Wild geese

The great exodus from Ireland

Gerard Windsor

On Every Tide: The making and remaking of the Irish world

by Sean Connolly Little, Brown $34.99 pb, 488 pp

In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’

Sean Connolly adopts the phrase for his account of two and a half centuries of emigration from Ireland. He is also charmingly longer to be accepted and integrated there than in other destinations. The Irish were among the first national groups to arrive in massed numbers into a settled settler society based largely on mainland British stock. During and after the Great Famine of 1846–49, a million Irish sailed for the United States, most of them poor and unskilled. A generation later, many were no more affluent or skilled. Although they came largely from a rural background, few joined the push to open up the West; they lacked the means to finance the journey or take up land. Instead they stayed in cities, above all New York and Chicago. Connolly doesn’t say so, but it is hard to avoid feeling that the early generations of emigrants, especially the Famine victims, were in a prolonged state of shock. Furthermore, there was substantial hostility to them from nativist Americans. They lacked the support that later generations enjoyed from the Catholic church – the Devotional Revolution in Ireland didn’t occur until the second half of the nineteenth century. The lives of priests and parishioners were not nearly as entwined as they became after Cardinal Cullen’s reforms. perverse; his book emphasises that very few tides have actually been involved. Only those to the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, far less strongly, to Argentina.

Four-fifths of all emigrants went to the United States, and Connolly naturally devotes most of his attention to that country. Not merely, however, because of the numbers: the Irish took

Connolly traces the gradual advance and integration of the Irish in America up to the days of the first two presidents of Irish heritage – John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan – and on to the American involvement in the Irish Troubles that began in 1968 and maybe finished in 1998. Irish Americans provide the book’s best lines. When a servant was sacked for repeated drunkenness, ‘in a loud voice and with a martyr-like air, the girl exclaimed, “What do I care? They did the same to our Saviour.”’ Someone offered this definition of the term ‘lace curtain Irish’ (when Irish Americans had moved up a grade): ‘families where there was fruit on the table even when no one was sick’. Irish America remains more than a shadowy ghost. Connolly’s last paragraph is about the implications of a 2019 proposal in the Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s principal parliamentary chamber, to allow non-resident Irish citizens to vote in presidential elections. Initially, the worry was that Gerry Adams might get the job, ‘propelled by a coalition of American barstool republicans and the Sinn Fein electoral machine in Northern Ireland’. That concern is passé. The new bogey lies in the fact that a majority of Irish Americans supported Donald Trump; Connolly refers to their ‘potentially malign influence’. The image, and the character, of contemporary Ireland is light years away from Trumpism. Outward-looking, the Irish government in 2020 published a policy statement about its global focus. Forget the old diaspora, was the message. The new one is any country ready to partner with Ireland in increasing ‘the impact and effectiveness of our international presence’, so that Ireland emerges ‘an island at the centre of the world’.

What about the other island, the nearest thing to a second Ireland? ‘By 1846, one quarter of the population of New South Wales was Irish-born.’ Even now, more than a quarter of all Australians claim some Irish heritage. Connolly devotes minimal space to Australia, but it’s because he sees the situation here as unproblematic.

Outside Macquarie’s Barracks in Sydney is a wall commemorating the ‘Irish Orphan Girls’. Between 1848 and 1850, 4,175 females aged fourteen to eighteen from Irish workhouses were brought to Sydney; it was a colonial initiative to reduce the shortage of marriageable women. They were given free passage to Sydney: ‘Poor Law Guardians were required to supply each girl with a full set of clothing ... Each shipload was accompanied by a matron and a surgeon, and was well provided with food.’ Connolly comments, ‘As implemented it was probably the best organised scheme of assisted emigration provided by any nineteeth-century agency.’ What’s more, it seems to have been a stunning success; two-thirds of the women married within three years of arrival and the average number of children born to each of them was nine.

In contrast to Irish America’s enduring narrative of victimhood, Australia let that past go. Connolly’s explanation is that here the Irish were ‘able to participate almost from the beginning in the construction of a “new society”’. In America, they were ‘at the bottom of an already well-established social order. Despised and exploited, they were more prone to see themselves as victims and to allow historical memory to harden into active grievance and resentment’. The story can be typified by two careers. In 1856, Charles Gavan Duffy emigrated to Victoria. In 1871, he became premier of the state. By contrast, Patrick Kennedy emigrated to the United States in 1849; his great-grandson became president 112 years later.

Sectarian riots and killings that coloured Irish American life had no equivalent in Australia. For all the Irishmen at Eureka, their cause was miners’ rights, not Ireland’s nor those of Irish immigrants. Instead of blood, Irish Australians produced the ever-memorable hijinks of Daniel Mannix – his arrest by a British destroyer in the Atlantic and his St Patrick’s Day Parade with the fourteen white-charger-mounted VC Recipients.

Irish Australia last had its day in the sun in the 1990s when the old country was so flavoursome – the two charismatic women presidents, Seamus Heaney and his Nobel Prize, enthusiastic public commemorations of Bloomsday, de rigueur annual performances of new Irish plays. But those revels now seem permanently ended.

Connolly’s book is unlikely to be supplanted. It is gracefully written, awash with statistics (readers may need breathers), and footnoted and referenced so extensively that it is a masterly synthesis of secondary sources. Connolly’s major Australian debts are to David Fitzpatrick and Patrick O’Farrell. Yet he doesn’t repeat the bold original thesis of O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia (1987) – one of the great, and stylistically beautiful, works of history written in this country – that the Irish presence and agitation determined that Australia was not to be ‘a New Britannia in another world’ but determinedly multicultural from the start. g

Gerard Windsor has both Australian and Irish citizenship.