actress Ana Victoria García Obregón.
During the 20th century, certain Irish intellectuals made their homes in continental Europe, particularly James Joyce, and later Samuel Beckett (who became a courier for the French Resistance). Eoin O'Duffy led a brigade of 700 Irish volunteers to fight for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and Frank Ryan led the Connolly column who fought on the opposite side, with the Republican International Brigades. William Joyce became an English-language propagandist for the Third Reich, known colloquially as Lord Haw-Haw.

Bermuda

Bermuda was England's third successful overseas territory to be established (as an extension of the second, Virginia) (External Link

) (External Link

), and is the oldest remaining. Settlement, which began accidentally in 1609, was primarily by English indentured servants, but there were four minority groups by the end of the 17th century. These were Native American slaves, free and enslaved blacks, Irish prisoners-of-war (POW), and ethnically-cleansed civilians, sold into slavery for seven years, and smaller numbers of Scottish POWs. The Irish and Scots slaves were the result of Oliver Cromwell's invasions of their countries in the 1650s, in order to force his protectorship upon them. In Ireland, this had been preceded by a native uprising against the Anglo-Irish settler state, and Cromwell's response was the large-scale ethnic cleansing of parts of Ireland, and the repopulation of those areas with new settlers from England and Scotland. The Irish proved to be troublesome slaves, in Bermuda. Following the uncovering of a plot between Irish and black slaves to overthrow the colony, a ban was placed on the importation of any further Irish. Over the following century, the Irish and Scots, who were ostracised by the white-Anglo majority, combined with Bermuda's blacks and Native Americans (and some part of its white-Anglo majority) to create a single demographic group, which, in the spirit of racial polarisation, is known as black. With the large scale emigration, primarily of white-Anglo Bermudians, during that time, blacks were left with a slight majority. The Irish (and other non-African) roots of Bermuda's black population are rarely mentioned, today. The area with the strongest awareness of both its Irish and Native American origins is Saint David's Island, at the east of the archipelago. The western-most island is Ireland Island. The origin of this name is uncertain. Popular myth in Bermuda attributes it to the large number of Irish convicts who laboured there in the 19th century, during the building of the dockyard (these included the nationalist politician John Mitchel). This explanation is patently false as many records show the island bore that name two centuries before. Although there's little surviving evidence of Irish culture, elderly islanders, who can remember when marine turtles were hunted in Bermuda, described the method of capture as being the laying of a net to one side of the reptile, and the throwing of a cilig (a length of rope with one end knotted round a stone) into the water on the opposite side. Hearing the splash of the cilig, the turtle moves away from it, into the net. The word cilig appears to be meaningless in English, but in some dialects of Gaelic is used as an adjective meaning "easily deceived". Characteristics of older Bermudian accents, such as the pronunciation of the letter 'd' as 'dj', as in Bermudjin (Bermudian), may also indicate an Irish origin. Later Irish immigrants have continued to contribute to Bermuda's makeup, with names like Crockwell (Ó Creachmhaoil), and O'Connor now being thought of, locally, as Bermudian names.
The history of the Irish community of Barbados and other British-settled Caribbean islands is similar in many respects, including the circumstances of its originating from an indentured servant class deported there by Cromwell. Over time, the Irish community there dwindled as they intermarried with the growing black population; the white descendants, known as redlegs, emigrated or died off and now form a tiny percentage of the population.

Montserrat

The tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat was first settled in 1631 when Irish Catholics left St. Kitts and Nevis due to anti- Irish Catholic sentiment and persecution by the English on the islands.
After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (notably at the siege of Drogheda in 1649), Irish political prisoners were transferred to Montserrat. To this day, Montserrat is the only country or territory in the world, apart from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland to observe a public holiday on St Patrick's Day. The population is predominantly of mixed Irish and African descent.

United States

The diaspora to America was immortalized in the words of many songs including the famous Irish ballad, "The Green Fields of America":
� So pack up your sea-stores, consider no longer,

   Ten dollars a week isn't very bad pay, � With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages,

   When you're on the green fields of America.
   The experience of Irish immigrants in America hasn't always been harmonious, however. Irish newcomers were sometimes uneducated and often found themselves fighting Americans for manual labor jobs or, in the 1860s, being recruited off the docks by the U.S. Army to serve in the American Civil War. This view of the Irish-American experience is depicted by another traditional song, "Paddy's Lamentation". � Hear me boys, now take my advice,

   To America I'll have ye's not be going, � There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar,

   And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin.
   The classic image of an Irish immigrant is led occasionally by racist and anti-Catholic stereotypes. In modern times, in the United States, the Irish are largely perceived as hard workers. Most notably they're associated with the positions of police officer, firefighter, Roman Catholic Church leaders and politicians in the larger Eastern-Seaboard metropolitan areas. Irish Americans number over 44 million, making them the second largest ethnic group in the country, after German Americans. The largest Irish American communities are in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Kansas City and Savannah, Georgia. Each city has an annual St Patricks Day parade with Savannah having the largest one. The parade in Boston is closely associated with Evacuation Day, when George Washington and his troops forced the British out of Boston during the Revolutionary War. At state level, Texas has the largest number of Irish Americans. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, Arkansas list 9.5% of the population as Irish descendent, primarily located in the southeast part of the state. In percentage terms, Boston is the most Irish city in the United States, and Massachusetts the most Irish state, in percentage of population terms. Greeley, Nebraska (population 580) has the highest percentage of Irish-American residents (46%) of any town or city with a population of over 500 in the United States. The town was part of the Irish Catholic Colonization effort of Bishop O'Connor of New York in the 1880s.
   Before the Great Hunger ("Irish Potato Famine") and the associated British policies resulted in over a million dead and more emigrated, there had been the Penal Laws which had already resulted in significant emigration from Ireland. Under these laws, "Dissenters" or non-Anglicans had certain civil rights suppressed by the British Crown, encouraging the massive migration of several hundred thousand people from Ireland - particularly from the province of Ulster. Because a majority of these were Presbyterians, and many of those had settled in Ulster from Scotland, they became known as the "Scotch-Irish" in the United States, to which they formed a steady stream of emigration throughout the 18th century. The more widely accepted term abroad is Scots-Irish or Ulster-Scots. Many settled in the mountains of the southeastern states and due to their affiliation with William III of Orange, or "King Billy", they became known as "Billy-Boys of the Hills" - later Hillbillies. Some of them wore red or orange neck-scarves to signify that they were signaturees of Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant and were also known as Rednecks.
   In the United States Census of 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the United States) claimed Scots-Irish ancestry, the author James Webb suggests estimates that the true number of people with some Scotch-Irish heritage in the USA is more in the region of 27 million See also Irish immigration to Puerto Rico.

Canada

See also: Irish Quebecers, Irish Newfoundlanders. The 2006 census by Statcan, Canada's Official Statistical office revealed that the Irish were the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,354,155 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent or 14% of the nation's total population.
Many Newfoundlanders are of Irish descent. It is estimated that about 80% of Newfoundlanders have Irish ancestry on at least one side of their family tree. The family names, the features and colouring, the predominant Catholic religion, the prevalence of Irish music – even the accents of the people – are so reminiscent of rural Ireland that Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as "the most Irish place in the world outside of Ireland". Newfoundland Irish, the dialect of the Irish language specific to the island of Newfoundland was widely spoken until the mid-20th century. It is very similar to the language heard in the southeast of Ireland centuries ago, due to mass immigration from the counties Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Cork. Guysborough County, Nova Scotia has many Irish villages. Erinville, Salmon River, Ogden, among others, where Irish last names are prevalent and the accent is reminiscent of the Irish as well as the music, traditions, religion (Roman Catholic), and the love for the old country of Ireland itself. Some of the Irish counties from which these people arrived were County Kerry (Dingle Peninsula), County Cork, and County Roscommon, along with others.

Argentina

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, over 50,000 Irish emigrated to Argentina. Distinct Irish communities and schools existed until the Perón era in the 1950s. In the 1880s the Argentine government sought to promote immigration from Ireland and sent two agents to Ireland to recruit young and able-bodied migrants. A minor scandal known as the Dresden affair happened when the agents promised more than they could deliver, and when 1,774 Irish arrived aboard the City of Dresden ship they were plunged into destitution. Many children died.
   Today there are an estimated 500,000 people of Irish ancestry in Argentina, approximately 12.5% of the Republic of Ireland's current population; however, these numbers may be far higher, given that many Irish newcomers declared themselves to be British, as Ireland at the time was still part of the United Kingdom and today their descendants integrated into Argentine society with mixed bloodlines. Che Guevara, whose grandmother's surname was Lynch, was another famous member of this diaspora. Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, said of him: "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels". However, Che Guevara considered himself Latin American, Argentine and Cuban, and his connection with Ireland was remote. On March 13 1965, the Irish Times journalist Arthur Quinlan interviewed Che at Shannon Airport during a stopover flight from Prague to Cuba. Guevara talked of his Irish connections through the name Lynch and of his grandmother's Irish roots in Galway. Later, Che, and some of his Cuban comrades, went to Limerick City and adjourned to the Hanratty's Hotel on Glentworth Street. According to Quinlan, they returned that evening all wearing sprigs of shamrock, for Shannon and Limerick were preparing for the St. Patrick's Day celebrations.
   Widely considered a national hero, William Brown is doubtlessly the most famous Irish citizen in Argentina. Creator of the Argentine Navy (Armada de la República Argentina, ARA) and leader of the Argentine Armed Forces in the wars against Brazil and Spain, he was born in Foxford, County Mayo on June 22 1777 and died in Buenos Aires in 1857. The Almirante Brown class destroyer is named after him, as well as the Almirante Brown partido, part of the Gran Buenos Aires urban area, with a population of over 500.000 inhabitants.
   The first entirely Catholic English language publication published in Buenos Aires, The Southern Cross is an Argentine newspaper founded on January 16 1875 by Dean Patricio Dillon, an Irish immigrant, a deputy for Buenos Aires Province and president of the Presidential Affairs Commission amongst other positions. The newspaper continues in print to this day and publishes a beginners guide to the Irish language, helping Irish Argentines keep in touch with their cultural heritage. Previously to The Southern Cross Dublin-born brothers Edward and Michael Mulhall successfully published The Standard, allegedly the first English-language daily paper in South America.
   Between 1943 and 1946, the de facto President of Argentina was Edelmiro Farrell, whose paternal ancestry was Irish.

Mexico

Probably the most famous Irishman ever to reside in Mexico is the Wexfordman William Lamport, better known to most Mexicans as Guillen de Lampart, precursor of the Independence movement and author of the first proclamation of independence in the New World. His statue stands today in the Crypt of Heroes beneath the Column of Independence in Mexico City. Some authorities claim he was the inspiration for Johnston McCulley's Zorro, though the extent to which this may be true is disputed.
After Lampart, the most famous Irishmen in Mexican history are probably "Los Patricios". Many communities also existed in Mexican Texas until the revolution there, when they sided with Catholic Mexico against Protestant pro-U.S. elements. The Batallón de San Patricio, a battalion of U.S. troops who deserted and fought alongside the Mexican Army against the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, is also famous in Mexican history. Álvaro Obregón (possibly O'Brian, but more likely from the Spanish northern city of Obregón) was president of Mexico during 1920-24 and Obregón city and airport are named in his honour. Mexico also has a large number of people of Irish ancestry, among them the actor Anthony Quinn. There are also monuments in Mexico City paying tribute to those Irish who fought for Mexico in the 1800s. There is a monument to Los Patricios in the fort of Churubusco. During the Potato Famine, thousands of Irish immigrants entered the country, today, over 90,000 Irish descendants live in Mexico. Other Mexicans of Irish descent are: Romulo O'Farril, Juan O'Gorman, Edmundo O'Gorman, Anthony Quinn, Alejo Bay (Governor of the state of Sonora), Guillermo Purcell a businessman, former Miss Mexico Judith Grace Gonzalez, among many others. Today, the Irish community in Mexico is a thriving one and is mainly concentrated in Mexico City and the northern states.

Other American Countries

In the wake of the mid 17th century Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Oliver Cromwell deported many Irish prisoners of war into slavery or indentured labour in Caribbean tobacco plantations. Most of these forced migrants ended up in Barbados, Monserrat or Jamaica (Tom McDermot was an Irish campaigner there against colonialism and slavery). In addition, many of the Irish Catholic landowning class in this period migrated voluntarily to the West Indies to avail of the business opportunities there occasioned by the trade in sugar, tobacco and cotton. They were followed by landless Irish indentured labourers, who were recruited to serve a landowner for a specified time before receiving freedom and land. The descendants of some Irish immigrants are known today in the West Indies as redlegs. Many of the Wild Geese, expatriate Irish soldiers who had gone to Spain, or their descendants, continued on to its colonies in South America. Many of them rose to prominent positions in the Spanish governments there. In the 1820s, some of them helped liberate the continent. Bernardo O'Higgins was the first president of Chile. When Chilean troops occupied Lima during the War of the Pacific in 1881, they put in charge certain Patricio Lynch, whose grandfather came from Ireland to Argentina and then moved to Chile. Other Latin American countries that have Irish settlement include Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Brazil.

South Africa

Nineteenth-century South Africa didn't attract mass Irish migration, but Irish communities are to be found in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the Colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington, "The Afrikaner from Cork"; and Sir Albert Hime, from Kilcoole in County Wicklow. Irish Cape Governors included Lord Macartney, Lord Caledon and Sir John Francis Cradock. Irish settlers were brought in small numbers over the years, as from other parts of the United Kingdom. Henry Nourse, a shipowner at the Cape, brought out a small party of Irish settlers in 1818. In 1823, John Ingram brought out 146 Irish from Cork. Single Irish women were sent to the Cape on a few occasions. Twenty arrived in November 1849 and 46 arrived in March 1851. The majority arrived in November 1857 aboard the Lady Kennaway. A large contingent of Irish troops fought in the Anglo-Boer War on both sides and a few of them stayed in South Africa after the war. Others returned home but later came out to settle in South Africa with their families. Between 1902 and 1905, there were about 5,000 Irish immigrants. Place names in South Africa include Upington, Porteville, Caledon, Cradock, Sir Henry Lowry's Pass, the Biggarsberg Mountains, Donnybrook and Belfast. External links: Irish Police in SA

& Research in SA

Australia

Irish Australians form the second largest ancestry group in Australia, numbering 1,919,727 or 9.0 per cent of respondents in the 2001 Census.
   It isn't clear whether the Irish-born are considered "Irish Australians" or if the term only refers to their Australian-born descendants. The 2001 Census recorded 50,320 Irish-born in Australia, although this is a minimal figure as it only includes those who wrote in "Ireland" or "Republic of Ireland" as their country of birth. Responses which mentioned "Northern Ireland" as birthplace were coded as "United Kingdom". This interpretation may omit as few as 21,500 Irish-born present in the country, as many as 29,500, or possibly even more. Nevertheless the number of persons born in Ireland, north and south, resident in Australia in 2001 may be confidently extrapolated at around 75,000.
   According to the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs White Paper on Foreign Policy, there were 213,000 Irish citizens living in Australia in 1997; nearly three times the number of Irish-born immigrants to the country. Most Irish Australians, however, don't have Irish citizenship and define their status in terms of self-perception, affection for Ireland and an attachment to Irish culture.
   Irish settlers - both voluntary and forced - were crucial to the Australian colonies from the earliest days of settlement. The Irish first came over in large numbers as convicts (50,000 were transported between 1791 and 1867), to be used as free labour; even larger numbers of free settlers came during the nineteenth century, partly due to the Donegal Relief Fund. Irish immigrants accounted for one-quarter of Australia's overseas-born population in 1871. Their children, the first Irish Australians in the sense we understand the term, played a definitive role in shaping Australian history, society and culture. Historian Patrick O'Farrell noted in The Irish in Australia (1987) that the term "Australia first" became "what amounted to the Australian Irish Catholic slogan". These Australians of Irish background didn't tend to regard Ireland as their "mother country" - primarily because few had a wish to return to a home they'd left in search of a better life. Rather, they tended to identify themselves as Australians.
   According to census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004, Irish Australians are, by religion, 46.2% Roman Catholic, 15.3% Anglican, 13.5% other Christian denomination, 3.6% other religions, and 21.5% as "No Religion".
   The high percentage of Catholics is largely the result of descendants of Irish immigrants. Today, those people include Nicole Kidman and Paul Hogan.