The tradition of exile

In Irish and, especially, Irish-American tradition the famine has come to be seen as the main cause of the mass emigration and depopulation which Ireland experienced in the nineteenth century. But does the famine, traumatic though it was, really deserve this reputation? Certainly, between the censuses of 1841 and 1851 the Irish population dropped by about 20 per cent and in the seven years that the potato blight continued (1845-52) some one and a half million people emigrated from Ireland. There can be no doubt that the immediate impact of the famine was dramatic. Yet mass emigration continued until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, by which time the Irish population was only 4.4 million. Clearly, the famine cannot be the sole, or even the major cause of sustained Irish emigration.

In fact emigration was already increasing in the 1820s and 1830s. This can be linked to the collapse of Irish rural industries (especially woollen textiles) in the face of competition from the fast-growing textile manufacturing centres of northern England and Ulster. It is estimated that, in a third of Irish counties in 1821, more people were engaged in manufacturing, trade and crafts than in farming: the impact of de-industrialisation in terms of lost employment opportunities was therefore enormous. It is also significant that, while Ireland’s population as a whole declined, that of the poorest west coast districts, where smallholders were most dependent on the potato crop, actually increased in the 30 years after the famine. Only in the 1880s, after another succession of bad harvests, did mass emigration from these areas begin. It is therefore apparent that changing patterns of land-holding also influenced emigration. Emigration was higher from the fertile and intensively farmed east because land was scarce. In the west, because of the thousands of evictions of destitute tenants that had happened during the famine, land - poor land - was available in abundance. Once land became more difficult to obtain in the west, emigration increased. It would seem, then, that lack of opportunities in industry and agriculture were the real reasons for sustained emigration in the nineteenth century.

There is also the question why such a high proportion of Irish emigrants went to the USA. At first sight it appears obvious that there was a strong and sustained desire to escape British oppression, a belief which nineteenth-century US government and Irish nationalist propaganda deliberately encouraged. Again things were not so simple. The overriding importance of a desire for liberty seems dubious in view of the fact that both before the famine and throughout the twentieth century Britain was the most popular destination for Irish emigrants, and even in the second half of the nineteenth century it was the second most popular destination after the USA. The fact that the Catholic Irish were not exactly welcomed with open arms in Protestant America also argues against the primacy of this motive. More important than this, 1840s Britain was suffering from a serious industrial recession, encouraging emigrants to take the more expensive option of going to America where employment opportunities were better. Money sent back home by migrants to their relatives subsequently funded a self-sustaining chain of emigration that continued for the rest of the nineteenth century.

A key part of the Irish attitude to the experience of emigration has been to treat it as exile, rather than as a search for better opportunities. This is why the famine is so central to the Irish-American identity. Why is this when it is clear that neither the famine nor British rule was the main cause of Irish emigration? Emigration is for most people a great emotional wrench: it involves severing close relationships, abandoning parents and other elderly relatives, sometimes never to see them again, engendering intense feelings of guilt. By seeing their experience as a continuation of the seventeenth - and eighteenth-century tradition of going into exile for political reasons and blaming the British for forcing their decisions on them, Irish emigrants were more easily able to come to terms with actions that might otherwise have seemed rather selfish.