The American War of Independence struck a sympathetic chord in Ulster. Many thousands of Ulster people had emigrated to America and some were in the forefront of the Revolution. However when France declared its support for the Colonists, Volunteer Companies were formed to counter any possibility of a French invasion of Ireland. Ulster at that time was the cradle of progressive ideas in Ireland. “May the northern lights ever illuminate the Irish nation” became a popular toast.
Many of the volunteers were politically-conscious and democratically minded. They used the strength of the Volunteer Movement to press for radical reform, including a demand for legislative independence. Although the Volunteers were Protestants, the Belfast Companies called vociferously for Catholic emancipation and resolved that: “We invite to our ranks persons of every religious persuasion”. Indeed the Belfast Companies not only raised half the building costs of St Mary’s Chapel and St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Donegall Street but on the day of its opening in 1784 paraded in full dress and marched to attend the Mass, which according to the Belfast Newsletter, was also attended by great numbers of the other Protestant inhabitants.
Father O’Donnell published a letter of thanks from the Catholics of Belfast to the Volunteers “for their generosity in enabling them to erect a handsome edifice for the celebration of divine worship. They know not in what adequate terms to express their feelings and were excited by the attendance and so respectable a protestant audience on Sunday last at the opening of the House- the impression of which mark of regard is never to be effaced”.
A few years later, in 1789, the Siege of Derry centenary commemorations showed, as A T Q Stewart pointed out, how the celebration of the historic event could not have developed in a more natural way, allowing all the townspeople to take civic pride in it. An early nineteenth Century account describes how the day’s celebrations culminated. The Derry Corporation, the Clergy, the Officers of the Navy and Army, the gentlemen from the country, Volunteers, Scholars and Apprentices sat down to a plain but plentiful dinner in the Town Hall. Religious dissentions in particular seemed to be buried in oblivion. Roman Catholics vied with Protestants in expressing their sense of the blessing secured to them by the event which they were commemorating.
At the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars, the demand for timber for sailing ships could not be met from the traditional source of the Baltic States due to a blockade by Napoleon’s navy. Emigration through the ports of Moville and Derry was to British North America, where timber was plentiful, rather than the new United States. Due to technological changes in linen production, cottage-based weavers and their impoverished families were left with no option but to migrate to the Maritime Provinces of what is now Canada.
This immigration started about 1815 following the battle of Waterloo and it is thought that 80% of passengers landed in Canada, with perhaps half of that total going on to the United States. By 1871 they made up 24.3% of Canada’s population, with 35% of the population of Ontario and New Brunswick being of Irish origin.
In this pre-famine period of genuinely mass immigration (1815-45) in both the United States(400,000) and Canada (450,000), protestant Irish migrants continued to significantly outnumber catholic Irish. As a consequence in 1871 60% of the Irish in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were protestant. Furthermore they were rural settlers, in contrast to the United States where the Irish immigrant’s principal role was to service the industrial revolution.
With the failure of the Potato crop in 1845 thousands upon thousands of desperate and diseased men, women and children from every corner of Ireland sought escape by boarding ships bound for America. And it is this period (1845-50) that has received the most attention. There is still a tendency to see the Great Famine as the prime cause of the Irish Diaspora, when in reality heavy emigration from Ireland began well before the Famine and continued well after it.
To be continued