LIVERPOOL, this year's European capital of culture, is the most Irish city in Britain - and not just because three of the Beatles had Irish roots, writes Brendan Ó Cathaoir.
As the former "gateway to the Atlantic" reinvents itself, ghosts of the Famine emigrants linger on the restored waterfront. At the height of the mass influx from across the Irish Sea, Liverpool became a "city of the plague".
But an Irish community prospered there before the Famine. St Patrick's Chapel in Park Place, now closed, was built by public subscription "under the express stipulation that the whole of the ground floor shall forever remain free for the accommodation of all". Outside, a Celtic cross commemorates 10 priests, including three Benedictine monks, who in attending to the sick caught typhus fever and died in 1847.
The passage to and through Liverpool was the most common experience of Famine emigrants. At the height of the catastrophe, as panic succeeded bewilderment in 1846-47, thousands of desperate people walked from western counties to Dublin and crossed the Irish Sea on the decks of cattle boats. Many who had escaped typhus in Ireland contracted the fever in Liverpool's notorious lodging houses while awaiting embarkation for the New World. As refugees streamed in at the rate of 1,000 a week, the emigrant business became almost as vicious as the recently abolished slave trade.
Nowhere else in the world was the contrast between economic vitality and destitution more manifest than when this outpouring of humanity broke like a wave on the Mersey waterfront. In a sense, all Irish townlands met there for the first time and witnessed their common fate. The poverty of the Irish was visible in their malnourished bodies and rags. But their demeanour also distinguished them from other paupers. They were described as "passive" and "stunned", with the fever-stricken "resigned beyond natural resignation".
The authorities, already overwhelmed, were frustrated by the tendency of the sick or starving peasants to hide furtively in cellars. Their furtiveness was due partly to a fear of being sent back; some 15,000 were returned to Ireland under the Poor Law Removal Act. Speaking Gaelic above a whisper outside the Irish wards also branded the emigrants for the swarms of predators.
During 1847 an estimated 200,000 Irish arrived; more than 130,000 departed for North America. The Liverpool Timesobserved there were two classes of migrants: the emigrants of hope and those of despair. The latter category tended to stay in Britain. Irish families could be seen begging on the roads to Manchester and other industrial centres.
Typhus, dysentery and cholera reached epidemic proportions in Liverpool slums (where an estimated 35,000, mainly Irish, had crowded into putrid cellars). Doctors did not know then that typhus was carried by lice. Up to 100,000 people were infected; nearly 7,500 died and were buried in mass graves.
The bedraggled hordes fleeing from Ireland provided an irresistible scapegoat for public revulsion and official impotence, while their brutalised condition confirmed sectarian hatred. The Liverpool Herald, a leading Orange paper, commented: "It is remarkable that the lower order of Irish papists are the filthiest beings in the habitable globe, they abound in dirt and vermin and have no care for anything but self-gratification that would degrade the brute creation." The simianised Irishman was incubating in the mind of Victorian caricaturists.
Moreover, a fear of revolution was so palpable in 1848 that when habeas corpus was suspended in Ireland, the burghers of Liverpool took the extraordinary step of seeking to have that draconian measure extended to their city.
Initially, the Famine Irish were glad to accept any job in the expanding seaport. Gradually, some rose above the unskilled labour force. In 1885 the Scotland division of Liverpool became the only constituency in Britain to elect an Irish nationalist MP (the journalist T.P. O'Connor). The Irish labour leader James Larkin was born in Liverpool. As late as the 1930s there were complaints about the "grave injury being done to the prosperity of Merseyside" by unrestricted Irish immigration.
Although tensions persisted throughout the Northern Ireland Troubles, sectarianism has now been vanquished in Liverpool. The Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals no longer frown on each other from opposing hilltops. Sir John Betjeman described the Anglican cathedral as as "one of the great buildings of the world". The Cathedral of Christ the King, nicknamed "Paddy's Wigwam" because of the Irishness of its congregation and its resemblance to a Native American tepee, was built on the site of the largest workhouse in Britain and consecrated in 1967.
The Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool today forms part of a network of growing interest in our history and culture. We have come a long way since Liverpool's greatest son, W.E. Gladstone, announced at the outset of his premiership in 1868: "My mission is to pacify Ireland." His statue dominates Merseyside Peace Garden, which is dedicated to the people of all nations whose lives have been blighted by war.
St Luke's Church stands roofless since the Nazi blitz of 1941. In the adjoining gardens a sculpture by Éamonn O'Doherty (unveiled by President McAleese in 1998) remembers our exodus. Its inscription exhorts: "Let us continue the work of helping those displaced by famine and disease in many parts of the world. Let us dismantle those systems which still cause such suffering." At Clarence Dock gates a bilingual plaque records: "Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled the Great Famine to Liverpool in 1845-52."