Scottish-Irish links

Irish immigration

In the second half of the nineteenth century, things began to change. Due to poverty and famine (1845-9), there was a mass exodus from Ireland across the Atlantic, to England and to Scotland.

Tom Devine (1999: 502) states that the Irish Protestant migration to Glasgow was predominantly from the northern counties of Antrim, Down, Londonderry and Armagh, and the Catholic migration was from Donegal and Cavan which are now part of the Republic of Ireland. The majority of the Irish people in the early wave of migration were Catholics from Donegal. Many were poor, ill-educated and lacked industrial skills. Several decades later, a significant number of Protestant Irish came from the Belfast area, specifically to boost the production of shipbuilding in the Clyde.

Most of the Irish that came to Scotland settled in the West though other areas had significant settlements, e.g. Dundee. They provided much needed labour to build road and railways connecting Scottish towns and cities but also connections to the South. The 'Irish navvy' was a valuable, if not always valued, resource.

Irish immigration had changed from a seasonal agricultural trend to growing numbers of labourers who settled into the urban centres where the industrial revolution was gathering pace. 'Concentrated on the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder and huddled into their cramped quarters … the Irish constituted "the most abject part of the population, prepared to tolerate a lower standard of life than all but the very poorest"' (Gallagher 1987: 12). The common practice of word-of-mouth recruiting ensured that jobs were passed within families that were already established and known to each other. Discrimination against the Irish of Catholic affiliation as 'aliens' was practised by employers and by the craft associations that controlled the apprenticeships that led to better paid, skilled work. As a result the Protestant Irish, estimated to have been at least 25% of the immigrants into Scotland, fared better, achieving close social and cultural ties within the majority population.

By 1904, Scotland's mines, furnaces, ironworks, shipyards, docks and mills were expanding at great speed in order to meet the demands of the British Empire and Glasgow was the 'second city of the Empire'. Scotland's cities were a magnet for casual manual and skilled workers as thousands of immigrants from the Highlands, Lowlands and Ireland crowded into any available housing and sought any available form of employment. Fortunes were made by industrialists and merchants, but times were hard and harsh for the majority of the population. Poverty and illness took their toll on men, women and children who worked in dangerous conditions and lived in slums that were unsafe and unsanitary.

Later, more immigrants arrived and found work in the coalmines and they settled where coalmining was the local industry. Alongside coalmines were the ironworks and steelworks. These paid better but were worked by local people who were largely Protestant, a consequence of historical factors such as the Reformation. Two faith traditions now lived alongside each other but as Devine (2000:101) puts it they were 'socially separated as well as religiously divided' not to mention economically disparate.

The immigration of Irish people has to be understood within its historical context. Centuries of religious rivalry and warfare were, in the 19th century, compounded by economic turmoil and social unrest; religion, class, ethnicity and race were becoming intermingled.

Scots have long been involved in action to eliminate Catholicism. So much so that in the 17th century, James VI and I authorised Scottish Presbyterian emigration to the Ulster Plantation in order to complete the subjugation of the last of the Gaelic Catholic clans. In 1641 many of the Ulster Scots settlers were killed in a revolt by the Irish. The ties between embattled Presbyterians in Ulster and Scotland were to remain close, especially after the victories of the Apprentice Boys in Derry (1689) and of the army led by William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne (1690). In 1795, the Orange Order was founded in Armagh to defend Protestants against the Catholic movement that was rising again in the region. The Orange Order spread quickly and Orangemen helped to crush the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion, paving the way for the Established (Episcopalian) Church of Ireland to strengthen its hold. However, it would also be important to note that many radical Protestants took part in the United Irishmen and the rebellion. More generally, that strand of Protestantism that came to be associated with radical Liberalism and then socialism remained strong in Scotland. Ulster Presbyterians who were strongly opposed to this new regime fled back to Scotland.

United in the face of adversity

With the onset of World War I in 1914, there was a major disruption in  the lives of thousands of Scots as men were mobilised into the armed forces. The grandsons of the Catholic Irish immigrants joined the Scottish regiments and fought alongside their Protestant neighbours

'Your country needs you'; with these words General Kitchener summoned a generation of young Glaswegians to offer themselves for military service against the might of the Kaiser's armies. In common with their colleagues from all over the country, Glasgow's youth were caught up in a wave of patriotic fervour and rallied to the flag. The Highland Light infantry, or HLI, was Glasgow's regiment. Young men from very different backgrounds suddenly found themselves forced together to face a common enemy. The sectarian tensions which had already begun to cool before the war seemed unimportant as solidarity replaced bigotry on the front line (Conti, www.theglasgowstory.com)

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