Background
All Higher Still History courses require pupils both to develop knowledge and understanding so that they can describe and explain the events and circumstances of the past, and study a variety of sources so that they can gather data from them and appreciate their particular strengths and weaknesses. The topic of Irish migration is important but is just one strand of the Intermediate topic 'Immigrants and Exiles'.
Irish people left Ireland for North America, and England, as well as coming to Scotland. There were factors that attracted them to want to get out of their own country. By the 1830s Scotland offered attractive employment to Irish people struggling to survive. Scottish farming was becoming increasingly productive and there was plenty of work in digging drains and building walls and buildings, as well as helping with the harvesting of various crops. Improved roads and the construction of new canals (soon to be followed by railways) required further workers. The coal industry sought to increase its output, the textile industry was expanding, iron and steel making offered further opportunities. About thirty per cent of the people in Scotland lived in towns in the 1830s and here there was work to be found in shops, markets and street trading and as servants. By 1841, before the potato famine, there were already 125,000 Irish-born people amid the 2.6 million total population of Scotland.
Irish problems preceded the potato famine, not least because of the rapid rise in the population of Ireland. In 1841 over eight million people lived in Ireland, a fifty five per cent increase from the population of 1801.
Yet Ireland lacked sufficient employment for its people. Some factories developed in Belfast but on the whole Ireland lacked the rapid growth of industry that was evident in England and Scotland. The important Irish linen industry found it increasingly difficult to face the competition of cheap textiles from England and Scotland.
The overwhelming majority of Irish people lived in the countryside, working on land that they rarely owned. A number of the owners of lands in Ireland did not even live there but saw their Irish estates as sources of income to sustain their comfortable lives in mainland Britain. Peasant families, therefore, increasingly divided up their land to try to sustain family members. Potatoes were the crop best suited to generating a large nutritious food crop from a small piece of land. Nor did peasants have spare income for purchasing the grain, meat and dairy products produced by those Irish farmers who were prosperous. These goods were mainly exported to Britain.
This dependence on potatoes created the tragedy of 1845-1846 when the crop was destroyed by blight. Blight was caused by a fungus that spread rapidly, especially in moist conditions and which persisted in the soil affecting crops for several following years. The disease was not properly understood till the 1860s and not effectively treated till 1885.
Ireland was ruled from Westminster where Sir Robert Peel's government was slow to respond. It is estimated that the famine killed well over a million Irish people, whilst those who could scrambled to leave the country. The nearest place to which those in the north could escape was Scotland. The potato famine hit the Highlands of Scotland too, but here help from the Government and from the better off was prompt and effective enough to prevent actual deaths from starvation.
Irish migration to Scotland remained at a high level from the 1840s to the 1920s. In 1851 they amounted to 7.2% of the population but their impact was not evenly distributed. They were to be found, especially, in Glasgow, Dundee, in the mining communities of the Lothians and in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Motherwell.
The majority of these migrants were Catholics. The significant minority of Protestants (around a quarter of the total) found it relatively easy to become assimilated to the Protestant people of Scotland.
These migrants came at a time when many Scots were emigrating to England or various parts of the Empire, in search of greater prosperity. Irish workers therefore played an important part in sustaining the growth of the nineteenth century Scottish economy and were especially famed as navvies building canals, railways, harbours and bridges. They rose to key positions in several workers' organisations such as the Glasgow Cotton Spinners Association.
Hostility towards Irish immigrants built up in the nineteenth century, pushed forward by their large rise in numbers after the potato famine and by the increasingly organised Catholic church hierarchy that was encouraged by the papacy. Even in the mid nineteenth century anti-Catholic Scots were active in the Scottish Reformation Society and sometimes caused riots (as in Greenock in 1851).
This mid-century trouble may have encouraged the setting up of distinct Irish Catholic communities, often based around the growing number of Catholic churches. There were Catholic organisations to help the poor, such as the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Catholic schools, mainly paid for by fund raising, following the 1872 Education Act. It may be, too, that the late nineteenth century emergence of a powerful movement for Home Rule for Ireland further stimulated Irish migrants and their descendants in Scotland to continue to think of themselves as distinct from native Scots.
The Education Act of 1918 at last provided Catholic Schools with state funding to cover running costs. They kept their distinct religious education, the access to schools by priests; school staff had to be acceptable to the Church. It was not long before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was expressing its alarm that the Irish Roman Catholics represented an alien group in Scottish society; in fact by the 1920s Irish migration to Scotland was falling to low levels. The Church accepted the Protestant Irish as people who would merge readily into Scottish society.
The Orange Order became especially important in the Clyde ship building area of the late nineteenth century; indeed, by 1914 the Order's three large branches were to be found in Greenock, Partick and Govan. Connected to this there is evidence of discrimination in shipyards, such as John Browns' employment of Protestants rather than Catholics.
Professor T C Smout prefers to round off his discussion of Irish settlement in Scotland in an optimistic fashion, writing that 'in the perspective of one hundred years, the absorption of the Irish into the social fabric of Scottish life must be considered one of the achievements of Scottish history'. (T C Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, London, Collins 1986, p248.)
