Sunday, March 8th, 2013.
I had occasion to take a young man to task in the pub
t’other evening. He was ranting about Poles coming over here and taking all our
jobs and houses. I reminded him that nobody had badmouthed the Polish
immigrants in the 50s after they’d joined forces with us to defeat Nazism.
Anyway, I said (his surname was Irish), a generation or two before that, it was
US that the bigots were complaining about – the Irish, and their descendants.
So, with Paddy’s day near, I thought I’d dig out this piece I once wrote on the
subject for The Scotsman. It was never published. (Xenophobic sods!)
“It actually took a long
time to dawn on me that the vast majority of my ancestors were Irish. I wasn’t
brought up that way. Nobody sent my brothers and me to Irish dancing classes.
My folks never threw parties where some drunken glaik sang Orra Pell (the
alternative title to The Rose of Tralee)
- “Orra pell mune was rye-zeeng …” As a
child, I only knew one Irish person and that was my aunt. My mother’s brother
had married a girl from the County Sligo, a strikingly beautiful young woman
whose looks and gentle brogue lent her a glamour, to my childish eyes, as
exotic as that of Fletcher Christian’s Tahitian bride, Maimiti.
I
became interested in Ireland not through music, politics, religion or football,
but through its literature. Yeats and O’Casey made the initial breakthrough
(clever lads!); then subsequently Shaw, Wilde, Behan, Beckett and, primarily,
Joyce confirmed my enthusiasm. I wanted to visit Dublin because of Ulysses
and Juno & the Paycock; I wanted to see Sligo because of
Yeats’s later poems. I wanted to sit and have ‘the craic’ in Irish pubs because
the peerless Flann O’Brien used to do the same. Once I got there, I found that,
as in Scotland, the places and the people are reason enough to be there, on
their own.
Before
secondary school, Ireland was just a name for me on a map, like any other. Even
when I got to the big school, my Irish ancestry hardly impinged upon me. This
despite the fact that the majority of my school mates seemed to have been
supplied by Central Casting. If they weren’t called Cogan, Logan, Bogan, Hogan
or Rogan, then they were called O’Mara, O’Hara, O’Dowda or O’Shea. The girls
were all called Mary or Anne-Marie. There was a sprinkling of Italian and
Polish names, too, but the preponderance of Irish surnames was taken for
granted. I must have been slow, right enough, because the fact that I was
called O’Donnell didn’t once suggest Irish descent to me.
My
first inkling came during one holiday job in the Public Park. Up till then, I
had never inkled at all. I had an orange polo-neck jersey of which I was
inordinately fond. I had craiked at my mother to buy me it for ages and, once
she did, it was hardly off my back. I had to be scrutinised carefully every
bed-time, to make sure I wasn’t wearing it under my pyjamas. Anyway, I was
wearing it at work, the day the boss came into the bothy. He got an eyeful of
it – well, truth to tell, it was hard to miss. It wasn’t just orange; it was ORANGE! It was a tangerine dream, an
apricot apparition; it was the jersey ambassador from Seville.
The gaffer snorted and said snidely
to the others, “Well, that’ll dae me. Eh? An Irishman in an orange jersey.” I
laughed with the others. “I’m no Irish,” I said. “Aw, son,” he replied, “you’ve
a lot to learn.”
I
know now what he meant, of course. With a name like O’Donnell, in his mind I
had to be a Catholic. Irish and Catholic are still synonymous, to this day, in
the narrow minds of some. But it’s been going on a while. My great-aunt in
Shotts overheard two women on the street, watching a Polish family walk into
Mass. “Ah never kent the Poles were Irish,” said one.
When
did the Irish come here, and why did it cause such a stushie?
“Scotch-Irish”
is a term widely current in countries with a significant history of
immigration, most notably those of North America. It refers to people descended
from the Scots planted in Ulster by King James VI and I, people of
predominantly Presbyterian stock. My ancestry is the exact opposite. I come
from the Irish Scots, descendants of overwhelmingly Catholic Irish immigrants
to Scotland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These
people migrated from the counties of Ulster in search of work. The majority
came from Donegal, and most of these from the area around Glenties. So did my
branch of the O’Donnells.
Irish
migration to Scotland had been around for centuries before the start of the
nineteenth, mainly agricultural workers in search of seasonal employment. But
when the work was finished, when the tatties were howked and the neeps shawed,
the Irishmen returned to their native land. A significant change for both
countries occurred with the Industrial Revolution that took place in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. The textiles industry, the iron and coal
industries were transformed. Wages in Scotland rose to as much as five times
what a healthy fit young man could earn in Ireland. The crossing between the
two countries was short and comparatively cheap. The temptation and the
opportunities were obvious.
Irish
migrant labourers arrived first on the west coast and moved east, stage by
stage, as jobs proliferated. From Ayrshire and Dunbartonshire, they spread
eastwards to Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire and, eventually, came to West Lothian
– my part of the world.
The
first reference to Irish labour in West Lothian mentions them in the years 1818-1821, working on the Union
canal, which runs between Edinburgh and Falkirk. This canal flows across the
entire length of the county and, when it was built, was considered one of the engineering marvels of the age. It
followed a course of 31 miles, all on the same level, obviating any necessity
for locks, and with a constant depth of five and a half feet and a constant
breadth of 35 feet. Small wonder it was nicknamed “the mathematical river”. But
the Irishmen who navvied on it have left no trace of themselves. When the job
was finished, they moved on in search of more work. They did not mix or
inter-marry with the locals.
The
next time we come across the Irish in our local history is in the 1830’s,
working on the network of railways set up then. Like their compatriots of a
decade earlier, they did not mix. But there is documented evidence that they
fought with co-workers from the Highlands, another set of men driven by poverty
from their native peat to the Central Lowlands in search of work. The “wild
Irish” lived in a settlement of huts near Winchburgh and were noted for their
drinking and rambunctiousness. On one occasion, they fought a pitched battle
with the Highlanders, in numbers of over a thousand, outside the village. If
nothing else, it demonstrates graphically that they were not being absorbed
into the local population.
In
the 1840’s, the potato blight devastated Ireland and emigration from that
country reached massive proportions. The increase can be shown dramatically in
the differing census returns of 1841 and 1851 for Blackburn in West Lothian, my
home village. In 1841, 18 out of 443, or 4% of the village’s population, were
Irish. They worked in the local cotton mill or as general labourers. Ten years
later, in 1851, after the starvation years in Ireland, 137 out of 684, or 20%
of the population, were Irish. Even this figure may be slightly misleading for
these people had begun to marry locals and, if we count the Scottish born
children of Irish immigrants, the figure is closer to 25% of the population
being 1st or 2nd generation Irish. Work still centred
around the mill and general labouring, for coal mining was still a small scale industry at this
time. Indeed, in 1851, there were only 6 coal miners among the population.
The
whole process of coming over from Ireland and finding somewhere to live and
somewhere to work was made easier by the system of “chain immigration”. The
first Irish to come over invited relatives and friends to follow them, gave
them accommodation and found them employment. These new arrivals, in their
turn, did likewise. In Blackburn in the 1851 census, a third of the Irish
enumerated were lodgers, almost all of them with fellow Irishmen.
The percentage of Irish in the census of 1861 remained
constant. Mining was becoming the most important industry in the area and it
provided some security and constancy since the mining companies provided
housing to encourage a stable work force. More and more Irish stayed and
settled in the area. They began to intermarry and integrate with the local
community. It would be a falsehood to state that there was no trouble between
the local, indigenous population and those of Irish origin, but there was not
much. The main source of resentment in those days was the reputation of the
Irishmen for taking jobs at less than the going rate – which would still have
been far more than they could have dreamed of in Ireland. This reputation was
not wholly justified. But, in any case, in West Lothian, for most of the 19th
century, work was plentiful and the two groups were seldom in competition for
jobs.
Ill-feeling
on purely sectarian or national grounds did, occasionally, surface. There was,
for instance, a massive riot in Bathgate in 1857 between Scots and Irish. But
it must be remembered that almost a third of the immigrant Irish were of the
Protestant persuasion, so that it was hardly, if ever, a straightforward
animosity between Scots Protestants and Irish Catholics.
The
last great invasion of Irish immigrants into West Lothian came in the 1860’s
and 1870’s, when the county was, for a brief period, the centre of the world’s
oil industry. Paraffin Young had patented his method of extracting oil from
bituminous coal in 1850, and moved on to shales shortly thereafter. Once his
patent expired, other companies moved in and townships sprang up around places
like Addiewell and Broxburn. There was a huge influx of Irish labourers into
these communities and many of these men stayed and married local girls. Together with previous
immigrants who had done the same, these people were largely responsible for the
great number of Catholic families in the county. The electoral registers of
modern Bathgate, Blackburn, Broxburn, Whitburn and Armadale still contain great
numbers of Irish surnames.
Resentment
against the interloping Irish started early in the nineteenth century. There
are records of several full-scale riots in the towns of West Lothian. There
were the violent scuffles near Winchburgh in the 1830’s. In the Bathgate riot
of 1857, a pitched battle was fought between Irishmen and locals in the town’s
Hopetoun Street, Engine Street (now George Street) and along the Whitburn Road.
Construction work was going on at that time in Hopetoun Street and the building
site provided many missiles for the fighting. The Falkirk Herald for the time
describes the scene as “assuming an
alarming aspect.” The cause of the riot is said to have been the Scots’ desire
for revenge on the Irish, who had assaulted a local youth.
The
following year, in 1858, Armadale was the location for another potentially ugly
street disturbance between Irish and Scots. For some years, Irish labourers had
travelled through Armadale on their way to work on farms in the east. The
locals, mistrustful of the Irish, took it upon themselves to pelt them with
stones and assault them in general, as they passed through. Consequently, the
Irish used to muster in Bathgate before they set off on the return to Armadale,
in order to have a sufficient number to deter attack. In 1858, however, someone
overheard the Irish in Bathgate boasting of what they would do to anyone who
set about them in Armadale, and sped off to that town to warn the inhabitants.
A huge number of Armadale men, armed with guns, hammers, axes and other weapons,
assembled at the town’s eastern end. The Irish approached, savagely-bladed
hooks at the ready. An impasse followed, until one Armadale man told the Irish
they could pass through in peace, but the first to strike a blow would “fall a
dead man." In silence, the Irish walked through the town. An ugly
situation had been averted. But the prejudice against the Irish was obvious.
Precisely
why the native population disliked the Irish is not hard to fathom. The reasons
were twofold: economic and religious. Irish labourers acquired a reputation for
being strike-breakers and for taking positions at wages below the agreed rate,
both of which inflamed anti-Irish sentiment amongst the local work-force. That
they were used by some unscrupulous managers in strike-breaking is beyond
question. That they accepted lower wages than Scots workers is also true. In
their defence, it must be stated that the comparatively low wages they earned
in Scotland were considerably higher than they could have earned back home. And
the charges were rather unfairly applied to all Irish workers, deserved or no.
It
was the bad luck of the Irish to be working in Scotland in general and West
Lothian in particular, at the same time as many of the worst social problems
associated with industrialisation first came to prominence. People had to toil
long hours for little money, in dangerous and back-breaking work; injuries and
fatalities were more common; housing conditions and other amentities were poor,
and there was a significant increase in drunkenness and associated crimes. The prevalence of these
social horrors, at the same time as the appearance of increased numbers of
Irish immigrants, caused many to make the mistake of seeing a causal
relationship between the two. The “Paddies” were made the scapegoats for all
the ills of the local working community. They were roundly detested by their
fellow workers and treated with the utmost contempt by management.
The
immigrant community reacted by becoming an enclave in the larger Scottish
society, turning in upon themselves and preserving as much as they could of
their native culture and customs. In this, they were led and encouraged by
Catholic clergy, who were anxious to resist pressures from outside which might
weaken the religious life of their flocks. Many feared that young Irish,
working alongside Scottish Protestants, would have their faith weakened,
through intimidation or ridicule. Increasing familiarity brought the dangers of
mixed marriage and sending children to state schools, where their native
religion would not be cherished and taught. In times of hardship, the fear was
that Protestant soup-kitchens, especially in Glasgow, might weaken the faith of
Catholic Irish, desperate to avoid starvation for themselves and their children.
In my childhood, it was still common to hear, of a Protestant with an Irish
surname like Brady or Mooney, “Aye, his grandfaither took the soup.”
The
founding of Celtic Football Club in Glasgow by the Marist Brother Walfrid in
1888 was done in an attempt to give Irish Catholic immigrants in the locality a
source of identity and pride. The name was chosen to represent the Irish and Scottish roots of the players. Similar
sporting associations sprang up throughout the Central Belt, through Lanarkshire
and the Lothians, to the east coast. Music, in particular choral ensembles,
fulfilled a similar role. Encouraged by the success of such ventures, and the
pride they generated, the Irish began to settle down and seek to become part of
the wider community. The emergence of the Labour Party, again initially in the
west but very soon throughout industrial Scotland, was another factor in the
gradual integration of the immigrant community. Labour’s support for the 1918
Education Act, which enabled Catholic schools to become part of the state
system, whilst still allowing the church influence over appointments and
religious education, won Catholic and Irish voters.
The
process was inevitably accelerated by social and financial improvement. At
first within the immigrant enclave, certain individuals began to set up
businesses – from itinerant vendors with carts to proprietors of public houses,
lodging houses and shops. Their financial rewards allowed them to give their
children success through education, a common method of self-improvement and
social acceptance in any immigrant community. As the next generation went on to
university they, almost by definition, moved out of the immigrant areas and
into the community at large.
Hostility
to the Irish and their religion had been a feature of the Scottish psyche for a
long time. In 1857, the anti-catholic “Witness” could write:
We deeply
lament and condemn the introduction into counties like East Lothian of a set of
low Popish Irish, that bring with them their debasing habits, their turbulence,
their blind superstition, and deteriorate our native population wherever they
settle.
The
Orange Order, begun in Ireland in 1795, came to Scotland through soldiers
posted to Ireland during the 1798 rebellion. The Order developed slowly during
the first half of the 19th century, although there was a significant
Orange/Green riot in Girvan in 1831. Increasing industrialisation and the
proportionately increased numbers of Irish that came with it fanned the flames
of Orangeism in Scotland and in the 1870’s District Lodge #26 was established
in West Lothian at Armadale and Whitburn, soon to be followed by Lodge #48 at
Broxburn. These towns were at the heart of
West Lothian mining – coal and shale.
Religious
antagonism came from the fact that many Scots looked on Catholicism as an
unscriptural and superstitious religion which placed too much emphasis on
church practice and dogma, rather than on the Bible, which they saw as the word
of God. There were, moreover – and still are, even today – those who see
Catholicism as an organised conspiracy against the institutions of the crown
and the church.
Conversely,
Catholics always felt that there were intrigues and machinations against them.
(The feeling is still there today, amongst some Celtic supporters who feel that
there is a Masonic conspiracy against their team). It was not only the very
public demonstrations of fealty to state and church by the Orange Order,
sometimes descending into mutually violent antagonism, which encouraged these
anxieties. There were hostile attitudes towards Catholics in some skilled
unions and trades councils in the mid-Victorian era, where entry to certain
trades could be denied to RC’s by subtle methods such as making membership of
the Freemasons a pre-requisite, and where suspicion and anti-Catholic prejudice
in jobs like mining were embodied in membership of Orange Lodges. Even in my
childhood, some people never shopped in a certain drapery, because they
wouldn’t employ Catholics.
How
much better has it got? Was the composer James Macmillan right in 1999, to say
that there is still latent anti-Catholicism in Scotland? It’s difficult to quantify
– what’s latent is hardly obvious. There are still bigots and peddlers of
hatred around, certainly, and not only on one side. But now, in an era when
fewer people are attending church or chapel, when Scotland has a fresh and
vigorous sense of its identity as a nation, after years of Little England
Toryism making all Scots, of whatever persuasion or none, feel united in the
face of contempt, maybe most of us genuinely can say, “A man’s a man for a’
that.”
Let
us pray that come it may!
