Departures - Leaving Ireland

The histories of migration in Ireland are those of arrivals, settlers gaining land and property, and departures; of explorers; of Christian missionaries; those who have been forcibly transported; have fled war and famine; dispossessed of land, property and livelihood.

One of the first significant departures involves a story among stories, collectively called Immram. They are NOT fake news! The voyage of St Brendan forms the basis for one of these stories and is discussed in an article for the Ceann Sleibhe Information Wrap.


These Immrama were written in the Christian era and were first recorded as early as the 7th century by monks and scholars who had fled Continental Europe as a result of the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. These monks carried the learning of Western Europe and became the vanguard of the Christianizing of Europe. On this account it is expected that Immram have their origins in pre-existing Christian voyage literature, pre-existing Celtic legends, or classical stories the monks would have known. Essentially Christian in aspect, they preserve elements of Irish mythology.

Fact and fiction merge with the legend of St Brendan the navigator, who was probably born north west of the village on Fenit Island in close proximity to what is now Fenit harbour around 484, where there is a bronze monument and a view over Brandon Bay looking out to Mount Brandon on the Dingle peninsula.

The early Irish, particularly monks, were certainly far travelled, reaching the Orkney, Shetland, Faroe Islands at an early date and perhaps even reaching Iceland. Some places and things referenced in the immrama and the Brendan tale have been associated with real islands and real things.

The earliest extant version of The Voyage of Saint Brendan was recorded around AD 900. There are over 100 manuscripts of the story across Europe, as well as many additional translations.

The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an overtly Christian narrative, but also contains narratives of natural phenomena and fantastical events and places, which appealed to a broad populace. The Voyage of Saint Brendan contains many parallels and inter-textual references to the Voyage of Bran and the Voyage of Máel Dúin.

On the Kerry coast, he built a currach-like boat of wattle, covered it with hides tanned in oak bark softened with butter, set up a mast and a sail. He and a small group of monks fasted for forty days, and after a prayer upon the shore, embarked in the name of the Trinity. The account is characterized by a great deal of literary license and contains references to hell where “great demons threw down lumps of fiery slag from an island with rivers of gold fire” and “great crystal pillars.” Many now believe these to be references to the volcanic activity around Iceland, and to icebergs.

The story may or may not be about real things, but the story itself is heritage, a product of culture, and a picturing of the world, real and/or imaginary.

Forced departures

Iceland was a destination for the departure of many Irish people in the ninth-century, but these were forced departures, part of the story of slavery in Ireland.

Gaelic raiders had kidnapped and enslaved people from across the Irish Sea for two centuries after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire destabilised Roman Britain; their most famous victim was Saint Patrick.

Early Irish law makes numerous reference to slaves and semi-free sencléithe. A female slave (cumal) was often used as a unit of value in financial transactions, e.g. in expressing the honour price of people of certain classes. Such a unit of value was worth a good deal less than a horse.

Dublin's slave market

However, it was the Vikings who, from the 9th to the 12th century, established in Viking Dublin a major slave trading centre which led to a significant increase in the enslavement and migration of the indigenous people of the island of Ireland.

When the Vikings established early Scandinavian Dublin in 841, they began a slave market that would come to sell thralls captured both in Ireland and other countries as distant as Spain, as well as sending Irish slaves as far away as Iceland, where Gaels formed 40% of the founding population, and Anatolia. In 875, Irish slaves in Iceland launched Europe's largest slave rebellion since the end of the Roman Empire, when Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson's slaves killed him and fled to Vestmannaeyjar. Almost all recorded slave raids by the Vikings in this period took place in Leinster and southeast Ulster, although in 870, Vikings, most likely led by Olaf the White and Ivar the Boneless, besieged and captured the stronghold of Dumbarton Castle (Alt Clut), the capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde in Scotland, and the next year took most of the site's inhabitants to the Dublin slave markets.

The History Ireland online history magazine published an article by Clare Downham, a lecturer in Celtic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, in 2009, and headlined with the question:

The Viking slave trade: entrepreneurs or heathen slavers? 

Les pirates normands au IXe siècle by Évariste-Vital Luminais (1894). The Annals of Ulster record that in AD 821 Howth, Co. Dublin, was raided and ‘a great booty of women was carried away’. (Musée Anne de Beaujeu, Moulin) "clickbait" Alert! 

Slave-raiding across the Irish Sea is attested (in both directions) at the time when Roman power collapsed in Britain. There is no evidence, however, of large-scale slave-raiding in Ireland in the century prior to the Vikings’ first recorded raids. Slaves were, nevertheless, obtained by other means—as prisoners of war, or in lieu of debts that could not be paid. In addition, parents occasionally sold their children or gave themselves into slavery as a desperate measure during times of famine.

Acquisition
When the Vikings came to raid the coasts of Ireland, people, along with ecclesiastical metalwork and cattle, were portable goods that could be taken off in ships. The Annals of Ulster record that in AD 821 Howth, Co. Dublin, was raided and ‘a great booty of women was carried away’. Viking leaders also realised that they could obtain a quick and sizeable profit by ransoming high-status captives back to their communities or families. From the 830s a number of high-profile figures were seized (usually kings or bishops), who were later released (presumably for a fee) or who were ‘killed at the ships’ of the Vikings—perhaps because hostage negotiations failed or because the captives chose to put up a fight.
 
The late ninth-century Life of St Findan has a remarkable account of one individual’s travail at the hands of the Vikings. Findan (a man of noble stock from Leinster) was sent to ransom his sister, who had been taken by Vikings. Things went badly and Findan was himself captured, although some of the Vikings argued that it was wrong to seize negotiators and he was soon freed. Findan nevertheless was taken by Vikings on another occasion and carried off to the Orkney Islands, where he eventually escaped and made his way to the Continent. A curious feature of the account is that Findan’s second capture was aided by an Irish conspirator. Political alliances between Vikings and Irish are recorded in the annals from the 840s. In the tenth and eleventh centuries we hear of Irish kings gathering captives as the booty of war, presumably so that they too could profit from the burgeoning slave markets established in Ireland’s major ports.

Fate
What was the fate of those captured by Vikings? The Life of Findan suggests that some were sold on to Viking colonies in Britain, while recent DNA studies suggest that many went to Iceland. A sensational story is also found in a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga concerning an Irish princess called Melkorka who was brought to Iceland as a slave. Melkorka pretended to be dumb, and it was only after she had borne a child to her owner that her Irish pedigree was discovered. Laxdaela Saga presents one of several medieval stories that circulated about Irish princesses in Iceland. These probably reflect later fantasies about exotic noble beauties rather than historical reality. Another destination for slaves exported from Ireland was the east. The comparatively sophisticated Islamic and Byzantine empires produced many luxury goods that were sought after by Viking traders, and there is archaeological evidence for imports from these regions, including Byzantine silk and Arabic coins, in Ireland. These high-status goods were exchanged for ‘unmanufactured’ items from northern Europe, including slaves and furs.

The destination of slaves was only one aspect of their fate; their treatment was another. The Arabic geographer Ibn Fadlan gives a very dark account of the way the Vikings treated their female slaves, which included human sacrifice. There is some evidence for this in an insular context. At Ballateare on the Isle of Man a wealthy Viking was buried with many slaves, including a young female who had been killed by a savage blow across the top of her skull. Her remains lay towards the top of the warrior’s burial mound, mixed in with the cremated remains of his animals. An eleventh-century poem, Moriuht, purports to tell the tale of an Irish poet and his family who were captured by Vikings. The poem is an outrageous attack by a rival, who delights in claims that Moriuht was urinated upon and gang-raped by his captors.
 
There is no doubt that people living in eastern coastal districts of Ireland feared seizure by Vikings. Probably very few slaves were sacrificed to heathen gods. Most would have ended up living alongside their new owners, in Ireland or abroad, required to do the dirtier and more laborious work of the household. Whether owners were relatively kind (eventually freeing their dependants and endowing them with land) or whether they treated their slaves worse than their livestock was probably a matter of luck.

Opposition
Not all slaves accepted their condition. A few escaped; one, an Irish bishop held on Dalkey Island in 940, died in the attempt. The Icelandic Book of Settlements tells a story of a revolt by Irish slaves in the early days of the Scandinavian colony, but in this tale the escapees were all killed. It is possible that some of the wars fought between Irish and Vikings were fuelled by accusations that the enemy had made slaves of their people. In 980 the Southern Uí Néill king Maelechlainn stormed Dublin. He was credited with releasing all the Irish slaves in the port from captivity. This may have been a wise political move as well as an act of charity; it served as a rallying point for a king who sought supremacy across Ireland, and it imposed an economic disadvantage on his defeated enemies. In the late tenth century the fortunes of Viking rulers in Ireland were in decline. They suffered a series of defeats at the hands of powerful Irish kings. In these situations the tables were turned. Irish kings now seized human booty from the defeated Viking armies or towns. Their justification seems to have been that the inhabitants of Viking towns were foreigners bearing the sins of their ancestors.

Decline of the slave trade
Notwithstanding the significant defeats suffered by the Viking towns, they remained economically powerful in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and commerce in slaves continued. There is greater evidence for the involvement of Irish kings in this lucrative business in the eleventh century. There are also reports of slaves being paid as tribute, or in return for military service. In 1098 ships from Dublin supported the Welsh of Anglesey against the Normans, but they were induced to change sides by a Norman earl with promises of ‘captives . . . of young men and maidens’. A near-contemporary Welsh source reports with relish that the earl ‘assembled from afar all the hags—toothless, humped, lame, one-eyed, troublesome, feeble’ to give as payment to the ‘traitors’, and at the sight of them the Dubliners weighed anchor and sailed away.
 
A significant blow was dealt to the slave market of Dublin in 1102 when trafficking in human cargo was banned in England. This led to the breakdown of exchange networks in this particular commodity, although some illicit trading may have continued from the port of Bristol, where Irish merchants were accused of carrying unwitting visitors off in their ships.

The Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland used the persistence of the slave trade as a justification for conquest. Any English slaves in Ireland were to be freed, according to a degree of the Council of Armagh in 1171. It is not clear whether there were many English slaves in Ireland at this time, but it certainly suited the invaders to seize the moral high ground. Trading in slaves had been abolished in areas under Norman rule, partly on religious grounds as a movement for spiritual reform spread through Christendom, but also for economic reasons. Across large areas of Europe population growth meant that lower classes of freemen were forced to accept deteriorating conditions of employment: slavery was no longer necessary. The Normans opposed slavery but supported a feudal system that saw people of the lowest ranks effectively enslaved as serfs.

Conclusion
Viking slave-raids on Ireland seemed fearful and abhorrent to contemporaries, despite the fact that slavery was already an integral part of Irish society. Perhaps this fear was fuelled by the alien ways and heathenism of the first Viking raiders and their method of slave acquisition, which operated outside the norms of Irish society. Despite this, over time, non-Viking groups became willing to participate in similar slaving activities in Ireland and elsewhere. How important slavery was to the economy of the Viking Age ports in Ireland is unclear. Contemporary sources perhaps tell us more about the emotions that were aroused by the capture and sale of individuals than about the commercial significance of these transactions.
 
Medieval slave-traders sought to depersonalise their victims (perhaps to soothe their own consciences) by identifying them as low-born, criminals, foreigners, or members of an opposing political group. In passing judgement on medieval crimes against humanity, it is worth remembering that such labels have also been used in modern times when denying people basic human rights.

The image chosen for this article illustrates the abduction by Norsemen of a young woman to a life of slavery. It is a work by the nineteenth-century French artist Évariste Vital Luminais, a historical and genre based work that underlays the factual aspects with a sexual frisson, explicit but undeclared, clearly intended for a male audience.

Update 2019

The factual aspects are, nevertheless historically relevant, but often luridly presented, as the "clickbait" value of images often applies. For example, this article for Archaeology World with a sensationalist headline:

Viking Sex Slaves, Behind The Founding Of Iceland

"clickbait" Alert!

Iceland has become among millennials a famous tourist destination with its incredible landscape, friendly people, and cheap flights. Although, if any found themselves in Reykjavik and took a trip to the National Museum of Iceland, they might find a display there with an interesting statistic. In fact, it’s a statistic with some dark implications for Iceland’s past.

After analyzing the DNA of modern Icelanders, scientists have been able to come up with a fairly accurate idea of what the founding population of the country looked like. Around 80% of Icelandic men were Norse, hailing from Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Of course, as a colony founded by Norse settlers, that’s to be expected. But based on the mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed down in the female line, we know that over half of the female settlers were Celtic, meaning they came from Ireland, Scotland, and the northwestern islands of Britain. So essentially, the founders of Iceland were a strange combination of Norse men and Celtic women.

At first glance, that fact is just an interesting bit of genealogy. But it quickly grows more disturbing the more you think about it. After all, the people who settled Iceland were also the same people who produced the infamous Vikings. However, as most people know, the Vikings had a habit of carrying off slaves. Given the genetics of Iceland and the nature of the people who settled it, it’s possible that a large percentage of the first women in Iceland were taken there as slaves.

Slavery played a much larger part in Norse society than most people are aware of. Slaves, or “thralls” as they were called, were present in most Norse communities, with many being taken in Viking raids across Europe. While the warriors spent most of their time fighting or drinking, it was up to slaves to do a great deal of the work around the village.

In fact, it was a serious insult to a Viking to say that he had to milk his own cows. That was considered work for slaves and women, and with so many around, no free-born Norseman needed to milk any cows. The lives of slaves were often quite brutal. Slaves were regularly subjected to violence, both as punishment and for religious reasons. When their masters died, slaves were often murdered so that they could serve them in death as they had in life.

Above all, Vikings prized young female slaves. These girls taken in raids could expect to be raped regularly while being pressed into a life of domestic servitude. The desire for women might even explain a lot about why Vikings began to raid Britain in the 9th century. Some scholars have suggested that early Norse society was polygamous, and powerful chiefs married multiple wives, leaving none for other men. According to this theory, Vikings first took to the seas to find women because there were few available in Scandinavia. This theory could also explain why Vikings leaving to settle Iceland would have looked to Britain as a source of women.

There simply weren’t enough available women in Scandinavia to help settle the island. If this is the case, then the settling of Iceland involved Norse raiders making stops in Britain on the way, killing the men, and carrying off the women. Once on the island, it’s harder to say what these women’s lives might have been like. Some historians have suggested that though they started out as slaves, the Norsemen in Iceland eventually took the women as wives. If so, then they may have treated them with a basic level of respect. Norse culture placed a heavy emphasis on maintaining a happy household with a spouse.

Others have suggested that these women may have willingly gone to Iceland with Norsemen who settled in their communities. But the Vikings were never shy about taking slaves, and there certainly were slaves in Iceland. The most likely explanation is that there were Celts who volunteered to go to Iceland as well as Celtic women who were taken there as slaves. That means that, on some level, sexual slavery played a significant role in the settlement of Iceland.

Feudalism replaces slavery

The Irish slave trade began to decline after William the Conqueror consolidated control of the English and Welsh coasts around 1080. The Viking slave traders and were dealt a severe blow when the Kingdom of England, one of its biggest markets, banned slavery in its territory in 1102. Furthermore, the continued existence of the trade was used as one justification for the Norman conquest of Ireland after 1169, after which the Hiberno-Normans replaced slavery with feudalism. The raids were discontinued.

By the end of the 15th century, central English authority in Ireland had all but disappeared. England's attentions were diverted by the Wars of the Roses. The Lordship of Ireland lay in the hands of the powerful Fitzgerald Earl of Kildare, who dominated the country by means of military force and alliances with Irish lords and clans. Around the country, local Gaelic and Gaelicised lords expanded their powers at the expense of the English government in Dublin.

From 1536, Henry VIII of England decided to reconquer Ireland and bring it under crown control. The Fitzgerald dynasty of Kildare, who had become the effective rulers of Ireland in the 15th century, had become unreliable allies of the Tudor monarchs. The re-conquest was completed during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, after several brutal conflicts, including the first and second Desmond Rebellions, 1569–73 and 1579–83, and the Nine Years War, 1594–1603.

 War, famine, migration!

Scorched earth warfare was carried out in Ulster, just as it had been conducted earlier in the crushing of the rebellion in Munster. In an article for The Irish Story John Dorney references the continuation of this brutal method of warfare under the heading War and Famine in Ireland:

In the closing stages of the Nine Years War (1594-1603) in 1601-03, much the same pattern of war-related famine occurred (as in the previous rebellion in Munster, the Desmond wars). Hugh O’Neill’s and his allies’ forces had been dispersed and were reduced to fugitive warfare in the hills and forests of central Ulster.

English commanders, Lord Mountjoy, Henry Dowcra and Arthur Chichester along with Niall Garbh O’Donnell, a local rival of O’Neill’s ally Hugh O’Donnell, used the same brutal  tactics seen in the Desmond wars, devastating the countryside and killing the civilian population at random.

Chichester reported of one such raid; “We have killed, burnt and spoiled …within four miles of Dungannon…we have killed above 100 people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not. We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it hath bred much terror in the people”.

Famine soon hit Ulster as a result of the English scorched earth strategy. In this case, the deliberate destruction of food may have been combined with exceptionally cold weather and a poor harvest to accentuate famine conditions. The 1590s, with combination of war and extremely wet and cold summers and harvest seasons, saw near-famine condition throughout Ireland. The harsh winter of 1602-03 saw famine occur across Europe.

In Ulster, however, there can be no doubt that conditions were far worse than elsewhere in Ireland. Fynes Morrison, Mountjoy’s secretary, recorded that;

“No spectacle was more frequent in towns and ditches and especially in the wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles”.


Chichester’s forces found that the locals were reduced to cannibalism, in one instance coming upon five children eating a dead woman, their mother. Irish sources claimed that as many as 60,000 people had died in the Ulster famine of 1602-3. This may be an exaggeration, as we have no reliable information even about the population of the province, or indeed of the island at the time, but we can be sure that the death toll was very large as a proportion of the pre-war population. The repeated references to cannibalism, both in the 1580s and 1600s is a clear indication that these were very serious crises, where starvation had reached  such a pitch that neighbourly and even family bonds of human solidarity had broken down.

One of the obvious solutions for people living in a war and famine stricken area is simply to flee to safer territory and  this is precisely what Irish people of the late 16th century did. While soldiers could find employment in Flanders,France and Spain, mostly in Spanish service, civilians generally ended up in England and Wales, ‘most of them’, according to the Privy Council, ‘peasants with wives and children’.

Refugees from Ireland

In 1583, the English Privy Council complained about the, ‘great number of Irish poor people begging in and about this city [London]’. In 1601, the Bristol city council had to appoint a special official to process the ‘great number’ of Irish arriving in the city and nearby Pembrokeshire in Wales was ‘innundated’ with people, who had fled, ‘the late wars in Ireland’.

Refugees found their way as far away as France where by 1605-07, thousands clustered around Paris, Nantes, Rouen, Angers, St Malo, Morlaix and Anjou. The French attitude was generally hostile to these people, whom they considered “vagabonds and beggars”.

In 1600 the Breton Parlement at Rennes prohibited mariners from transporting more Irish into the ports of Brittany. In Rouen, 5-700 Irish were arrested and forcibly repatriated. Over 1,000 were expelled from Paris in 1606 on boats manned with archers and sent back to Ireland. The French ports were reporting ‘daily arrivals of Irish beggars’ until 1609 – evidence that it was many years after the war was over before famine condition eased in Ireland. Indeed a series of poor harvests in the late 1620s sent another waves of Irish “beggars” towards the dismayed French.

Nevertheless, demographically the country recovered relatively quickly from the toll taken by both war and famine in the late sixteenth century. It has been estimated that by the middle of the seventeenth century, the population of Ireland had doubled from about one million to two million; fruits of what one writer called, “fairer terms of happiness and prosperity than [for] … these five hundred years, she had enjoyed the sweet fruits of a long peace, full of people and riches”.

However, the war-related famines of late Tudor Ireland did leave an important legacy, aside solely from their part in breaking the resistance of native lords to their incorporation into the English-run Kingdom of Ireland. Without the depopulation of much of Ulster at the end of the Nine Years War, it is difficult to see how, in 1608 the province could have been ‘planted’ as it was, with settlers from England and Scotland.

Flight of the Earls

 

Fri, Sep 14, 2007

President Mary McAleese today unveiled a monument to mark the 400th anniversary of the Flight of the Earls.

The John Behan sculpture commemorates the leaving of 99 of Ulster's Gaelic aristocracy from Rathmullan, Co Donegal.

Featuring three men with their arms stretched in the air walking a gangplank, the bronze statue represents the plight of the men who were led by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, at midday on September 14, 1607.

"It is a pleasure to be here on this day, to mark a key and cathartic episode in our island's history," said Mrs McAleese at Rathmullan. "Even today we struggle to fully comprehend the downstream consequences of the loss, the driving out of our great native leaders.

"It has been a long and harsh scattering for most of these 400 years, but now we gather the memories of all those who left our shores whether through military force or economic deprivation," she said.

Marking 400 years of "a long and harsh scattering."

On 14 September 1607, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and about ninety followers left Ulster in Ireland for mainland Europe. This departure has gained a particular significance, especially in the nationalist narrative, as a symbolic moment in Irish history - the end of the old Gaelic order.

The Wikipedia article on the Flight of the Earls presents some of the main historical facts, but because of the cultural and symbolic significance of the event there are ongoing controversies and debates:

After their defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, and the end of the Nine Years' War in Ulster in 1603, Tyrone and the Prince of Tyrconnell, Lord Tyrconnell's elder brother and predecessor, had been forced into exile in January 1602 by the victorious English government of Ireland under the leadership of the Lord Mountjoy. They retained their lands and titles, although with much diminished extent and authority. However, the countryside was laid bare in a campaign of destruction in 1602, and induced famine in 1603. O'Neill was pardoned under the terms of the Treaty of Mellifont in March 1603 and submitted to the crown.

When King James I took the throne in 1603, he quickly proceeded to issue pardons for the Irish lords and their rebel forces. As king of Scotland he had a better understanding of the advantages from working with local chiefs in the Scottish Highlands. However, as in other Irish lordships, the 1603 peace involved O'Neill losing substantial areas of land to his cousins and neighbours, who would be granted freeholds under the English system, instead of the looser arrangements under the former Brehon law system. This was not a new policy but was a well-understood and longstanding practice in the Tudor conquest of Ireland.

He was later granted the Earldom of Tyrconnell by King James I on 4 September 1603, and restored to a somewhat diminished scale of territories in Tyrconnell on 10 February 1604.

In 1605, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester, began to encroach on the former freedoms of the two Earls and The Maguire, enforcing the new freeholds, especially that granted in North Ulster to the Ó Catháin chief. The Ó Catháins had formerly been important subjects of the O'Neills and required protection; in turn, Chichester wanted to reduce O'Neill's authority. An option was to charge O'Neill with treason if he did not comply with the new arrangements. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in the same year made it harder for Catholics to appear loyal to both the crown and the papacy. As the Dublin administration sided with Ó Catháin, O'Neill was invited by King James to make his case in 1607 to the Privy Council in London, which he never did.

By 1607, O'Neill's allies the Maguires and the Earl of Tyrconnell were finding it hard to maintain their prestige on lower incomes. They planned to seek Spanish support before news of the Battle of Gibraltar arrived. When their ship dropped anchor, O'Neill seems to have joined them on impulse.

Also, as the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) had been ended by the Treaty of London in 1604, King Philip III of Spain wanted to remain at peace with England under its new Stuart dynasty. As a part of the peace proposals, a Spanish princess was to marry James' son Henry, though this never happened. Spain had also gone bankrupt in 1598. Tyrone ignored all these realities, remained in Italy, and persisted with his invasion plan until his death in exile in 1616. 

The Ireland History website has an article from 1996 that revisited the historical issues surrounding the "flight" of the Earls.  

The article by Murray Smith begins:

One of the most argued over events in the career of Hugh O’Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, is his departure from Ireland with Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, on 14 September 1607. English contemporaries claimed that he fled in anticipation of the discovery of a plot of his against the government. Later apologists for O’Neill produced a ‘false dawn’ theory that he, despite being favourably treated at his submission in 1603, fled because of a government plot against him. Thus they referred to his departure as ‘the flight of the earls’. Recent evidence from Spanish sources, however, has called into question the image of O’Neill as victim. He was plotting against government at the same time as it was probably plotting against him: he had long considered leaving Ireland. His departure, therefore, was not a precipitous ‘flight’ at all!

The conclusion of the article says:

Apologists for O’Neill were partly correct in their basic theory of the ‘false dawn’, in that the government was overturning the Mellifont settlement. Their allegation that there was an official plot against O’Neill is still in question. However they were certainly wrong in claiming that O’Neill was innocent of plotting himself and that his departure was a ‘flight’. The words James Wills used in 1840 to explain his behaviour at the start of the Nine Years War are equally valid; O’Neill was ‘much sinning as well as much sinned against’.

The article ends with a reference to visual representations, and this proves exceptionally useful in the Re:LODE montage of images and information.

In any survey of changing interpretations of past events, it would be a serious error to overlook attempts at visual representation. The seventeenth century saw O’Neill caricatured in Protestant propaganda woodcuts and the nineteenth century witnessed various romanticised impressions of his colourful career in book engravings. In more recent times Thomas Ryan painted The Departure of O’Neill out of Ireland (1958) [see above], a reflection of the artist’s belief that the ‘Flight’ was a cardinal date in Irish history, and in order to fill the gap created by the absence of any Irish school of historical painting. The painting’s nationalist message is clear when we look at the groups of figures on either side of the descending figure of O’Neill, surrounded by his entourage: on the left are a group of static figures, the main one a Dominican friar giving his benediction to O’Neill, symbolising those who stayed in Ireland, the friar symbolising the Catholic Church; the moving, soldierly figures on the right symbolising the start of the Irish Brigades on the continent. The traditional style of painting, no less than its subject matter, ensured that it was, according to its author, received with indifference by the Irish art establishment. The modernists’ rejection of Ryan’s painting and the establishment’s blackballing of the artist himself in many respects presages the debate over ‘revisionism’ in Irish history-writing itself. 

Writing on the wall

In a particular example of the recent programmes of both nationalist and unionist muralist art as public statements of identity and politics, we can see how the use of a large scale mural celebrating the Flight of the Earls, as an Arts Council funded public art project, has led to some controversy.

The Peter Moloney Collection of Murals has an image of this mural situated near Ardoyne Avenue, Belfast. The accompanying text says:

The pair of plaques on the left indicate that the mural was painted as part of the Re-Imaging Communities Programme’ (top) and launched by President Mary McAleese on June 19th (bottom). Even though the subject was historical, the state funding for the project required the removal of a sword from O’Neill’s right hand; he is shown instead clutching the collar of his cloak.

The continuing significance of the "Flight of the Earls", is that it is capable of contextualising the modern experience. This is evident in the song The Flight of the Earls written by Liam Reilly of Bagatelle fame and performed by the Wolfe Tones.

The 17th century was perhaps the bloodiest in Ireland's history. Two periods of war (1641–53 and 1689–91) caused huge loss of life. The ultimate dispossession of most of the Irish Catholic landowning class was engineered, and recusants were subordinated under the Penal Laws.

The Parliamentarian reconquest of Ireland was brutal, and Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland. The extent to which Cromwell, who was in direct command for the first year of the campaign, was responsible for the atrocities is debated to this day.

The impact of the war on the Irish population was unquestionably severe, although there is no consensus as to the magnitude of the loss of life. The war resulted in famine, which was worsened by an outbreak of bubonic plague, probably brought to Ireland by the New Model Army. The Parliamentarians also transported about 50,000 people as indentured labourers to work, in servitude in enforced migration, mainly to the Caribbean.

 

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Leaving Ireland
The abiding story of the emigration of hundreds of thousand of Irish people across the world is well known, and especially in those societies where those connected to the Irish diaspora maintain a sense of identity in the re-telling of this story.

The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since early Medieval times, but it is only possible to quantify it from around 1700: since then between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. This is more than the population of Ireland at its historical peak in the 1840s of 8.5 million. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool; those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States.

After 1840, emigration from Ireland became a massive, relentless, and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans who claim Irish as their primary ethnicity. 

Writ large in the story of the Irish diaspora is the Great Famine.

The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór, [anˠ ˈgɔɾˠt̪ˠa mˠoːɾˠ]) or the Great Hunger was a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. It is sometimes referred to, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine, because about two-fifths of the population was solely reliant on this cheap crop for a number of historical reasons. During the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.

The proximate cause of famine was potato blight, which ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. However, the impact in Ireland was disproportionate, as one third of the population was dependent on the potato for a range of ethnic, religious, political, social, and economic reasons, such as land acquisition, absentee landlords, and the Corn Laws, which all contributed to the disaster to varying degrees and remain the subject of intense historical debate.

The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for Irish nationalist movements. The already strained relations between many Irish and the British Crown soured further, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions, and boosting Irish nationalism and republicanism in Ireland and among Irish emigrants in the United States and elsewhere.

The madness of trade, pricing and the market
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this historic humanitarian crisis is that during the famine Ireland was a next exporter of food.

Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine. The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.

Emigration as a consequence of the Great Famine 


 While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. The beginning of mass emigration from Ireland can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland over a period of 50 years to settle in the New World. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, "at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated". However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants leaving from western Ireland than any other part.

Families did not migrate en masse, but younger members of families did, so much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigration throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrant started a new life in a new land, sent remittances "[reaching] £1,404,000 by 1851" back to his/her family in Ireland which, in turn, allowed another member of the family to emigrate.

Emigration during the famine years of 1845–1850 was to England, Scotland, South Wales, North America, and Australia. By 1851, about a quarter of Liverpool's population was Irish-born. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the well-established McCorkell Line.

Of the more than 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. Overcrowded, poorly maintained, and badly provisioned vessels, known as coffin ships, sailed from small, unregulated harbours in the West of Ireland in contravention of British safety requirements, and mortality rates were high. The 1851 census reported that more than half the inhabitants of Toronto were Irish, and, in 1847 alone, 38,000 famine Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, and Saint John also received large numbers. By 1871, 55 per cent of Saint John residents were Irish natives or children of Irish-born parents. As part of the British Empire Canada could not close its ports to Irish ships (unlike the US), and the emigrants could get passage cheaply (or free in the case of tenant evictions) in returning empty lumber holds. However, fearing nationalist insurgencies, the British government placed harsh restrictions on Irish immigration to Canada after 1847, resulting in larger influxes to the US.

In America, most Irish became city-dwellers; with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In addition, Irish populations became prevalent in some American mining communities.

The famine marked the beginning of the depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. Population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century; between 1831 and 1841, population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. By the 1830s, they were seen as overly simplistic, and Ireland's problems were seen "less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment." The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions.