The exodus of nearly 10 million people from Ireland after 1700 to North America, but also Britain and Australasia, created a diaspora unique in scale and significance.
Across the world today millions of people – the estimates vary widely – who are the descendants of those who left the country constitute the global Irish, people who through ethnic or cultural ties proudly describe themselves as Irish.
Only in recent times have those living on the island come to accept, reluctantly in some cases, that Irishness is not about where you were born or grew up, but common ancestry, a shared sense of history, and a deeply felt Irish identity.
Ireland's relationship with North America is often seen as one-way traffic: emigrants left Ireland to make their lives in the United States and Canada. This new book by the distinguished historian of Ireland, David Fitzpatrick, who died in February 2019, sets out to demolish this view. He does this very effectively, and in classic style, by deploying statistics and other evidence to force us to rethink our untested and lazy assumptions.
Fitzpatrick demonstrates, based on an impressive analysis of a huge amount of statistical and documentary information, that “the course of modern Irish history is inexplicable without confronting Americanisation”.
“Americanisation” is taken as the influences on Irish social, cultural, political and economic life that came from across the Atlantic between the Great Famine and the mid-1920s. It differed very substantially from the other great force of change in late 19th century Ireland, Anglicisation, yet its effects are largely unknown. Till now, that is.
For the most part people were the agents of change: Americans who settled in Ireland for work or other reasons, and more especially the children and grandchildren of those who had emigrated, who returned to live in their ancestral homeland and who promoted American norms, customs and outlooks.
Irish lore
The returned Yank was a familiar figure of Irish lore, someone who, after years of living in America, returns home with capital and expertise, sometimes attracting the ire and jealously of contemptuous neighbours. But this study extends across generations to include those born in the United States and Canada.
Fitzpatrick is interested in the broader grouping of Americans, which he identifies using the census records for the early 20th century, along with other digital sources such as passenger lists and government records.
After the first World War the US government required those entering the country to have passports, and he has made excellent use of these applications to help reconstruct the stories of Ireland’s American population. What emerges is a fascinating statistical portrait which is interspersed with many vivid personal accounts.
A characteristic of all Fitzpatrick’s writings – and very evident in this his final book – is the ability to combine rigorous demographic analysis with an understanding of the fragility and complexity of the human experience. People in the past, or indeed the present, do not always act rationally, and some choices appear inexplicable or irrational.
For instance in the passport applications a common theme is of American relatives who travel to Ireland ostensibly for the short term, to care for a family member or look or deal with the legal affairs of a deceased relative, only to find that they end up staying for years.
The elite Americans who worked in professional and administrative roles were mainly based in Ireland’s towns and cities who can be “viewed as a showcase of American modernity exported in human form to Ireland”. A number of “professional” Americans also feature in this account, including musicians, performers, artists, writers and missionaries.
Cosmopolitan
The overall sense that comes out clearly from his discussion of the other nationalities who featured from Britain, Europe and further afield along with the Americans and Canadians is just how cosmopolitan Ireland was at this time.
Ironically after Independence in 1922, Ireland was a less hospitable place to outsiders as the country entered an era of cultural isolation. We now know that this isolation was overstated, as histories of Ireland during the second World War and beyond amply show. The 1920s and 1930s were, however, decades when Ireland was most isolated in the 20th century.
A remarkable aspect of the book is the detailed study of Co Leitrim, where Fitzpatrick's ancestors hailed from. One third of young adults in Leitrim between the Great Famine and the first World War emigrated, mostly to the United States. In painstaking detail, Fitzpatrick reconstructs the demographic experience of Co Leitrim and presents a compelling portrait of the county's American population.
Over the course of a long and very distinguished career Fitzpatrick opened up new areas of study or challenged conventional wisdom on old ones. His first book, Politics and Irish Life (1977), reinterpreted the history of the Irish Revolution using the experience of Co Clare.
His writings on the history of Irish emigration and the Irish overseas set almost impossibly high standards of scholarship. Not as well known in Ireland, his book on emigrant letters exchanged between Ireland and Australia in the 19th century, Oceans of Consolation (1994), is widely recognised internationally as a classic work in the history of global migrations.
Scholarship
His biographies of Harry Boland, Frederick MacNeice (father of Louis) and Ernest Blythe are widely acclaimed as models of dispassionate scholarship, as is his work on the history of Irish Protestants, a group who were at one time completely written out of Irish history.
Fitzpatrick also published seminal studies on divorce and separation, the basis of rural agitation, the impact of the first World War on Ireland, all topics that were regarded as beyond the pale in the 1980s and early 1990s.
In what is a poignant epilogue entitled “questions unanswered” he observes that many of the themes raised by this book will have to pursued by others due to illness, and he records his hope “that Americanisation might one day become the key feature of a major recasting of post-Famine Irish history”.
This important book will propel this debate, and there could be no more appropriate tribute to one of Ireland’s finest historians.
Enda Delaney is professor of modern history at the University of Edinburgh
