As economic migrants, the Irish in nineteenth-century Liverpool experienced the kind of occupational disadvantage identified by ‘segmented’ or ‘dual’ labour market theory, discrimination normally applied to workers marked out by phenotypic difference.¹ The absence of any such marker notwithstanding, the Irish were labelled and stigmatised on arrival, victims of prejudice that hindered their prospects in the labour market. As ‘poor Paddies’ they were excluded from the ‘primary sector’ where relatively decent wages, labour conditions, job security and union membership applied, to be confined to a ‘secondary sector’ of low-paid, unprotected, dead-end jobs – on the docks, in adjacent processing and...

Historical geographers have located the Irish in Liverpool at the bottom not only of the labour market but also of the residential hierarchy. Given their limited resources, the Irish tended to congregate around ‘core-streets’ in the city’s two major working-class areas, close to the docks and the casual labour markets: the ‘instant slum’ of the north end with its purpose-built court housing, and the failed middle-class suburb of the south end, hastily ‘made down’ into overcrowded and cellared street housing. Over time, there was to be substantial concentration in the north end, extending out from the two pre-Famine ‘clusters’, the...

Matthew Gallman’s recent comparative study of Liverpool and Philadelphia highlighted a significant difference in the ‘host’ response to the Irish Famine influx. Where the city of brotherly love relied on voluntarism, the ‘black spot on the Mersey’ pioneered a number of public initiatives in poor relief, public health, policing and other areas of urban policy, some of which were already in place before the Famine crisis.¹ This public interventionism, however, added significantly to the weight of the local Protestant establishment, prompting fears that relief and assistance – even for such special cases as the blind – would be accompanied by...

Although privileged in historical studies, ‘top-down’ institutional and charitable provision needs to be assessed in wider context, taking account of the various networks, formal and otherwise, by which migrants themselves adjusted to new surroundings. Working through family links, social connections and regional solidarities, many arrived in Liverpool through chain migration, with those already at destination helping newcomers (in classic ‘moving European’ fashion) to find jobs and housing, thereby protecting them from disorientation, dislocation and anomic behaviour. Unknown arrivals who lacked such support mechanisms had to integrate themselves into street or court networks of mutual aid. Invariably run by women, those...

Electoral politics in Irish Liverpool underwent a diverse (at times bewildering) range of hyphenated political allegiance before the consolidation of ‘Nat-Labism’ in the years before the First World War. Taking account of recurrent socio-economic, generational and other tensions within a large migrant enclave over time, this chapter endeavours to chart the convoluted route, nearly but never entirely completed, from grateful dependence upon the Liberals to defiant ‘Home Rule’ political independence. Alternative forms of extra-parliamentary nationalist politics, from the Confederates through the Fenians to the IRB, are considered in the next chapter.

The Liberal alignment had a venerable past stretching back...

In extra-parliamentary as in constitutional inflexion, Liverpool was the pivot of Irish politics in Britain. A cause of much concern to the authorities, there were persistent fears of violent disturbance and commercial catastrophe, in particular the destruction of shipping and warehouses, either in simultaneous support of a ‘rising’ in Ireland or as a diversion to hinder the despatch of troop reinforcements across the Irish Sea. The hub of the wider Irish diaspora, Liverpool was also the first point of contact for returning Irish-Americans with their ‘republican spirit and military science’.¹ The source of funds and arms for separatist physical force...

While the threat of physical force nationalism was sporadic, disturbance and direct action on the streets were endemic in Victorian Liverpool. Contemporary commentators had a ready explanation: the presence of ‘riotous’ Irish whose propensity to violence was compounded by ‘pre-industrial’ notions of time and work discipline. Head Constable Dowling described the Irish labourers working on the construction of the dock extensions in the 1840s as ‘the most reckless, violent set of people that can be imagined’:

They assist each other, and attack the authorities, whoever they may be; they keep the neighbourhood where they reside, which is the North part...

A necessary means of regaining self-confidence, Irish cultural nationalism acquired accentuated resonance after the collapse of political agitation and outbreaks of ‘Pat-riot-ism’. In the aftermath, the first priority was to disabuse host attitudes, to refute the prejudice and ethnic denigration aroused to fever pitch by Irish ‘commotion’. However, while confuting the derogatory portrayal of the Irish, nationalist cultural brokers, anxious to ensure against further defamation, exhorted their less fortunate fellow-countrymen along the path of reform, respectability and rehabilitation. Liverpool, they were only too well aware, was renowned for its ‘unenviable pre-eminence in the unnecessary superfluity of its moral and material...

This chapter locates and assesses the cultural mission of the various clubs and associations of Irish Liverpool within the wider framework of commercial provision in a vibrant seaport city. Nationalist societies purportedly gained support in Ireland not so much through political conviction as by filling a social vacuum in recreational provision.¹ For the Irish in Liverpool, the bustling second city of empire, the situation could hardly have been more different. Here, in the fiercely competitive environment of a boisterous ‘sailortown’ waterfront culture, Irish associations had to compete against a variety of tempting, attractive and lurid commercial offerings.² As the study...

The suspension of the Home Rule Bill in September 1914 notwithstanding, the ‘Nat-Lab’ leaders of the INP were unquestioning in support of the war effort, a stance T.P. O’Connor justified to critical compatriots in America: ‘The Irish Party, when they realised that on this occasion England was in the right, did not allow their historical wrongs to prejudice them.’¹ As perceived by Harford and the INP councillors, whole-hearted participation in the war would not only underwrite and guarantee the Home Rule settlement for Ireland; it would also enhance the profile (and improve the lot) of the Liverpool-Irish. Hence their support...

The complex succession of events in Ireland between 1916 and 1923, conveniently condensed by Peter Hart into the single heading of ‘revolution’ – a rising, an election, a war of independence (with various alternate names), a truce, a treaty, another election and then a civil war – elicited a bewildering array of responses in Irish Liverpool.¹ The various forms of expatriate nationalist activity and expression were all apparent in accentuated form, reinvigorated and fused in a ‘revolutionary’ compound of competing, occasionally complementary, elements. Having played a relatively minor participatory role in the Easter Rising, the Liverpool-Irish revolutionary underground came to...

The distinctive identity of the Liverpool-Irish was tried and tested in the depressed economic conditions of the inter-war period. Habituated to their ‘curious middle place’, they conformed neither to the narrow norms of Irishness propounded by the Irish Free State under the ‘de Valera dispensation’ nor to notions of Britishness which prevailed outside Liverpool in Baldwin’s middle England.¹ As economic depression persisted, they were to endure heightened levels of ethnic and sectarian prejudice, a blend of old attitudes and new fears fuelled by alarmist response to the influx of numbers from the Irish Free State. The new arrivals were ready...