THE IRISH IN AMERICA

In hopeless circumstances at home, the Irish fled their homeland by the hundreds of thousands each year. From 1845-1855, nearly a quarter of the population emigrated, mostly from rural, Catholic, often Irish-speaking areas of Ireland. They fled to England, to Australia, and in greatest numbers to North America, seeking new homes in Canada and the United States. Thus began a pattern of emigration that would become a psychic trauma in Irish life for over a hundred years.

There had always been a migratory pull to the New World of the Americas. The Irish had played a major role in the earliest days of colonial life in America, but those Irish were driven by a sense of opportunity and adventure in a new world. During the starvation years, the exodus of the Irish was driven by desperation.

At the height of the Hunger Migration, the five-to-eight-week journey was especially perilous. The most desperate took unprecedented winter crossings to Canada on what came to be called “coffin ships” where fever and typhus became unwelcome shipmates. Many of these ships were cargo vessels used to bring lumber from Canadian forests to build English cities. Now Irish immigrants served as human ballast in the holds of these ships for the return trip. Thousands perished on the journey or in quarantine stations on arrival in the land they had hoped would save them.

Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith writes, “The thousands who poured over the Atlantic in 1847 were fugitives, a helpless horde of the kind which flees from a bombed town.” Despite the trauma of the journey, they continued to come and would do so for generations following The Great Hunger.

The New World was often hostile to this flood of impoverished Irish immigrants. In America’s cities, including Philadelphia, they arrived to face the native “Know-Nothing” movement, which defined “American” in terms that excluded the newly arriving Irish as “papists,” “foreign paupers,” “a motley multitude.”

Most came from rural, agricultural backgrounds, but they landed in an urban, industrial world. Many had never been more than twenty miles from home before undertaking the hazardous transatlantic journey. Apprehensive, but eager to start a new life in freedom, they disembarked at ports like this one on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.

However, when seeking employment, they were often greeted with the message “No Irish Need Apply.” Yet, by 1850, eighteen percent of the population of Philadelphia was Irish.

Attitudes toward the Irish were typified by an English commentator who described Irish immigrants as “more like tribes of squalid apes than human beings.” A prominent Philadelphian wrote of the Irish that they had “revolting and vicious habits. Being of the lower order of mankind, they were repellent to those who were further advanced in the social scale.”

This memorial commemorates the struggle and pain of those Irish who fled their homeland in the face of a hunger of catastrophic proportions. It celebrates their courage and honors them for opening the door for others. Their story springs from one dark period in the history of a distant island, but their journey and arrival changed the face of American life and forged an enduring link between Ireland and America.

As it was for the Irish long ago, America remains a hopeful refuge from suffering and injustice. The Irish experience, its traumas and its triumphs, stands as a model from which we can learn and grow. “The Irish, by being the first and the largest urban minority group with which American society had to deal, and by working their way into the general society, would constitute an example for the array of other immigrants who would follow them.” (Dennis Clark).

In 1994, speaking at the site of a quarantine station at Grosse Isle, Quebec, where 5,300 Irish died in 1847, Mary Robinson, President of Ireland, challenged her listeners to be participants in history rather than mere spectators: “If we are participants then we realize there are no inevitable victims…. If we are participants, we engage with the present in terms of the past.”

In looking at this monument on the edge of a river in a great American city, we honor the past, but we are also challenged to look at the present and to the future. For the most part, the children and grandchildren of the Hunger immigrants have prospered and are grateful for the bountiful blessings of America.