Story of the Irish

0:00Hey, this is Strawberry, how y'all doing out there today? I hope everybody is doing well, if you're not doing well, let's find a way to get well, look well, and be well. Right now we're gonna sit back and we're gonna listen to the story about the Irish people. See, like I told you, I like everybody because everybody is human. So we all are people. We are somebody that needs our stories told. So instead of hating and judging, let's learn. I must confess, my experience has convinced me that the half has not been told. I see much here to remind me of my former condition. The great famine is a monumental disaster.

1:02And it's the Irish poor who are the victims of this ghastly tragedy. On this very day, a cry of famine, wilder and more fearful than ever is rising from every parish and county in the land. The famine was a huge failure of the British state, and I think there's no way around that, but I think if the exact same thing had been happening in any part of England, Scotland or Wales, the response of the British parliament would have been different. The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and turbulent character of the people. There was a belief effectively that the Irish character and attitude needed to be totally changed. For our part, we regard the potato blight as a blessing.

2:02When the Kells once ceased to be potatoeaters, they must become carnivorous. The cancer of dependency had to be cured. The cure in question proved to be extraordinary cruel. And the result was a horrific calamity which a million people plus died. You essentially had a society which was disappearing, whole, valiant, whole hillside, torn side, massive transition from being essentially a very locatious bilingual culture into one which was increasingly monotonic. I'm the phone who should also torn quiet, the singing, the dancing, the young people, the vibrancy had gone. Now, we go back to being a complete Pueblo, where all the people at the same time had been waiting, day after day, when the people there were no people, inside of the lid, were no policemen as well.

3:05A lot of my friends, but also the Americans, it is almost impossible to believe they are no policemen as they are no policemen. My name is Pueblo, The black potatoes scattered down neighbors sent them to the poor house and across the sea. They are stretched in hundreds and mountain graveyards. May the heavenly host take up their plea. Helen, population of 8.5 million approximately, over 1.1 million died. Over 2 million people left the country. That's a reduction in the population by one third in 10 years. That's an event without parallel in contemporary European history. The Don Brody is a replica of an actual famine ship and it was operated and owned by the Graves family from New Ross.

4:09Between 1848 and 1858, over 20,000 people traveled from the Keysight here in New Ross. There would have been upwards of 300 people on some of those vessels that would have traveled on a six to seven week journey across Atlantic. Many of those who fled Ireland during these famine years made their way first to Liverpool. In 1850 alone, over a quarter of the men arrived in the city. We're here in the Albert Dock. The in front of us is the River Marzi, which is where all of the Irish would have arrived. There are huge pollas graves with thousands of the Irish dead in Liverpool from that period. People may have entered a few vessels that may have entered up in the workhouse or gone on to America, Australia. But certainly, nobody was ever going home again.

5:35The ones who got to North America felt they were lucky, but again, we have to temper that with the fact that we know maybe 10% of them died on board ships. We don't know precisely, emigration is largely unregulated, and then, as we know, from the records in Groceeal and Montreal, people died on arrival. And people's lives span because of what they'd been through with shortens. So even though people fled from famine, they didn't totally escape from its consequences. They are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors. Simply, you could not carry them to the hospitals. The very 28 years to be, 28 today, we know, tomorrow's past midnight, that our 30 dead, we will bury tomorrow.

6:45The idea that the famine was a Catholic thing is proven wrong by many Irish historians now. In Canada, a large number, maybe 20% of the 38,000 migrants who landed in Toronto in 1847, were Protestant, Typhus, New, no religion. There were Protestants on those ships, died here as well as Catholics did. The United States will remain a preferred destination for pejoration. Behind me is the waterfront that supported the second and fourth wards of New York. During the famine years, hundreds of thousands of Irish would have set their first foot in America here on these East River Dogs. In the 1840s, the Irish calendar for 45% of all immigrants in the United States. That means the Irish were very, very visible.

7:48Many Irish made their homes in Lower Manhattan, an area known as Five Points, today's Chinatown. This is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in the 19th century. Outsiders sought as noxious, dangerous, known for drinking, prostitution, gambling. The people who lived here, to them it was home. These were also the days of no Irish need to apply. Native born Americans saw the Irish wherever they looked until they didn't often like what they saw. They objected to how they grasped, how they spoke, how they looked. They were portrayed as having kind of semi-characteristics the way that African Americans were portrayed. Irish and African Americans lived together harmoniously in a number of communities and there was a lot of cultural interconnection.

9:08This is the major Catholic cemetery for the arstices of New York in the second half of the 19th century. It is arguably the largest Irish graveyard on the entire planet. The famine migrants who arrived in New York in these years were not coming into a vacuum. Many Irish had arrived earlier in the century. Many of them made good. When thousands of their repoverished fellow Irish arrived, they did not turn their backs. We have this image of the starving, poverty, stricken Irish, but that's only part of the story. You also had wealthy middle class and upper class Catholics who were ready and able to help. The Irish arrived to a country that would soon be sworn apart by political differences. In 1861, the American Civil War broke out.

10:10Irish led regiments drawn from the East Coast cities with a majority of the Irish had settled. We're prominent on the side of the Union. The Irish fought on both sides. Those who were on the side fought with their stage as was the pattern throughout the Civil War. Gradually in all the major urban areas where the Irish settled in numbers, the next generation began increasingly to move up in society. Their political argument was obvious from the beginning. People moved to the cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and the Irish community organized themselves politically, provided all sorts of support services for one another. I think that helped maintain this community. The real way that that power change came about was through sheer numbers and organization.

11:12And in places like Boston and New York and Chicago, it was actually numbers of Irish immigrants who then registered to vote that really made the change. As well as crossing the Atlantic, some Irish set their sights on an even more distant location, Australia. The first Irish to arrive had been sent to combat. In the decades following the famine, the Irish and others were now coming to Australia as free settlers. Around 1875, you've got thousands of Irish people. They're going to South Australia, to Victoria, to Melbourne, to Sydney. These are desperate people. They're trying their best to help their children and their families survive. A lot of them are tied to assisted migration schemes. One is the Earl Grey orphan scheme. It was a very male society. They needed women, so they came up with an idea that, okay, we've got a whole lot of overcrowded work houses in Ireland.

12:14Let's get some of these surplus women in particular to come to Australia. So they went around deliberately selecting girls from the ages of 14 to 18, and they were to be servants and wives. Because they were Irish, terrible things were said about them. These were the lowest of the low that they wouldn't know how to behave and that they were going to contaminate the breeding stock. By 1900, the Irish made up almost a quarter of the white population of Australia. They were a significant minority, but they remained under suspicion. They came from a majority Catholic country to a vastly majority Protestant country. So you have this sort of in-built situation where the English don't trust these Catholics, and they very much see them as lower than themselves on a racial hierarchy. The relationship between the Irish and the Indigenous people is complex.

13:14Some small numbers were sympathetic and tried to make it better for Indigenous people. And then there were many who were quite active in the decision as police for reminding children or as part of the push to take land of the Indigenous people. As well as their presence in the English-speaking world, the Irish were also found in almost every country in Latin America. Many had risen as prominence, including their born William Brown, founder of the Argentinean Navy. This is the degree of Admiral William Brown. Here he's known as the Almirante Guillermo Brown. He became so important that he was offered a position as governor of the province of Buenos Aires. It was a job of healing. It was a free British man.

14:14The Argentina would see a large and more systematic migration. While some Irish stayed in the city of Buenos Aires, many moved to the Grosslands known as the Pampas. This is the land of the Cachos. The Irish were very successful because they brought all their knowledge from home, how to work in the land, how to breed a sheep, raise cattle, and also they were excellent horsemen. So they became kinds of Irish Argentines or Irish sculptures here in the Pampas. Part of what it means to be Irish in the second half of the 19th century is immigration. The floodgates that are opened by the famine remain open throughout that period and indeed they remain open throughout the 20th century.

15:22I'm Kevin Macquarie. I'm Kevin Macquarie. This is the...