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From: "Charles.Clark" <>
Subject: Ireland Abroad:Foster's Modern Ireland, part 3
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 19:54:12 -0400
References: <200010090809.AA591462486@mail.fea.net>


wrote:

>
> This appears to answer once and for all our perennial question: Did
> people go back and forth between Scotland and IReland?!!!

Part 3 of Foster's chapter 15: the most important part of this is
probably the
bit about "the need to preserve the family farm." and the bit about "the
`stem
family' method of descent, where one inheritor took over, often late in
life."

Throughout the nineteenth century the mechanisms of emigration became
more
efficient: brokers, entrepreneurs and subagents entered the traffic,
manipulating increasingly professionalized propaganda. The conditions of
the
actual voyage were thrown into sharp relief by the horrors of `coffin
ships'
during the Famine, when, for instance, 20 per cent of emigrants from
Cork to
Quebec died, either on board or after landing. The testimony of those
who
survived (including investigators who actually took a steerage passage
and then
exposed the nightmare conditions of starving and overcrowding) took
effect;
regulations to mitigate this were in force by the later nineteenth
century.
Some landlords saw the arrangement of a reliable passage, and the
equipment of
their emigrating tenants, as part of their duty; many more (notoriously
Lord
Palmerston) did not. Even those who did could not expect to be thanked
for it.
The horrors of the fever-ridden Atlantic crossing in the 1840s were
inextricably linked with the destitution that had brought so many to
their
deaths in Ireland, on board ship, or at the notorious points of
disembarkation.
The monuments to dead immigrants at Quebec and Montreal tell their own
story,
while one at Grosse Isle gives the version as recorded by the Ancient
Order of
Hibernians in 1909: `Thousands of the children of the Gael were lost on
this
island while fleeing from foreign tyrannical laws and an artificial
famine in
the years 1847-8. (God bless them. God save Ireland!'
As the mechanisms for emigration became smoother, and the practice
established
on a large scale, the idea of forced expulsion became less and less
relevant.
The Catholic Church, for instance, emerged as an important agency of
emigration, especially religious orders in search of new recruits. By
the late
nineteenth century American-based houses of the Sisters of the Holy
Cross, the
Dominicans and the Sisters of Mercy were competitively `gleaning the
country'.
The spread of Catholicism abroad was frequently perceived as one of the
advantages of the emigrant flood. None the less, the Irish `Catholic'
world
view-that philosophical acceptance of stasis noted by so many
nineteenth-century travellers - was not conducive to enterprising
emigration.
Nor was the tendency to defer to established authority and the low
tolerance
for individual deviation that were part of the same syndrome. Even when
emigration had become established as an almost automatic part of rural
life, it
conflicted sharply with the high value that Irish country people put
upon
communalism, kinship and a sense of place. To leave home meant a psychic
disruption. `The depressing and harassing nature of the frightful,
restless
life I have here has made a mush of my mind,' complained one
Irish-speaking
emigrant of the 1820s (who had nevertheless made enough money to buy his
own
farm at Utica, New York).3
What created the powerful pressure to emigrate, especially after the
Famine,
was an equally intrinsic part of the Irish rural mentality: the need to
preserve the family farm. Emigration after the Famine did not release
land for
consolidation into larger units, as the theoreticians had hoped; farm
owners
were not emigrating. Their `assisting relatives' were, and those who
were
encouraged by the family, at home and abroad, to clear the way for an
undivided
inheritance by leaving. Subdivision and partible inheritance had long
given way
to the `stem family' method of descent, where one inheritor took over,
often
late in life. This is closely connected with the type of person who
emigrated
from Ireland. In contrast to other migrant nationalities, women made up
as
large a proportion as men, at some points even outnumbering them. Irish
emigrants were also likely to be unattached, rather than family groups
(except
at the height of the Famine). Young adults, especially in their early
twenties,
preponderated. Emigration was often seen as a stage in life, en route to
marriage or full employment. The finances of emigration were important
here:
the cost of a single ticket could be more easily raised, and the
earnings of
one representative emigrant could be channelled back to bring out other
members
of the family later on. (Though the formal cost of a passage varied
little,
prices were affected by discounts and fluctuations in demand, as well as
trading patterns that created empty ships needing to be filled.) Before
and
during the Famine, the landless rural poor often found the cost of an
Atlantic
voyage prohibitive; later on, price reductions and remittances from
relations
altered this. But throughout the nineteenth century, emigration was the
resort
of the young, the single and those who lacked access to a farm or to
textile
skills.

Charlie

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