According to the most recent census the population of the 26 county state in April 1986 was 3,537,200. Add to this the figure for the six counties and the total is approximately five million. The first census in 1821 gave a figure of 6,803,000 and by 1840 this had risen to just over eight million. In 1986 there was a surplus of live births over deaths of 27,798.
No precise figures are available on the numbers who emigrate. People moving from the six counties to Britain are only moving between one DSS office and another as far as the British State is concerned, nor does it monitor the numbers of people immigrating from the south. The Dublin government could not dare to keep accurate data on the number of its citizens forced to leave the country. Every plane and boat leaving Ireland is carrying witnesses to the disastrous condition of the country's neo-colonial economy.
According to Irish government statistics, which do not include people on , even more exploitative than their British equivalents, "training schemes"
250,000 people are unemployed. Another 125,000 are unemployed in the north. It is estimated that 250,000 have left the 26 counties since the start of the decade (Irish Post 12/12/87) and, in the opinion of Anastasia Crickley, an Irish sociologist, more than another 50,000 will have left the country by the end of 1988.
It is necessary to begin a survey of the Irish in Britain with this plethora of numbers to show that they have come from a bankrupt country with a declining poplulation. It is also necessary to point out the boundless gratitude of the Irish ruling class for the existence, so close to home, of a stronger economy to which they can ship vast numbers of discontented young people. Speaking in London, a Fine Gael TD, Professor John Kelly said: "emigration is a solution the Irish people have wished upon themselves by their deliberate indifference to the implications of the birth rate." He went on to call for more teaching of foreign languages in Irish schools to allow Irish youth the opportunity to take advantage of an impending labour shortage in Europe. And these are not the views of an isolated right-wing crank. On recent visits to the United States and Australia, Charles Haughey tried to persuade both governments to increase the quota of visas allocated to Irish immigrants. It is estimated that 125,000 Irish people are living and working in the United States. The visa quota for 1987 was 3100.
In Kerry and Sligo young people are offered IRf29.50 towards their one way fare to London. Archbishop Dermot Clifford of Cashel and Emly asked the government to provide emigrants with four weeks' unemployment assistance before their departure because so many young people were arriving in London without enough money to survive. Bertle Aber, the Minister for Labour, accepted the suggestion and expressed the hope that the government would be able to reclaim the money from the EEC (Irish Post-5/3/88).
The unthinking crudity of these examples is evidence that emigration is accepted as part of the Irish bourgeoisie's mechanism for social control. If a
quarter of a million people had not left, the total number of unemployed would be approaching half a million. This, coupled with the possibilities latent in the continuing national struggle, is a nightmare for the Irish ruling class. Emigration on a huge scale in times of recession is absolutely indispensable for the continued survival of the neo-colonial 26 county state. Catholic school children are frequently reminded of Ireland's special mission to bring the word of Christ to the heathen through its priests and nuns abroad — a grotesque hybrid of the "white man's burden" and the need to export people. Politicians talk of leaming skills and developing the personality abroad. Two different aspects of an unending ideological preparation for emigration.
Given the physical closeness of the two islands there has always been a traffic in people between them. Already in 13th century Bristol there was a colony of Irish traders and by the 16th century there were sizeable Irish communities in York, Canterbury and Norwich. The Irish community in Bristol rioted in protest at Cromwell's deportation to the West Indies of prisoners taken in his bloody Irish campaigns.
By 1413 the problem of impecunious Irish immigrants was considered serious enough to warrant the passing of laws to rid England of Irish beggars and vagabonds. In the 19th century there existed what was the "Passing On" laws which moved the destitute from town to town, at the expense of the local boroughs until they reached the point of departure for the boat to Ireland. Camden council did not come up with an original idea in 1988 when it provided homeless Irish people with travel warrants.
Although there has always been a flow of Irish people to Britain there have been peaks and troughs. The first big peak was the mid 19th century because of the famine. Between 1849 and 1852, 100 000 immigrants arrived annually. However, at that time the preferred destinations were Canada and the United States and generally it was only the most impoverished who moved to England, many seeing it as only a staging post until they could save the fare to North America. It should also be borne in mind that for 75% of these people Irish was their first language and many of them would have little or no knowledge of English.
Here is an empirically accurate contemporary account from a not unsympathetic observer: "These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it is held together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend on drink. What does such a race want with high wages?
'The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen." (Engels: The Condition Of The Working Class In England). Irish immigrants were prepared to work harder for less money than English workers and were often used as strike-breakers. In the 1730s this caused riots in Wapping and a century later clashes between Irish and English railway navvies often resulted in deaths. During the 1860s two-thirds of the British army and navy were Irish.
The unpopularity of the Irish was added to by their practice of drunken brawling on Saturday nights in industrial towns all over England in which, according to accounts of the time, hundreds of men fought out the parochial rivalries they had brought with them. The other side of this picture is that the same community provided some of the most outstanding leaders of the early working class movement in Britain, such as Feargus O' Connor, and as well as breaking some strikes, led and organised others.
This is the typical picture of the 19th century Irish in Britain. Drunken, brawling navvies building the canals, bridges, sewers and railways. But since at least 1861 Irish women in London have outnumbered Irish men in the city. Almost half of them were out of sight as domestic servants, about a fifth of them worked in the sweat shops of the clothing industry while the rest worked in pubs or as street sellers. In 1851 only 0.1% had teaching or white collar work. The post war economic boom in Britain coincided with a slump in the Irish economy and the 1950s saw a decline in the population in Ireland. As in the previous century they were drawn to the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs, particularly in the construction industry.
RACISM AGAINST THE IRISH In the 1970s the unthinkable happened: the Irish economy went through a boom and it is estimated that about 100 000 people returned. It couldn't last, and by 1980 emigration had begun again on a mass scale. We shall retum to these two waves shortly but, before we do we must briefly discuss the racism which has made the lives of so many Irish people in Britain so unpleasant, forcing them to choose the conflict caused by dignified resistance or the humiliation of acquiescence, and which has embittered the relations between Irish and English workers for every generation of immigrants.
The first ideologue of the racism of an expansionist English ruling class was Gerald Cambrensis, a monk from a Welsh Norman family who wrote "The History and Topography of Ireland" in which the motif which was to run through imperialist self-justification up to the present day was elaborated. He argued that the "Irish live like beasts" and that the invaders were a civilizing force. They had the welcome support of Pope Alexander Ill who beseeched them to "recall the Irish... to the observance of the Christian faith." Cambrensis' book was translated and re-published in 1577 when the Elizabethans were trying to subdue the rest of the island.
Cromwell's account of his massacre at Drogheda where he admitted to killing 3000 people is remarkably similar to Thatcher's opinions on the deaths of later generations of the Irish resistance: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.
And if Thatcher is the bearer of an ideological continuity so too are the publishers Futura, who between 1977 and 1979 sold 485 000 copies of three
Official Irish Joke Books. Books of this type were already appearing in the early 18th century with titles like Teagueland Jests and Bog Witticisms ("Teague" is a corruption of the Irish name "Tadgh"). One had as an introduction: "The bulls (stupid expressions) and witticisms that too frequently drop from Irish mouths have made them the discourse and entertainment of all sorts of companies. Nothing more recommends Teague and his countrymen than their natural stupidity." Would Bernard Manning disagree with that?
Racism against Irish people has seeped into every pore of British society and can be broadly divided into three categories. The first, and probably the rarest, is the deliberately offensive comment made within earshot of an Irish person, usually following an argument or discussion on Irish politics. The second is the unthinking racism which seeks approval for imitating a "comedian" like Jimmy Cricket (the most recent in a long string of professional self abusers). This latter exemplifies how thorough the uncritical absorption of racism has been in large swathes of British society, with the working class being its worst victims.
The third is what can be called official racism. This ranges from the hideous cartoons in Punch in the 19th century, to the author Charles Kingsley's description of "human chimpanzees" and John Junor and The Sun in the 1980's. It is from the third that the other two feed and it is the most political. It pours out of the sewers of British intellectual life almost in unison with the upsurges of the struggles in Ireland, when Ireland becomes an issue that cannot be ignored.
Thus the Victorians, having ill-digested Darwin, wrote at length on the Irish as a less evolved race and their cartoonists depicted Fenians as apes. The thrust of most political commentary on Ireland in the bourgeois press is still on the civilizing, peace-keeping role of the British presence and in 1988 Neil Kinnock could still refer to a policy for withdrawl as the "politics of Pontius Pilate". He has studied his Cambrensis and Kipling.
IRISH POLITICAL ACTIVITY However the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which is used almost exclusively against Irish people, is the most oppressive manifestation of this official racism. It was passed eight days after the Birmingham pub bombings in which 21 people were killed in 1974. It is one of those pieces of legislation which give the lie to those who are convinced of the stupidity of the British ruling class. The Act was considered draconian enough to take a lot of steam out of the demands for the restoration of the death penalty, the return of which would almost certainly have created a mass movement in defence of condemned prisoners.
Also, in the words of the National Council for Civil Liberties "by giving the Home Secretary and police powers that cannot be challenged in court the Prevention of Terrorism Acts have destroyed at a stroke the edifice of safeguards built up in this country's legal system to protect the citizen against wrongful arrest, detention or conviction."
Under the PTA the police can detain for forty eight hours people suspected of "involvement in terrorism"
", a phrase defined generously enough in practice to allow anyone whose opinions do not coincide with the prejudices of the average Special Branch officer to be held. With the Home Secretary's seldom, if ever, witheld permission, suspects can be held for an additional five days. The Act also permits the authorities to ban people from both the north and south of Ireland from entering Britain and more than 300 such exclusion orders have been made.
Those banned are not informed of the evidence against them and since the British Government maintains that the Six Counties are as British as Leeds, it is practising a form of internal exile similar to that used by the Tsars and Mussolini. Since there already exists an extensive literature on the nuts, bolts and statistics of the PTA (recommended are NCCL-PTA The Case for Repeal and the Irish Post) we will not linger on the figures. However some political points must be made.
By removing virtually all constraints on the police, this Act almost completely disrupted political activity, on Irish matters, among the Irish in Britain from the time of the Birmingham pub bombings until the 1981 Hunger Strike. Combined with the show trials of the Birmingnam Six and the Guildford Four and the meticulous brutality of those police investigating Irish related incidents, this Act terrified numerous political activists into inaction or safer areas of work. It was very successful at intimidating large numbers of people from participating in politics. That Irish people were prepared to, was demonstrated by the success of the Anti-Internment League in organising protests a couple of years previously.
THE REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT AND BRITAIN But if the PTA contributed to the absence of a mass solidarity movement involving tens of thousands of Irish people, the Republican Movement itself must bear part of the responsibility for the vacuum.
Its contentions that a bomb in England generates a hundred times more publicity than a bomb in Ireland and that the morale of Republicans in Ireland is uplifted by such bombs is true. It is also true that the Fenians planted bombs in England, that there were a couple of disastrous campaigns in England in the 1930s and 1940s and that Sean Mac Stiofain, who eventually become the IRA'S Chief of Staff, was convicted for an arms raid in 1951. But, with the exception of the Fenians' bombs, the aftermath of which is described below, every bombing campaign, but most especially those in the 1970s, has been a political kamikaze mission.
Without, for one moment transferring the guilt for every drop of blood spilt in Ireland, England and Europe as a result of the occupation of Ireland, from the hands of British imperialism, it is necessary to point out lessons that must be learned from the mistakes of those prepared to die in the struggle. The first is that bombs in Britain make it infinitely easier for the British Government to rush through pre-planned legislation like the PTA. Brief jubilation in Derry at a bomb in London is more than outweighed by the fear generated among irish people in Britain at the prospect of unwarranted attention from the police or the
reactions of neighbours and work-mates. There were spontaneous factory walkouts and anti-Irish demonstrations in Birmingham after the bombs and many people who lived through that period have anecdotes about being refused service in cafes and shops.
Bombs in Britain contribute absolutely nothing to the struggle to break British workers from generations of racist indoctrination and social-imperialist leadership. They only make them more vulnerable to the propaganda in The Sun and Daily Express. Certainly they do not make it easier for socialists in Britain to argue a principled case for the right of nations to self-determination outside comparatively small groups of workers. And, if the two most vital components of a mass withdrawal movement do not participate in political activity around the question, the campaign which prevents them from doing so is an obstacle. Fortunately the Republican Movement has moved far beyond the positions many in its leadership held in the 1970s and its analysis on how it should conduct the struggle in Britain has developed accordingly. This question itself has been critically examined within the Movement: recent history is evidence of the conclusions that have been drawn.
HISTORY OF IRISH POLITICAL ACTIVITY IN BRITAIN Although the principal interventions of Irish revolutionary organisations into Britain have, historically, been less than useful, there is a history of self organisation which merits a more detailed study than it can be afforded here, and we must content ourselves with indicating some of the highest points. In February 1867 the Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known as the Fenians, planned to raid the arsenal at Chester Castle, seize the arms, comandeer trains from the station and make to the port of Holyhead where they would take over all the steamers and sail to Ireland, before news could reach Dublin. The point about this plan is not the breadth of its ambition, but rather that it does seem to have been feasible.
The Times reported that large numbers of men arrived from Liverpool, Preston, Manchester and Halifax and a local JP estimated that 1400 men were involved. The authorities were tipped off by a spy. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a conspiratorial organisation capable of such an achievement must have had enormous and active support among the immigrant population. However, although it had circles in all the large English towns it suffered from both lack of a political perspective and a desire to translate this support into something other than an armed organisation.
But it was to be the execution of Fenians which created, for the first time in Britain, a mass movement in defence of Irish revolutionaries in which the demand for Irish freedom was never far from the fore and which united not only the organisations of the Irish in Britain, but also those of women, the British working class, other immigrant communities and liberal and democratic opinion and got more than 100 000 people onto the streets of London. All this in 1869. The International Working Men's Association (IWMA), the First Interna-
tional of Marx and Engels, participated in the movement to win an amnesty for the prisoners who had been condemned to death. Marx, in a letter to Engels, said of his own contribution at a meeting "I did all I could to provoke this demonstration of English workers for Fenianism," a remark many of those who claim his tradition would be loathe to make of the heirs of the Fenians. Two things motivated the involvement of the IWMA in the Amnesty Movement. The first was the importance of Ireland to a revolution in Britain. In Marx's opinion, "the English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland" because its antagonism to the Irish, particularly the immigrants who were flooding the lower end of the labour market, was the "secret of its impotence."
The other was the involvement of comparatively large numbers of Irish workers in the Association. While it is generally known that in New York there were German and Italian sections it is a more obscure fact that there was an Irish section which drew its membership primarily from exiled Fenians and that another was established in England in 1871 at the instigation of Marx and Engels.
Again its members were mainly associated with the Fenians. Regrettably by the time the Irish section was established in Britain the IWMA had entered a decline and little is known of the work of those involved in the group. Nevertheless its existence was a clear statement of the views of Marx and Engels on the self organisation of oppressed groups and their connection with the organisations of the working class.
The next high point was during the War of Independence of 1919-21 when the Irish Self Determination League, a movement which, by its own rules, limited itself to Irish people living in Britain and yet built up a membership of 100 000 within twelve months. Campaigning for self-determination and British withdrawal its 200 branches could stage simultaneous demonstrations thousands strong in a dozen cities and towns in Wales and England. It did not really operate in Scotland, where proportionally the largest Irish community lived and which provided financial contributions during the War in excess of those collected in Ireland.
One fanciful estimate which still must indicate a considerable degree of politicisation suggests that there were "4000 IRA members" in Glasgow (Donall Mac Amlaigh Irish Emigration) but it is difficult to gauge the level of committment required of the bulk of this membership. Fifty years passed before the next significant involvement of Irish people in agitation on Ireland. This was with the Anti-Internment League, an organisation which built its demonstrations and meetings by leafletting building sites, among other more traditional methods.
Before, during and after these peaks there was and continues to be, a tremendous diversity of groups and associations comprised of Irish people and their daughters and sons. Participating in the Amnesty Association demonstrations were the St. Patrick's Brotherhood, various Irish temperance and friendly societies as well as the IWMA and the Association's own Ladies' National
Committee. During the 19th century there were thirty attempts to set up a specifically Irish paper in Britain and the Irish Post which was the forty seventh attempt now has a circulation of 78 000 with an audience of 5.5 readers per copy.
In London today there are twenty Irish centres or clubs, 32 county associations, 80 district associations, eighteen centres teaching the Irish language as well as bookshops, cultural societies and innumerable pubs and social events. Add to this the nationally organised GAA, sales of Republican News in the region of 5000 each week and a cultural festival organised by the Federation of Irish Societies which draws a mainly working class audience of 100 000 people on a single day and it becomes clear that there exists a community which is very aware of its own culture, origins and history. Moreover the open sale of Republican News to enthusiastic purchasers in a number of pubs in Britain points to a politically conscious minority within that community prepared to publicly identify itself with an incessantly criticised armed struggle for national liberation.
Activities of this sort have existed for as long as the Irish have been in Britain, but for long periods they were not an overt expression of political views. Young women and men have joined teams to play camogie and hurling because they liked the games and because they expressed a national identity. Rarely did this translate into political e livil exe fish in Bryape cific montens politics and only since the Hunger Strike have they started to regain their confidence. But one must be cautious about assuming too much of the homogeneity of this portion of the Irish diaspora. The Campaign for the Birmingham Six was twice prevented from having a stall at the London Irish Festival and the Irish embassy cultivates a close relationship with senior clergy and the leaderships of many of the organisations. And while travellers are the most oppressed group in what we will go on to show is a disadvantaged community, even the sons and daughters of the Irish middle classes are having to emigrate. In 1987 33% of graduate engineers emigrated, similar and higher figures hold true for doctors, accountants and all the other professions.
To make the picture still murkier, many immigrants have been influenced by the collaborationist, anti-Republican culture of the 26 county state. Neither should we forget the Orange Order in Liverpool which split over the matter of displaying UVF banners on its parades and the neanderthal bigots on Scotland's west coast. And although the majority of Irish people continue to vote Labour there is a sprinkling of Conservative and SLD councillors.
Even some of the people who have been most cruelly punished by the British State, like Anne Maguire, who was falsely imprisoned on explosive charges and a self-confessed Tory, could write to the Irish Post criticising Ken Livingstone for his views on the family and morality and his courting of "extreme minorities". She also called on Kinnock to take action against him for his statements on Ireland (Irish Post 19/12/87).
So what we are dealing with when we speak of the "Irish in Britain" is a com-
munity which has a tradition of organisation several centuries oid. A community which is receiving new members every day, with, at one extreme, members who are as hostile to the struggle for national liberation in their homeland as any bourgeois politician, but a community with a coagulating conscious minority at the other.
The most important clot in this process of coagulation is the Irish in Britain Representation Group (IBRG) which was set up at the time of the Hunger Strike. The IBRG has profitted from Sinn Fein's decision to disband its own organisation in Britain, a positive development since it represented the Adams' leadership's attempt to encourage Sinn Fein supporters to enter more mainstream organisations within the Labour Movement.
The IBRG must be given much of the credit for winning the services targetted at Irish people by a handful of local authorities such as Brent's Irish Advisory Service and Haringey's Irish Liaison unit — both of which were hit by cuts. It has also sponsored initiatives in defence of those sentenced for the Broadwater Farm riots and is responsible for breaking down some of the unfortunate antagonism between Irish and black immigrants.
On top of this, it is active on the question of anti-Irish racism, particularly in the media, and has forced the more traditional Federation of Irish Societies to take up the issues of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Being more in tune with the needs of ordinary Irish people than the embassy, which has refused to call for the repeal of the PTA, it agitates vociferously on this issue. As we noted earlier, the Irish are an immigrant population which is increasing every day and that, to some extent explains their particular social problems, the other explanation is a paternalist racism which does not distinguish them from "white British"
Talk to a number of Irish immigrants and you quickly discover that the majority of them did not intend to stay in Britain permanently. They came 10 earn the money for a farm, a tractor or a shop, but they did intend to return, so the acquisition of permanent accomodation was not a priority for them. That partly explains why two out of every seven people who sleep rough in central London are Irish, as are one third of the occupants of hostels for the homeless in inner London. Conway House, a north London hostel for young Irishmen says in its annual report for 1987 that the average age of its residents had fallen from 25 to 19 within a year, a portent that this will remain an unbroken tradition.
Most Irish women lack the same kind of informal network open to men through pubs and casual work and face particular difficulties with accommodation. Not only are they clustered in poorly paid clerical, nursing and catering jobs, but also, on arrival they often do not have the money for the deposit and rent in advance required for private residential accomodation. Proportionately more of them are single parent households than in the white UK populates often this may be the reason they left Ireland, where social services are ÷ * more spartan than those in Britain and contraception can be extremely d5z to obtain (some chemists demand production of a marriage cer: 2:
Bear in mind also that there is a constitutional ban on abortion and you get a sense of the oppressive backwardness of priest-dominated rural Ireland in particular. This is why several thousand Irish women leave the country for abortions each year,never to return and, although they outnumber Irish men, they make much less use of advisory agencies.
As regards owner-occupation of houses, only the Bangladeshi community in London with 32% is worse off than the Irish with 34% and there are more Irish working as unskilled labourers than any other group. For many of these people, who are encouraged to claim social security to depress wages, it is safer to work odd days in a week rather than an entire week because small building contractors, always Irish, are prone to vanish without paying at the end of the week. THE IRISH AND THE BRITISH LABOUR MOVEMENT As if all this were not enough, Irish immigrants are three times more likely to suffer from mental illness than English adults, and are more likely to suller from depression, personality, behavioural and alchohol related disorders than any other major immigrant group. They also have the highest rate of suicides. To conclude this survey we will glance quickly at the relationship between the Irish and the organisations of the British working class.
Honourable mention must be given to the Levellers and the Chartists. One Leveller leaflet addressed to Cromwell's troops asked "Whether the English would not do as the Irish have, if the Irish should dispossess and tyrannise over them?"
E.P.Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class points to contacts between Irish and English revolutionaries from the time of the French Revolution onwards and similarities of method between those involved in agrarian agitation in Ireland and the Luddites in many areas.
However the most singular distinguishing feature of the majority of those who have become involved in the British Labour Movement is their failure, by and large, to seriously challenge the established attitudes on British imperialism and Ireland; and the higher they rise the truer this becomes. A possible exception to this rule is Councillor Sam Campbell, the former convenor of Midiothian District Council who was suspended from the Labour Party for six whole months for describing Catholics as the "enemy" and demanding that their schools be closed.
Obviously the reasons for this failure are that an individual who begins as a good militant trade unionist can gradually become absorbed by the bureaucracy. Also, too often their own politics do not let them see any connection between the class struggle in which they participate every day and the potential role of their organisations and the British working class in substantially impeding British imperialism's freedom of manoeuvre and contributing to its defeat. In any event once recruited to the Labour Party or a union it is easier to accept its traditions and concensus if one sees no alternative; but this concensus has now, hopefully irreparably, broken down. Exeter Council's decision to com-
memorate the landing of William of Orange caused national protests within the Labour Party.
The Labour Committee on Ireland and Labour Women for Ireland have become influential pressure groups and probably the majority of individual party members are in favour of withdrawal. Nontheless there remains a major battle to be fought within the party against the leadership's surrender to Thatcher's project and, within the unions the battle has scarcely begun. Although the NUR adopted but later overtured a policy for re-unification, one which ACTT still holds, these are very small pin-pricks on the hide of the trade union movement. This is a struggle from which this generation of immigrants must not abstain but neither should those active in the British Labour Movement abstain from becoming involved in the struggle against British imperialism, particularly in the year of the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist gunmen being sent into Ireland again, which offers so many oppurtunities.
But moreover, to take an example at random, the campaign against accidents in the construction industry (of which 50% of the victims in London are Irish) offer wonderful opportunities for the Labour Party, especially Labour councils, and unions to agitate on issues which will benefit the immigrant workers and illustrate the relevance of the Labour Movement to their daily lives.