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Review article: Cohesion and diversity in the Irish diaspora*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

David Noel Doyle
David Noel Doyle*
Affiliation:
Department of Modern History, University College Dublin
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Extract

Ireland’s uses of knowledge of the diaspora, much matured since the 1950s, now provide two master images from which to approach it: diversity and cohesion. On 2 February 1995 President Mary Robinson pinpointed its diversity as embodying the multifaceted nature of native Irish identities, and as a makeweight in domestic argument and experiment as to the recognition and acceptance of those identities. In March 1998 President Mary McAleese spoke of ‘our global Irish family’; she accepted such diversity, but sought its reintegration in a master image of cohesion, one obtaining both at home and abroad. The new Article 2 of the Irish constitution states that ‘The Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.’

In each case, desired standards are merged with claimed realities as to the diaspora. But any such emphasis whether on cohesion or diversity among the overseas Irish matches a growing body of work on the diaspora itself, much of it by the scholars within those communities. Critical work on this scale has not appeared before now. In the past collective work of this kind typically consisted of reprints and dissertations. One might question whether this scholarship answers the external burdens placed upon it.

The manpower alone here involved would suggest so. Over two hundred writers produce the Irish diaspora subjects in the four works here reviewed. And two of the editors, O’Sullivan, born in Kilmallock in 1944, a youthful migrant to Britain, and Glazier, an adult migrant to America, both epitomise the curiosity and enterprise of the newer emigrant scholars.

Type
Review Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 123 , May 1999 , pp. 411 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1999

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Footnotes

*

The Irish world wide: history, heritage, identity. Edited By Patrick O’Sullivan. 6 vols. London & Leicester: Leicester University Press (a Cassell imprint). 1992–7. Vol. 1: Patterns of migration. Pp xxiv, 231. 1992. £37.50 hardback; £16.99 paperback. Vol. 2: The Irish in the new communities. Pp xii, 266. 1992. £45 hardback; £16.99 paperback. Vol. 3: The creative migrant. Pp ix, 246. 1994. £45 hardback; £16.99 paperback. Vol. 4: Irish women and Irish migration. Pp xi, 238. 1995. £45 hardback; £16.99 paperback. Vol. 5: Religion and identity. Pp x, 262. 1996. £45 hardback. Vol. 6. The meaning of the Famine. Pp xiii, 266. 1997. £45 hardback.

Ulster and North America: transatlantic perspectives on the Scotch-Irish. Edited By H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, jr. Pp xii, 283. Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press. 1997. $39.95/£31.95.

The New York Irish. Edited By Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp xxii, 743. 1996. £41.50 hardback; £21.50 paperback.

The encyclopedia of American Catholic history. Edited By Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley. Pp xi, 1566. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press. 1997. $79.95.

References

1 Dáil Éireann deb., ccccxlviii, 1146–55 (2 Feb. 1995).

2 Office of the President of Ireland, St Patrick’s Day message from the President of Ireland, 1998. The Irish version, chlann dhomhanda na hÉireann, has the import of ‘extended’ family.

3 E.g. McCaffrey, Lawrence J., Conners, Margaret E., Doyle, David N. and Walsh, James P. (eds), The Irish-Americans (42 vols, New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

4 The collective series edited By O’Sullivan on the global diaspora counts 67 contributors, the volume on the New York Irish counts 28, that on Ulster America or the Scots-Irish counts 13, and finally there are 442 contributors to Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, about a third of them Irish-American, and about a quarter writing on matters more or less Irish-American (not the same thing by any means).

5 Bracken, P.J., Greenslade, L., Griffin, B. and Smyth, M., ‘Mental health and ethnicity: an Irish dimension’ in British Journal of Psychiatry, clxxii (1998), pp 103-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Tables 1 and 2 and bibliography; Hickman, Mary J. and Walter, Bronwen, Discrimination and the Irish community in Britain (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 Grimes, Seamus. ‘Friendship patterns and social networks among post-war Irish migrants in Sydney’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, i, 164-82Google Scholar; Linda Almeida Dowling, ‘ “And still they haven’t found what they are looking for”: a survey of the new Irish in New York City’, ibid., pp 196–221; Ellen Hazelkorn, ‘ “We can’t all live on a small island”: the political economy of Irish migration’, ibid., pp 180–220; Liam Greenslade, ‘White skins, white masks: psychological distress among the Irish in Britain’, ibid., pp 201–25; Bernard Canavan, ‘Storytellers and writers: Irish identity in emigrant labourers’ autobiographies, 1870–1970’, ibid., iii, 154–69; Kevin Rockett, ‘The Irish migrant and film’, ibid., pp 170–91; Graeme Smith, ‘My love is in America: migration and Irish music’, ibid., pp 221–36; Pauric Travers, ‘ “There was nothing for me here”: Irish female emigration, 1922–71’, ibid., iv, 146–67; Kate Kelly and Tríona Nic Giolla Choille, ‘Listening and learning: experiences in an emigrant advice agency’, ibid., pp 188–91; Mary Keils, ‘ “I’m myself and nobody else”: gender and ethnicity among young middle-class Irish women in London’, ibid., pp 201–34.

7 In 1881 the Irish living abroad broke down as among those in the four major locales: the United States 61 per cent, Great Britain 26 per cent, Australia 7 per cent, and Canada 6 per cent. See Akenson, Donald H., The Irish diaspora: a primer (Toronto & Belfast, 1993), Table 10, p. 54Google Scholar.

8 He originally planned one: ‘There is no synthesis of the great mass of primary and secondary printed material now available on the experience of Irish migrants throughout the world. This series is the first step towards such a synthesis’ (O’Sullivan, Patrick, Discussion paper: The Irish world wide (Bradford, 1990), p. 1Google Scholar). Contrast his disarming definitions in the General Introduction in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, i, pp xii-iv, xxiGoogle Scholar, and ibid., ii, l.

9 The historiographical survey on Britain accepts the Famine synthesis: Swift, Roger, ‘The historiography of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, i, 52–81Google Scholar.

10 Grada, Cormac Ó, Ireland: a new economic history, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), p. 74Google Scholar; Davis, Graham, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991), pp 20, 21, 51–2Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, David, ‘ “A peculiar tramping people”: the Irish in Britain, 1801–70’ in Vaughan, W.E. (ed.), A new history of Ireland, v: Ireland under the union, 1:1801-70 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 623-60Google Scholar; Doyle, David N., ‘The remaking of Irish America, 1845–80’ in Vaughan, W.E. (ed.), A new history of Ireland, vi: Ireland under the union, II: 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996), pp 725-32Google Scholar and passim to p. 763; Houston, C.J. and Smyth, W.J., Irish emigration and Canadian settlement (Toronto, 1990)Google Scholar; O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia (Sydney, 1987), p. 63Google Scholar; MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘Emigration from Ireland to Australia: an overview’ in Kiernan, Colm (ed.), Australia and Ireland, 1788–1988 (Dublin, 1986), p. 124Google Scholar (‘almost irrelevant’); Fitzpatrick, David, Oceans of consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia (Cork, 1994), pp 7–8Google Scholar.

11 Davis, Graham, ‘The historiography of the Irish Famine’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, vi, 21–5Google Scholar. This also has the merit of balancing Fitzpatrick’s most recent claim that the great flow to the United States after 1845 was due to the coincidence of British and Australian recessions with U.S. expansion: Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Flight from famine’ in Póirtéir, Cathal (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Cork, 1995), pp 176–7Google Scholar.

12 Akenson, Donald H., ‘The historiography of the Irish in the United States of America’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, ii, 98–127Google Scholar, a further rescension of his ‘An agnostic view of the historiography of the Irish-Americans’ in Labour/Le Travail, xiv (fall 1984), pp 123–59, published also in four other versions between 1984 and 1992. The editor graciously concedes that this writer had already altered the case: O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, ii, 6–7Google Scholar.

13 E.g. Busteed, M.A., Hodgson, R.I. and Kennedy, T.F., ‘Myth and reality of Irish migrants in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, ii, 26–51Google Scholar; Bernard Aspinwall, ‘A long journey: the Irish in Scotland’, ibid., v, 146–82, esp. Table 6.4, p. 155; Frank Neal, ‘The Famine Irish in England and Wales’, ibid., vi, esp. Tables 3.1-3.3, pp 56–8, by contrast with the rest of his essay, pp 59–80; Patrick O’ Farrell, ‘Lost in transit: Australian reaction to the Irish and Scots famines, 1845–1850’, ibid., pp 126–39, esp. pp 127–8; Patrick McKenna, ‘Irish migration to Argentina’, ibid., i, 63–83.

14 Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Emigration, 1801–70’ in New hist. Ire., v, 562–622Google Scholar; idem, ‘A peculiar tramping people’, ibid., pp 623–60; idem, ‘Emigration, 1871–1921’, ibid., vi, 606–52; idem, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, ibid., pp 653–702. Fitzpatrick’s emigration overviews were summarised in his Irish emigration, 1801–1921 (Dundalk, 1984), and those on the Irish in Britain in ‘A curious middleplace: the Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’ in Swift, Roger and Gilley, Sheridan (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), pp 10–59Google Scholar. His work is also downplayed in Akenson, Irish diaspora, in Roger Swift’s own essays, and in Davis, Graham, The Irish in Britain (Dublin, 1991)Google Scholar. This is probably the fate of radically sophisticated achievement.

15 Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish joke’ in idem (ed.), Irish world wide, iii, 57–82.

16 O’Reilly, Charles G., The life and adventures … of Private Miles O’Reilly (New York, 1864)Google Scholar; Hanchett, William, Irish: Charles G. Halpine in Civil War America (Syracuse, 1970)Google Scholar; Dunne, Finley Peter, Mr Dooley and the Chicago Irish, ed. Fanning, Charles (New York, 1976; Washington, D.C., 1987)Google Scholar; idem, Mr Dooley at his best, ed. Elmer Ellis (New York, 1938); idem, Observations by Mr Dooley (New York, 1902; Westport, Conn., 1969); Ellis, Elmer, Mr Dooley’s America: a life of Finley Peter Dunne (Hamden, Conn., 1941)Google Scholar; Fanning, Charles, Finley Peter Dunne and Mr Dooley: the Chicago years (Lexington, 1978)Google Scholar. The extreme rarity of such an approach is clear from any wide knowledge of emigrants’ letters home, or of immigrant Irish journalism.

17 Curtis, L.P., Apes and angels: Irishmen in Victorian caricature (Newton Abbot, 1971)Google Scholar; Gilley, Sheridan, ‘English attitudes to the Irish in England,1780-1900’ in Holmes, Colin (ed.), Immigrants and minorities in British society (London, 1978), pp 81–110Google Scholar; Power, Donald, ‘The Paddy image: the stereotype of the Irishman in cartoon and comic’ in O’Driscoll, Robert and Reynolds, Lorna (eds), The untold story: the Irish in Canada (2 vols, Toronto, 1988), i, 37–57Google Scholar; Greenslade, Liam, ‘White skins, white masks’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, ii, 201-25Google Scholar; idem, ‘The blackbird calls in grief: colonialism, health and identity among the Irish in Britain’ in Jim MacLaughlin (ed.), Location and dislocation in contemporary Irish society (Cork, 1997), pp 36–60; Bracken et al., ‘Mental health and ethnicity’.

18 Edwards, Owen Dudley, ‘The stage Irish’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, iii, 83, 85, 87, 88Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., pp 91, 94–5, 97.

20 Knobel, Dale T., Paddy and the republic: ethnicity and nationality in antebellum America (Middletown, Conn., 1986)Google Scholar; idem, ‘A vocabulary of ethnic perception: content analysis of the American stage Irishman, 1820–1860’ in Journal of American Studies, xv, no. 1 (Apr. 1981), pp 45–71; Bolger, Stephen, The Irish character in American fiction, 1830–1860 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

21 Evidence from Henry Thoreau is canvassed in the volume, but it is rather exceptional for its time, even Emerson offering a more balanced view, and is rather like setting up Jack Kerouac as an authority on 1950s black Americans. See Myers, James P. jr, ‘ “Till their … bog-trotting feet get talaria”: Henry D. Thoreau and the immigrant Irish’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, iii, 44–56Google Scholar.

22 Canavan, ‘Storytellers & writers’, ibid., pp 154–69; Rockett, ‘The Irish migrant & film’, ibid., pp 170–91; Frank Molloy, ‘ “The sigh of thy harp …”: the influence of Thomas Moore in Australia’, ibid., pp 115–32.

23 D’Arcy, Fergus A., ‘St Patrick’s other island: the Irish invasion of Britain’ in Éire-Ireland, xxviii, no. 2 (1993), pp 7–17Google Scholar; cf. Aspinwall, Bernard, ‘Popery in Scotland: image and reality, 1820–1920’ in Records of the Scottish Church History Society, xxii (1986), pp 235-57Google Scholar.

24 Miller, Kerby with Doyle, David N. and Kelleher, Patricia, ‘ “For love and liberty”: Irish women, migration and domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, iv, 40–65Google Scholar; Dennis Clark, ‘Irish women workers and American labor patterns: the Philadelphia story’, ibid., pp 113–30; Marilyn Cohen, ‘The migration experience of female-headed households: Gilford, Co. Down, to Greenwich, New York, 1880–1910’, ibid., pp 131–45.

25 A contrast with presumably both locally born adults of Irish parentage, and others from surrounding ‘old recusant’ districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire: see Lynda Letford and Colin G. Pooley, ‘Geographies of migration and religion: Irish women in mid-nineteenth-century Liverpool’, ibid., pp 89–112; Dympna McLoughlin, ‘Superfluous and unwanted deadweight: the emigration of nineteenth-century Irish pauper women’, ibid., pp 66–88.

26 Diner, Hasia R., Erin’s daughters in America (Baltimore, 1983)Google Scholar; Patrick O’Sullivan in idem (ed.), Irish world wide, iv, ll; Travers, ‘ ”There was nothing for me here” ‘, ibid., pp 146–67; Kelly & Nic Giolla Choille, ‘Listening and learning’, ibid., pp 188–91; Walter, Bronwen, ‘Contemporary Irish settlement in London: women’s worlds, men’s worlds’ in MacLaughlin, (ed.), Location & dislocation in contemporary Irish society, pp 61–93Google Scholar: this last, despite its title, on the aftermath of the 1940s-1960s migration.

27 Beccles, Hilary McD., ‘ “A riotous and unruly lot”: Irish indentured servants and freemen in the West Indies, 1644–1713’ in William & Mary Quart., 3rd ser., xlvii (1990), pp 502-22Google Scholar (Irish women were excluded from field work from the 1650s: see p. 511); Salinger, Sharon, ‘To serve well and faithfully’: labor and indentured servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp 90–91, 97, 108–9, 116, 119, 138–9, 150Google Scholar.

28 McAuley, James White ‘Under an Orange banner: reflections on the northern Protestant experiences of emigration’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, v, 43–69Google Scholar (chiefly covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with important references); Gordon Forth. ‘ “No petty people”: the Anglo-Irish identity in colonial Australia’, ibid., ii, 128–42; T. D. Regehr, ‘The Irish childhood and youth of a Canadian capitalist’, ibid., i, 147–63; Cohen, ‘Migration experience of female-headed households’, ibid., iv, 131–45; Letford & Pooley, ‘Geographies of migration & religion’, ibid., pp 89–112. For appeals see letters of Maureen Gaffney, Donald Akenson and others, Irish Times, week ending 10 Feb. 1995.

29 E.g. Moffat, Josiah, ‘The Scotch-Irish of the Up-Country’ in South Atlantic Quarterly, xxxiii (1934), pp 137-51Google Scholar; Whisnant, David E., All that is native and fine: the politics of culture in an American region (Chapel Hill, 1983)Google Scholar; the editors themselves study one facet: H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, ‘Scotch-Irish frontier society in southwestern North Carolina, 1780–1840’ in idem (eds), Ulster & North America, pp 213–26.

30 See, e.g., the letters and papers of Robert Witherspoon, Mary McDowell Greenlee, George Crockett, James Patton and Mary Cumming in the volume of eighteenth-century Irish emigrants’ letters and writings, with contextual essays By Kerby Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce Boling and David N. Doyle (forthcoming).

31 Warren R. Hofstra, ‘Land, ethnicity and community in the Opequon settlement, Virginia, 1730–1800’ in Blethen & Wood (eds), Ulster & North America, pp 167–88; Russel L. Gerlach, ‘Scotch-Irish landscapes in the Ozarks’, ibid., pp 146–66; cf. Tillson, Albert H. jr, ‘The southern backcountry: a survey of current research’ in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xcviii (1990), pp 387–122Google Scholar, esp. pp 392–5: ‘The evidence for the preservation of a cultural heritage among the Scotch-Irish is less clear’, (p. 392), a verdict modified somewhat By Hofstra and Gerlach, yet given force by the editors’ remark that the ‘essence of the Scotch-Irish style was simplicity and practicality [in] … a people practiced in abandoning their past’ (Blethen & Wood (eds), Ulster & North America, p. 2).

32 Contrast this indifference with Noll, Mark A. (ed.), Religion and American politics from colonial times to the 1980s (Oxford, 1990), p. 383Google Scholar: ‘The Scotch-Irish, for instance, were pivotal in American politics through the nation’s first half-century’; Ireland, Owen S., Religion, ethnicity and politics: ratifying the constitution in Pennsylvania (University Park, Pa., 1995)Google Scholar; compare with Ireland’s early work, such as ‘The ethnic-religious dimension of Pennsylvania politics, 1778–1779’ in William & Mary Quart, 3rd ser., xxx (1973), pp 423–49, and (with Wayne Bockelman), ‘The internal revolution in Pennsylvania: an ethnic-religious interpretation’ in Pennsylvania History, xli (1974), pp 125–59. On the newer exiles see Wilson, David A., United Irishmen, United States (Dublin, 1998)Google Scholar; Brie, Maurice J., ‘The American Society of United Irishmen’ in Irish Journal of American Studies, vii (1997), pp 163–77Google Scholar.

33 William Macafee, ‘The demographic history of Ulster, 1750–1841’ in Blethen & Wood (eds), Ulster & North America, pp 41–62. The parish registers on which he bases the data are Church of Ireland, not Presbyterian. He notes that their results are consistent with wider patterns; and one might add that were this not true of Presbyterians, their greater propensity for migration would seem inexplicable. Their average rural and village mentalité was not notably more rational or calculating than that of Church of Ireland weaver-farmers.

34 Vivienne Pollock, ‘The household economy in early rural America and Ulster: the question of self-sufficiency’, ibid., pp 61–75; Graeme Kirkham, ‘Ulster emigration to North America, 1680–1720’, ibid., pp 76–117; Trevor Parkhill, ‘Philadelphia here I come: a study of the letters of Ulster immigrants in Pennsylvania, 1750–1875’, ibid., pp 118–33; Catherine A. Wilson, ‘The Scotch-Irish and immigrant culture on Amherst Island, Ontario’, ibid., pp 134–45. One misses too an appreciation of the work of Brenda Collins, now senior keeper at the Ulster Linen Museum, Lisburn, who early grasped much of this, free of Weberian bias: ‘Proto-industrialisation and pre-Famine emigration’ in Social History, vii, no. 2 (1982), pp 127–46.

35 The shallow piece by Edward J. Cowan, ‘Prophecy and prophylaxis: a paradigm for the Scotch-Irish’ in Blethen & Wood (eds), Ulster & North America, pp 15–23 (an enlightened attack on religious atavisms in the Scots-Irish) thus entirely misses the tendency to thesis-making as ethnic myth formation within past academic study of this people. For Scots-Irish studies originally had been shaped by the assumption of an affinity between Prebyterianism and enterprise (e.g. By James McCosh of Queen’s University, Belfast, and Princeton).

36 Although we let the materials largely speak for themselves, such change is also evident in the forthcoming Miller/Schrier/Boling/Doyle study of eighteenth-century Irish and Scots-Irish emigration (see n. 30); a case study which makes it explicit is Doyle, D.N. and Miller, K.M., ‘Ulster migrants in an age of rebellion: the Crocketts of Raphoe’ in Ir. Econ. & Soc. Hist., xxii (1995), pp 77–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Whelan, Kevin, ‘Settlement and society in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Dawe, Gerald and Foster, J.W. (eds), The poet’s place: Ulster literature and society (Belfast, 1991), pp 45–62Google Scholar; Ó Gráda, Ireland: a new economic history, pp 32–6, 282–6. The nearly complete concentration of linen in the north-east occurred after the classic period of Scots-Irish migration.

38 Those by Hofstra, Gerlach and Wilson cited in n. 31 and n. 34, together with the editors’ study cited in n. 29.

39 Cited in n. 13 above.

40 For encouraging indications that this is under way see, e.g., Campbell, Malcolm, The kingdom of the Ryans: the Irish in southwest New South Wales, 1816–1890 (Sydney, 1997)Google Scholar; David Fitzpatrick, ‘ “Whistling a jig to a milestone”: Michael Normile, 1854–65’ in his Oceans of consolation, pp 39–95; John Herson, ‘Community, social mobility and assimilation: the Irish in late Victorian Stafford’ (forthcoming); Akenson, Donald, The Irish in Ontario (Kingston & Montreal, 1984), pp 203–353Google Scholar; Elliott, Bruce, Irish migrants in the Canadas (Kingston & Montreal, 1988), pp 116–232Google Scholar; Colin G. Pooley, ‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish in mid-Victorian Britain’ in Swift & Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, 1815–1939, pp 61–81.

41 Akenson, Irish diaspora, pp 266–9; the insight on p. 269 is quite brilliant. I have gradually come to believe that Akenson’s creative obsession with these issues has less to do with the Irish in Canada (with now almost two centuries’ traditions of structural assimilation and acculturation) than with fears of Quebec Canadien separatism (more post-Catholic than Catholic). In the United States, by contrast, the Protestant Irish logically went ‘native’ from the 1770s and abandoned such efforts at inter-Irish co-partnership from the mid-1830s (outside the South and New York City, both Democrat in politics; since other areas were largely Whig/Republican, this confirms a meta-Protestant party dynamic at work in them).

42 E.g. Grant, John N., ‘The Canso riots of 1833’ in Nova Scotia Historical Review, xiv (1994), pp 1–19Google Scholar; Sturgis, James, ‘Irish hooligans: Ned Kelly (Australia) and William Donnelly (Canada) in comparative perspective’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, i, 110-27Google Scholar; Reaney, James, ‘The Donnellys: a Tipperary vendetta in Victorian Ontario’ in O’Driscoll, Robert and Reynolds, Lorna (eds), The untold story: the Irish in Canada (2 vols, Toronto, 1988), ii, 785-9Google Scholar; See, Scott W., Riots in New Brunswick: Orange nativism and social violence in the 1840s (Toronto, 1993)Google Scholar; Curtis, Fahey, In His Name: the Anglican experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Ottawa, 1991)Google Scholar; Teehan, Eric Reuben, ‘Conflict, crime and connexion: the impact of Irish immigrants on St John, New Brunswick, 1845–1855’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, North Carolina, 1994)Google Scholar. Such work revives the insight, preceding Houston and Smyth, of Robertson, I.R., ‘Highlanders, Irish and the land question in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island’ in Cullen, L.M. and Smout, T.C., Comparative aspects of Scottish and Irish economic history, 1600–1910 (Edinburgh, 1972), pp 227-11Google Scholar. This pattern of ethno-social stratification is evident in the globally most popular literary export of Prince Edward Island, and perhaps Canada, the Anne of Green Gables series (8 vols, 1908–39) by the clear-visioned Lucy M. Montgomery (1874-1942). Publication of her extensive diaries (1889-1942) would document this.

43 Akenson, Irish diaspora, pp 264–6; Elliott, Bruce, ‘Regionalized migration and settlement patterns of the Irish in Upper Canada’ in O’Driscoll, & Reynolds, (eds), Untold story, i, 309-18Google Scholar. Apart from O’Driscoll and Reynolds, for the Irish in Canada see Houston, Cecil J. and Smyth, William J., Irish emigration and Canadian settlement (Toronto, 1990)Google Scholar; Akenson, Irish in Ontario; Elliott, Irish migrants in the Canadas; Toner, Peter M. (ed.), New Ireland remembered: historical essays on the Irish in New Brunswick (Fredericton, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, ‘The origins of the New Brunswick Irish’ in Journal of Canadian Studies, xxiii (1988), pp 104–19; Byrne, C.J. and Harry, M., Talamh an éisc (Halifax, 1986)Google Scholar; Power, Thomas P. (ed.), The Irish in Atlantic Canada, 1780–1900 (Fredericton, 1988)Google Scholar.

44 New York Irish History (founded 1986); New York Irish History Roundtable, (founded 1984).

45 It was preceded by an ancillary bibliography of the highest standard: Shea, Ann M. and Casey, Marion R., The Irish experience in New York City: a select bibliography (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

46 Leo Hershkowitz, ‘The Irish and the emerging city: settlement to 1844’ in Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 11–34; Joyce D. Goodfriend, ‘ “Upon a bunch of straw”: the Irish in colonial New York City’, ibid., pp 35–47; Walter J. Walsh, ‘Religion, ethnicity and history: clues to the cultural construction of law’ [1798-1834], ibid., pp 48–69; Paul A. Gilje, ‘The development of an Irish American community … before the Great Migration’, ibid., pp 70–83.

47 Hasia R. Diner, ‘Overview: “The most Irish city in the Union”: the era of the Great Migration, 1844–1877’, ibid., pp 85–106.

48 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth census: population, i, Tables 59–66, pp 874–905Google Scholar. Notably, the New York and Brooklyn church jurisdictions did not merge, and have had a distinct character since; broadly speaking, Brooklyn long remained characteristically more Irish in tone and control, perhaps freeing New York itself to be more cosmopolitan. See Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, pp 1047–9; Cohalan, F.D., A popular history of the archdiocese of New York (Yonkers, 1983)Google Scholar; Culkin, H.M. (ed.), Priests and parishes of the diocese of Brooklyn, 1820–1990 (2 vols, New York, 1990-91)Google Scholar.

49 Chris McNickle, ‘When New York was Irish, and after’ in Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 339, 344. However, I doubt any of the work’s Jewish contributors would agree with his assessment; these include Leo Hershkowitz, ‘Overview: The Irish and the emerging city: settlement to 1844’, ibid., pp 11–34; Diner, Overview: “The most Irish city in the Union” ‘, ibid., pp 85–106; Alan M. Kraut, ‘Illness and medical care among Irish immigrants in antebellum New York’, ibid., pp 153–68.

50 Graham Hodges, ‘ “Desirable companions and lovers”: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870’, ibid-, pp 107–24; John Kuo Wei Tchen, ‘Quimbo Appo’s fear of Fenians’, ibid., 125–52.

51 David Goodman Croly, cited ibid., p. 142; Kraut, ‘Illness & medical care’, ibid., pp 153–68; cf. Fox, J.W., ‘Irish immigrants, pauperism and insanity in 1854 Massachusetts’ in Social Science History, xv (1991), pp 315-36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Michael, The Orange riots: Irish political violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (New York, 1993), pp 12, 22, 63–4, 66–9, 188–220Google Scholar; Headley, Joel Tyler, The great riots of New York City, 1712–1873 (New York, 1873; repr., ed. Rose, Thomas and Rodgers, James, Indianapolis, 1970)Google Scholar.

52 John T. Ridge, ‘Irish county societies in New York, 1880–1914’ in Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 275–300; J. R. McKivigan and T. J. Robertson, ‘The Irish-American worker in transition, 1877–1914’, ibid., pp 301–20; Joe Doyle, ‘Striking for Ireland on the New York docks’, ibid., pp 357–73.

53 An exception might be Colleen McDannell’s rich ethnology of parish fairs: ‘Goiing to the ladies’ fair: Irish Catholics in New York City, 1870–1900’, ibid., pp 234–51. For an explanation of the weakness of studies of Irish-American Protestantism, see above, pp 420–21.

54 This is one the real gains of post-Vatican II scholarship, aided by secular ethnic studies. It is lucidly summarised in Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, as follows: African-Americans, By Cyprian Davis, pp 6–13; Croatian, By Paul Maslach, pp 393–5; Czech, By Josef Kalvoda, pp 404–6; Eastern Rite Catholics, By George A. Maloney, pp 471–5; French Canadian, By Janice Farnham and Bruce Bradley, pp 549–53 (cf. Acadians, By Albert Ledoux, pp 4–5, and French colonial, By C. E. O’Neill, pp 946–54); German, By Kathleen Neils Conzen, pp 571–83; Hispanic (modern) By Jaime Vidal, pp 635–42 (cf. Spanish colonial, By Stafford Poole, pp 954–62); Hungarian, By Dominic Csorba, pp 665–8; Italian, By Elisa Carillo and Mary E. Brown, pp 705–13; Lithuanians, By William Wolkovich-Valkaviçius, pp 803–5; Native American, By Carl Starkloff, pp 1009–21; Polish, By James S. Pule, pp 1138–49; Puerto Rican, by Floyd McCoy, pp 1180–85; Slovak, By Christine Krosel and Mark Stolarik, pp 509–10, 1323–7; Ukrainian, By Wasyl Lencyk, pp 1403–6 (cf. Rusyns, By P. R. Magocsi, on Carpatho-Ukrainians, pp 1221–4); Vietnamese, By Peter С Phan, pp 1434–5.

55 Contrast, for example, Matthew Harkins (1845-1921) of Providence, or even Michael Corrigan (1839-1902) of New York, with John Ireland (1838-1918) of St Paul. On foreign policy see Doyle, David N., Irish Americans, native rights and national empires … 1890–1901 (New York, 1976), esp. pp 12–17, 170, 175, 271–82, 294–313Google Scholar.

56 Lawrence J. McCaffrey, ‘Irish-American Catholics’ in Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, pp 696–705, otherwise a fine résumé of his Irish diaspora in America (revised ed., Washington, 1984), and his less temperate Textures of Irish America (Syracuse, N.Y., 1992).

57 The scholarship exists; relevant archives are open: e.g. Fogarty, Gerald P., The Vatican and the American hierarchy from 1870 to 1965 (Wilmington, 1985)Google Scholar; U.S. Catholic Historian, xii, no. 2 (spring 1994), passim; Ellis, J.T., Catholic bishops: a memoir (Wilmington, Del., 1984), pp 135-49Google Scholar.

58 Listed in Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, pp 1537–41. These range from the almost propagandist James Kenneally, long-serving executive of a society campaigning for women priests, to Philip Gleason, long seeking reconcilation of the Americanist mainstream with Roman initiatives to conserve the Catholic character of church-related colleges and universities, of which there were 232 in 1994: see Kenneally, ‘American Catholic women’, ibid., pp 53–65; Gleason, ‘Catholic education, higher’, ibid., pp 249–54.

59 As these are rarely known here, I list those of them who were born in Ireland: Catherine Barry (1881-1961); Leonora Barry (1849-1930); Teresa Barry (1814-1900); Mary F. Clarke (1803-87); Mary Colum (1887-1957); Margaret Gaffrey Haughery (1813-88); Angela Hughes (1806-66); Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930); Angeline McCrory (1893-1984); Susan McGroarty (1827-1901); Josephine Meagher (1840-1925); Mary G. Phelan (1872-1960); Mary B. Russell (1829-98); Mary P. Waldron (1839-1916); Mary F. X. Wade (18107-1884).

60 Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, pp 62–4, 83–6, 400–2, 664–5, 726–30, 995–6, 1000–2, 1105–7, 1424–30, 1495–8. The strain often shows, for example in the assertion that Thomas T. McAvoy (1903-69) ‘while not theologically liberal, helped fashion an intellectual groundwork for Catholic liberals’ (Maria Mazzenga, ibid., p. 871), or that John McLoughlin (1784-1857) ‘the Father of Oregon’, ‘even after he returned to the Catholic fold … remained open-minded’ (J. A. Schiwek, ibid., p. 892).

61 Ibid., pp 87–8, 287–8; Biever, Bruce F., Religion, culture and values (New York, 1976), p. 533Google Scholar; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical abstract, 1981 (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp 35, 43Google Scholar; Hanna, Mary T., Catholics and American politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 McCaffrey, Lawrence J., The Irish diaspora in America (1st ed., Bloomington, 1976), pp. 171-8Google Scholar; Hickman, Mary, ‘Incorporating and denationalizing the Irish in England: the role of the Catholic church’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, v, 196–216Google Scholar, in relation to Bossy, John, The English Catholic community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Norman, E.R., The English Catholic church in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

63 All these works greatly extend our knowledge of the twentieth-century emigration, a theme on which space constraints prevent discussion here; would that all the relevant chapters were in a single volume, given the absence of a text on post-1922 emigration. See citations in n. 6 above and David M. Reimers, ‘An end and a beginning’ in Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 419–38; Marion R. Casey, ‘ “From the East Side to the seaside”: Irish-Americans on the move in New York City’, ibid., pp 395–415; Robert W. Snyder, ‘The neighborhood changed: the Irish of Washington Heights and Inwood since 1945’, ibid., pp 439–60; Mary P. Corcoran, ‘Emigrants, Eirepreneurs and opportunists: a social profile of recent Irish immigration …’, ibid., pp 461–80; Rebecca S. Miller, ‘Irish traditional and popular music in New York City: identity and social change, 1930–1975’, ibid., pp 481–507; statistical tables, A.7-A.14, ibid., pp 560–64.

64 Cochran, David Carroll, ‘Ethnic diversity and democratic stability: the case of Irish-Americans’ in Political Science Quarterly, cx (1996), pp 587–604Google Scholar; Chase, Jeanne, ‘L’élaboration de l’immigrant Américain’ in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, xlix, no. 4 (1994), pp 929-49CrossRefGoogle Scholar (on the New York Irish, 1790–1820).

65 For U.S.: F. M. Perko, ‘Catholic education, parochial’ and Philip Gleason, ‘Catholic education, higher,’ in Glazier & Shelley (eds), Encyclopedia, pp 249–59, with references, and statistics, pp 86, 259, 302–7; also sources cited in n. 70 below; for England: Hickman, , ‘Incorporating and denationalizing the Irish in England’ in O’Sullivan, (ed.), Irish world wide, v, 201-16Google Scholar, and sources therein cited; for Australia: Barry M. Coldrey, ‘ “A most unenviable reputation”: the Christian Brothers and school discipline over two centuries,’ ibid., pp 217–33; Janice Tranter, ‘The Irish origins of an Australian religious sisterhood’, ibid., pp 234–55; F. X. Martin, ‘ “A great battle”: Bishop James A. Goold of Melbourne (1848-1864) and the state aid for religion controversy’ in MacDonagh, Oliver and Mandle, W.F. (eds), Ireland and Irish-Australia (London, 1986), pp 194-26Google Scholar; for Canada: Walker, F.A., Catholic education and politics in Upper Canada (Toronto, 1955)Google Scholar is still useful, but on the Irish dimension, central to their support for Confederation, see the essays on McGee, Thomas D’Arcy By Davis, W.G. and By Burns, R.B., in O’Driscoll, & Reynolds, (eds), Untold story, i, 459-63, 469–78Google Scholar; contrast Akenson, Irish in Ontario, pp 268–77.

66 See, e.g., citations above in nn 31 (Hofstra), 34 (Pollock and Wilson), 36, 40, 52. Was it a strange presaging intuition of such linkages that caused the vicious cartoonist of early twentieth-century New York, Al Capp, to place poorer Irish-American characters, with huge families, in Scots-Irish mountain country?

67 Lord, Daniel, Played by ear (Chicago, 1956), pp 247-84Google Scholar; Black, Gregory D., Hollywood censored: morality codes, Catholics and the movies (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar; idem, The Catholic crusade against the movies, 1940–1975 (Cambridge, 1997). The chief players were Martin Quigley, Joseph Breen, Patrick Masterson, Daniel Lord, Thomas Little and Patrick J. Sullivan, an all-Irish list, in the age of Cardinals Ritter and Mundelein, with the instigating bishops, John Cantwell and John McNicholas, born and educated in Ireland: a pattern which Gregory Black either fails to discern, or neglects to explain, so uncomplicated is his paradigm of Catholicism versus free expression.

68 Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 5, 71–2, 169–92, 341–5, 534–5, 698–9 (and table); D. N. Doyle, ‘The social structures of an immigrant faith’ in his Irish Americans, native rights and national empires, pp 38–90, esp. Tables 6–7 (pp 68–71).

69 Grada, Cormac Ó, Immigrants, savers and runners: the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in the 1850s, University College Dublin Centre for Economic Research, Working Paper WP98/2 (Dublin, 1998)Google Scholar; Casey, Marion R., ‘New York’s Irish middle class, 1850–1870’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, New York University, 1986)Google Scholar.

70 Perlman, Joel, Ethnic differences: schooling and social structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American city, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, 1988), pp 43–82, 203–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Providence, R.I., for general issues, and on New York, see Pozzetta, George (ed.), Education and the immigrant (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; for higher education of the middle class see McDonough, Peter, Men astutely trained: a history of the Jesuits in the American century (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, although it infers, rather than explores, an Irish-American dimension (Pp 332–8).

71 Birmingham, Stephen, Real lace: America’s Irish rich (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Corry, John, Golden clan: the Murrays, the McDonnells, and the Irish-American aristocracy (Boston, 1977)Google Scholar. But we need systematic study of the more numerous affluent Irish who were not so conspicuously rich.

72 Doyle, David N., ‘Small differences? The study of the Irish in the United States and in Britain’ in I.H.S., xxix, no. 113 (May 1994), pp 114-19Google Scholar.

73 Cf. ‘By 1900 … social indicators of the Irish as an underclass having an inbuilt propensity to destitution, overbreeding and criminality were no longer potent or appropriate. Nevertheless the Irish remained a people apart in a way that was not true in America or the Dominions’ (D’Arcy, ‘St Patrick’s other island’, p. 14, cited in n. 23).

74 Doyle, ‘Remaking of Irish America’, cited in n. 10; Casey, ‘New York’s Irish middle class’ and Ó Gráda, Immigrants, savers & runners, cited in n. 69; Bayor & Meagher (eds), New York Irish, pp 87–205; sources in O’Sullivan’s series, cited in n. 13.

75 Maume, Patrick, ‘Life that is exile’: Daniel Corkery and his search for Irish Ireland (Belfast, 1993)Google Scholar; Corkery, Daniel, ‘Nightfall’ in The stormy hills [1929] (repr., Cork, n.d.), pp 7–14Google Scholar.

76 See, e.g., Geary, Laurence M., ‘Australia felix: Irish doctors in nineteenth-century Victoria’ in O’Sullivan, (ed), Irish world wide, ii, 162-79Google Scholar; Barrington, Clare, Irish women in England: an annotated bibliography (Dublin, 1997)Google Scholar. Older approaches survive, such as Gerard Brennan, ‘The Irish and law in Australia’ in MacDonagh & Mandle (eds), Ireland & Irish-Australia, pp 18–32.