Irish Emigration 1801 - 1921

by David Fitzpatrick

Ireland under the Union was a land which most people wanted to leave. At least eight million men, women and children actually did emigrate between 1801 and 1921, a number equal to the entire Irish population at its peak, just before the Great Famine. Members of most generations born during the nineteenth century were more likely than not to move country, so that emigration became part of the expected cycle of life. No other country lost so large a proportion of its people during the century, or experienced such consistently heavy emigration over so long a period. Clearly, movement on such a scale could not have occurred without the combination of powerful foreign demand for immigrant labour and the chronic lack of employment opportunities at home. Nor could it have happened without the creation of complex mechanisms for funding, publicising and implementing emigration. Part I of this study provides a profile of those who left, while Part II analyses the factors facilitating and impeding emigration, ending with a discussion of its fundamental determinants.

Emigration was also one of the great formative factors in modern Irish history. Without studying emigration, one could scarcely hope to explain Ireland's peculiar blend of archaism and modernity as manifested in its economy, demography, social structure and political culture. Majority emigration means, moreover, that the study of Irish history must not be limited to Ireland. If the residual population which stayed at home was not exactly freakish ('the poor, the weak, the old, the lame, the sick, the blind, the dumb, and the imbecile and insane', as Sir William Wilde described it in 1864), neither was it a fair sample of the Irish people. These consequences are explored in Part III. The intention of this pamphlet is thus not only to analyse the profile and determinants of a major historical process, but also to open a neglected window upon the broader vista of Irish history.

What follows is largely a synthesis of many specialist studies of social, economic and demographic history. Some of these studies are cited in the Select Bibliography, to which readers should refer when confronted by the name of an author given in capital letters. Otherwise, citations are limited to cases of direct quotation. Many assertions, however, are based upon my own statistical analyses, details of which cannot be given here. Wherever possible, I have excluded numbers from the text, though some have got in by the back door in the guise of diagrams and maps. The few technical terms employed are marked by an asterisk and explained in the Glossary. This essay would have been less readable and less accurate than it is, but for the penetrating scrutiny of David Dickson, Georgina Fitzpatrick, Cormac O Grada, Peter Roebuck and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis. But my primary debt is to eight million others.

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