Economy, Poverty and Emigration

Abstract

Since the early eighteenth century around eight million people have emigrated from Ireland.1 Of this number, perhaps five million left in the first seven decades of the nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, young Irish men and women had a one in three chance of emigrating. In fact, the scale of departure was so large that by 1890 some 40 per cent of all Irish-born people were living outside their country of birth.2 Hobsbawm’s vivid description of the forces at work in Europe at this time have a particular resonance for Ireland: The nineteenth century was a gigantic machine for uprooting countrymen. Most of them went to cities, or at any rate out of traditional rural pursuits, to find their way as best they could in strange, frightening, but at best boundlessly hopeful new worlds, where city pavements were said to be paved with gold, though immigrants rarely picked up more than some copper.3