The Irish Who Helped Shape Liverpool — Migration, Famine, Faith and Politics

The Irish were here before the famine

Liverpool’s relationship with Ireland stretches back centuries.

Its geographical position made the town a natural point of communication with Ireland, and as Liverpool developed into a major port, those connections became increasingly important.

By the early nineteenth century Irish labourers were already a familiar part of Liverpool life.

They worked on construction projects and around the rapidly expanding docks, performing some of the most physically demanding jobs required by the growing port.

An important glimpse comes from the 1836 investigation The State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain.

The evidence reveals an uncomfortable contradiction.

Irish migrants could be subjected to extraordinary prejudice and stereotyped as lazy or undesirable while employers simultaneously relied upon them for extremely hard manual labour.

One observation recorded that much of Liverpool’s heavy work was performed by Irish workers.

The Irish were therefore helping build and operate the Victorian port before the famine migration began.

Then, in 1845, everything changed.

The Great Famine and Liverpool

Potato blight devastated Ireland from 1845.

For communities heavily dependent upon the potato, repeated crop failures became catastrophic.

Hunger was accompanied by disease, eviction and economic collapse.

People fled.

Liverpool became one of the principal gateways out of Ireland.

Steamers and other vessels crossed the Irish Sea carrying extraordinary numbers of migrants to the Mersey.

The most dramatic year was 1847 — Black ’47.

Contemporary estimates frequently cited in histories of the period suggest that approximately 300,000 Irish migrants arrived through Liverpool during that year alone.

But this figure requires an important qualification.

They did not all settle here.

Liverpool was one of the world's great emigration ports, and for many Irish arrivals it was intended to be merely a stopping point.

America was the destination.

New York, Boston and other cities were developing enormous Irish communities, and ships departing Liverpool offered the possibility of escape across the Atlantic.

But some migrants never made that second journey.

They arrived sick, exhausted and desperately poor.

Some simply couldn't afford another passage.

Liverpool became their home.

The Irish north end

The consequences were particularly visible around Vauxhall, Scotland Road and the surrounding north end.

Large Irish communities developed there.

They entered a city already suffering serious housing and sanitation problems.

Liverpool’s notorious courts and cellar dwellings could be overcrowded, damp and inadequately ventilated. Clean water and effective sewerage were far from guaranteed.

The sudden arrival of thousands of impoverished people intensified an existing public-health disaster.

Disease spread rapidly.

Typhus, cholera and dysentery became killers.

Liverpool's pioneering Medical Officer of Health, Dr William Henry Duncan, documented the relationship between overcrowding, poverty, sanitation and disease.

Contemporary officials sometimes described epidemic illness using language that blamed Irish migrants themselves.

Such evidence has to be treated carefully.

The Irish had not created Liverpool's slums.

They had arrived in a rapidly expanding Victorian city where extreme poverty and dreadful housing already existed.

The famine migration exposed just how inadequate Liverpool's infrastructure had become.

The Famine Priests

Among the most moving stories of famine-era Liverpool is that of the Catholic priests who entered infected homes to minister to the sick.

They visited overcrowded neighbourhoods where disease was rampant.

They comforted families, heard confessions and administered the last rites to the dying.

They understood the danger.

Some paid for that work with their lives.

A number of priests died after contracting disease while serving Liverpool’s poorest communities.

They became remembered in Catholic tradition as Liverpool's Famine Priests, and sometimes as the city's famine martyrs.

Their deaths also illustrate how different Victorian welfare was from the system we know today.

Long before the welfare state, priests, ministers, charities, religious orders and voluntary organisations frequently performed roles now associated with social services.

One Liverpool priest would take that work considerably further.

Father James Nugent

James Nugent, born in Liverpool in 1822, became one of Victorian Liverpool's most important social reformers.

After entering the priesthood, Nugent confronted a city containing enormous wealth alongside desperate poverty.

Children were particularly vulnerable.

Some survived by begging, selling small items, shining shoes or taking whatever casual work they could find.

Others slept rough.

Victorian society sometimes dismissed them as “street urchins”.

Nugent saw children who needed help.

He became associated with ragged schools, education, children's welfare, temperance and institutions designed to protect vulnerable young people.

His work is especially significant because he could cooperate across Liverpool's formidable religious divide.

One of his allies was the Anglican clergyman Canon Major Lester, another determined campaigner for disadvantaged children.

Catholic and Anglican Liverpool could be bitterly hostile.

Yet Nugent and Lester demonstrated that cooperation was possible.

Their statues now stand close to one another in St John’s Gardens.

Nugent's legacy did not disappear with Victorian Liverpool.

It survives through the charitable organisation known today as Nugent.

Irish women and the city

Liverpool's Irish history is sometimes told overwhelmingly through male dock workers.

That leaves out an enormous part of the story.

Irish women were fundamental to Liverpool life.

Domestic service provided employment for many young women arriving from Ireland, while nursing became particularly significant.

Generations of Irish women worked in Liverpool's hospitals, homes and charitable institutions.

Catholic religious orders also became heavily involved in nursing, education, children's welfare and care for the elderly and destitute.

Irish influence was therefore found far beyond Scotland Road and the docks.

It existed inside Liverpool's hospitals, schools, kitchens, convents and homes.

There was no single “Irish community”

Perhaps the biggest misconception is the idea that Liverpool's Irish population formed one united community.

It didn't.

Migrants came from different counties and different traditions.

Some were Catholic.

Others Protestant.

Some supported Irish nationalism.

Others passionately supported the Union with Britain.

There were Home Rulers, republicans, Liberals and Orangemen.

Even people arriving from different parts of Ireland could carry strong local identities and rivalries with them.

As Liverpool's Irish population grew, political and religious disputes originating across the Irish Sea became part of Liverpool life.

That could have serious consequences.

Orange and green

The Orange Order established a powerful presence among sections of Liverpool's Protestant population.

Catholic communities developed their own churches, societies and political organisations.

Public processions and commemorations became highly visible expressions of identity.

Sometimes they became flashpoints.

Liverpool experienced repeated episodes of sectarian tension and violence during the nineteenth century and beyond.

Powerful Protestant evangelical figures such as Hugh McNeile helped create a particularly assertive Protestant culture in the city.

Later campaigners would take sectarian politics in even more confrontational directions.

This is an uncomfortable history.

But it is part of Liverpool's Irish story.

Migration brought extraordinary cultural, economic and social contributions to Liverpool.

It also brought political and religious conflicts that were reshaped within the city itself.

Fenian Liverpool

There was also a revolutionary tradition.

During the 1860s Liverpool became an important British centre for Fenianism.

The Fenian movement sought an independent Irish republic.

Liverpool was strategically valuable.

It contained a huge Irish population, sat only a short journey across the Irish Sea from Ireland and was one of the world's great international ports.

Republican networks operated within the city.

Liverpool activists became connected with some of the most dramatic episodes of 1867, including preparations surrounding the attempted raid on Chester Castle and the repercussions of the Manchester prison van rescue.

Three Irishmen — William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O'Brien — were subsequently executed.

They became celebrated among Irish nationalists as the Manchester Martyrs.

Their deaths resonated strongly within Irish communities, including Liverpool.

Yet revolutionary republicanism was only one form of nationalism.

Another would enter Liverpool's ballot boxes.

Home Rule and the Irish vote

As Liverpool's Irish population became established, it gradually acquired significant electoral influence.

By the later nineteenth century thousands of Irish and Irish-descended men could vote.

Catholic political organisation initially tended to support Liberal candidates.

The emergence of the campaign for Irish Home Rule changed the situation.

Home Rule supporters began contesting elections in Liverpool, concentrating particularly on districts containing substantial Irish populations.

Vauxhall and Scotland Road became political strongholds.

Irish nationalist councillors entered Liverpool civic politics.

Among those associated with the movement were Laurence Connolly, Charles McArdle and Andrew Commins.

Something profound had happened.

The Irish were no longer merely migrants whose problems were discussed by Liverpool politicians.

They had become an electorate capable of choosing representatives themselves.

Then came one of the most extraordinary elections in Liverpool's political history.

T. P. O’Connor and Liverpool Scotland

The redistribution of parliamentary constituencies in 1885 created Liverpool Scotland.

The constituency contained a very large Irish population.

At the general election its voters elected Thomas Power O'Connor — T. P. O'Connor — an Irish nationalist.

An Irish nationalist MP representing a constituency in Liverpool.

O'Connor retained the seat through election after election.

He remained MP for Liverpool Scotland until his death in 1929.

For more than four decades a part of Liverpool sent an Irish nationalist representative to Westminster.

It is difficult to find a better demonstration of just how deeply Irish political identity had become embedded within Liverpool.

The Irish pub was more than a pub

Politics did not happen solely inside council chambers and Parliament.

Some of it happened inside pubs.

For migrant communities, the public house could perform several functions simultaneously.

It was somewhere to drink, certainly.

But it could also be a meeting place, informal employment exchange, political headquarters, social club and home for friendly societies.

Nationalist organisations used pubs.

Mutual-aid societies used pubs.

Workers met there.

News from Ireland circulated there.

In a period before modern social security, friendly societies could be extremely important. Illness, injury or unemployment might otherwise leave a working family destitute.

The Irish pub consequently became one of the places where community networks and political identities were maintained.

The legacy of that relationship between Liverpool and Irish pub culture remains visible across the city today.

Journalists, politicians and professionals

Another stereotype deserves challenging.

Irish Liverpool was not composed solely of poor labourers.

The labourers were enormously important — but they were not the whole community.

Irish and Irish-descended Liverpool also produced journalists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, politicians and campaigners.

John Denvir combined journalism with nationalism and temperance campaigning.

Justin McCarthy became a journalist, novelist, historian and nationalist politician.

Then there was Michael James Whitty.

Born in County Wexford, Whitty became an important figure in Liverpool civic life.

He was associated with the development of Liverpool's policing and fire services and founded the newspaper that developed into the Liverpool Daily Post.

Their stories reveal a community becoming increasingly embedded within every level of Liverpool society.

The dock labourer was Irish Liverpool.

So was the nurse.

The priest.

The journalist.

The publican.

The barrister.

The councillor.

And eventually the MP.

From migrants to Scousers

By the end of the nineteenth century, it was becoming impossible to tell Liverpool's history without telling the history of its Irish population.

Irish influence could be seen in its neighbourhoods, churches, hospitals, charities, schools, newspapers, pubs, labour force and politics.

But perhaps the greatest transformation happened inside families.

The famine refugee who arrived from Ireland had children in Liverpool.

Those children had children of their own.

Accents changed.

Communities mixed.

Identities evolved.

Within generations, people whose grandparents had crossed the Irish Sea were simply Liverpudlians.

Scousers.

The Irish heritage remained — sometimes strongly, sometimes only through a surname, a family story or the knowledge that somebody several generations ago had come from Cork, Dublin, Wexford, Galway, Mayo or somewhere else across the water.

The Irish who helped shape Liverpool

The Great Famine remains central to this history.

It should.

It was one of the great human catastrophes of the nineteenth century and transformed Liverpool.

But reducing Liverpool's Irish history to those terrible years misses something much larger.

Irish people were here before the famine.

They built docks and infrastructure.

They performed some of Liverpool's hardest labour.

They cared for its sick.

They educated its children.

They founded charities.

They established newspapers.

They organised politically.

They fought among themselves.

They challenged Liverpool's establishment.

They became councillors and MPs.

They created churches, clubs, societies and pubs.

And eventually their descendants became inseparable from the city itself.

The Irish didn't simply come to Liverpool.

They helped make Liverpool what it became.

And for countless Scouse families today, Ireland isn't simply the country across the water.

It's part of the family story.

About this article

This article was developed from Dr Ben Rees's talk, The Irish Community in 19th Century Liverpool, presented to the Wavertree Society.

The talk provides the inspiration, structure and many of the people and themes explored here. Additional historical research should accompany the published version's formal source list so readers can explore the evidence in greater depth.

Credit: Dr Ben Rees and the Wavertree Society.