Concentration and Dispersal: Irish Labour Migration to Britain

Abstract

Irish emigration might have been, as Foster claimed, ‘the great fact of Irish social history from the early nineteenth century’, but it also had an enormous influence upon receiver nations.1 Ireland’s close proximity to Britain meant that the two had always been linked by interactions such as migration. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, what had previously been a noticeably two-way flow of people developed into a much more one-sided affair. Ireland’s relative economic prosperity during the French Wars slowed, but did not stem, the flow altogether. By the 1820s there were noticeable Irish settlements in many towns outside the major ports of entry and the capital. These communities grew considerably in the 1830s and early 1840s and were swollen greatly by the emigration of the Great Famine period (1845–50) (see Table 2.1). What is more, they continued to be augmented for a long time after this mass exodus had subsided. Distinct Irish communities were still visible in the inter-war period in the large cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and more recently in Luton and Coventry.