Edited by T.M.Devine:
Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(Edinburgh, 1991)

Book Review by Roger Swift

This admirably concise and skilfully-edited collection of six essays emanates from the proceedings of the Scottish Historical Studies Seminar held at the University of Strathclyde in 1989-90 and presents the first major reassessment of the Irish presence in modern Scotland since the pioneering research of James Handley during the 1940s. In essence, the volume examines the identities and values of Irish immigrant communities in Scotland and explores the processes whereby Irish people were assimilated into Scottish society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Brenda Collins provides an effective context for the essays which follow in a seminal study of the origins of Irish immigration to Scotland. Collins suggests that rural deindustrialisation and changing patterns of family demography in Ireland were just as important in prompting emigration as the more familiar pressures of poverty and famine, and notes a degree of continuity between pre and post-Famine migration to Scotland. Whilst accepting that Scotland was merely a temporary haven for some Irish emigrants bound for North America, Collins observes that Irish migration to Scotland displayed one significant characteristic which set it apart from general Irish emigration patterns in that the vast majority of Irish emigrants to Scotland, and especially Clydeside, originated in the ancient nine-county province of Ulster. Indeed, this trend was as evident during the depressed years of the 1930s as it had been during the early years of the nineteenth century and leads Collins to conclude that the Irish movement to Scotland provides a particular example of a general case of rural-urban migration.

Most Irish emigrants were Roman Catholics, and Tom Gallagher's essay grapples with the elusive concept of Irish Catholic identity in Scotland. Whilst noting the difficulties - including the hostility of mainstream society - which Irish Catholics faced in acquiring an identity that would sustain them in their new environment, Gallagher suggests that there were a range of factors which gradually enabled this immigrant community to interact with Scottish society. These included the success of Glasgow Celtic; the emergence of the Labour Party after 1906; the absence of deep-seated sectarian rivalries outside Clydeside; the comradeship of the 1914-18 war; the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act; the creation of the Irish Free State; and re-housing schemes in the late-twentieth century, notably in the Gorbals, 'the hub of Glasgow Catholic life up to the 1950s'. Yet Gallagher also places Irish Catholic identity within a Scottish context by noting that Scottish society was also changing during the same period and that the elasticity of a developing concept of 'Scottishness' made it progressively easier for Irish immigrants and their descendants not only to be accomodated but also to retain an Irish Catholic identity which had been built on the rock of adversity.

Irish Protestants have been conspicuous by their absence from recent studies of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain, an omission Graham Walker's pioneering and wide-ranging essay particularly welcome. The Protestant Irish comprised about twenty-five per cent of all Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Scotland, although Walker acknowledges the absence of concrete statistical data about their actual numbers. Inevitably, Orangeism, which provided a means for Irish Protestant immigrants, particularly of 'the lower orders', to maintain a distinct identity, looms large in the Irish Protestant experience. Indeed,Walker notes a correlation between Orange activity and the weaving and coalmining centres of lowland Scotland, suggesting that sectarianism impeded the development of trade unionism among the Lanarkshire colliers. He also notes parallels between the Orangeism and craft consciousness of the skilled shipyard workers in Belfast and those on the Clyde (many of whom supported the Govan-based Glasgow Rangers as the Protestant answer to Celtic). Walker also observes that the Orange Order and Irish Protestant immigrants exerted a powerful influence on the Conservative party in Scotland, notably during the anti-Home Rule campaign of 1912-14, although Orangeism was diluted after 1922. Yet, refreshingly, Walker's sample study of Poor Law records in several Glasgow districts also reminds us that poverty was not the exclusive preserve of Irish Catholic immigrants. Less easy to identify were middle-class Irish Protestants, who do not appear to have formed a coherent community.

The question of assimilation is also explored by William Sloan who examines the religious dimension of the immigrant experience by comparing and contrasting the experiences of the Catholic Irish and Protestant Highlanders in Glasgow between 1830 and 1850. In assessing the extent to which the social interaction of migrants constituted a 'sub-culture' or promoted a sense of community, Sloan observes that from the outset both Irish Catholics and Protestant Highlanders were - for different reasons - largely non-church-going. Yet he also shows that the pace and scale of their assimilation into the host society varied considerably. Indeed, Sloan argues that the structural and ideological distinctiveness which the preservation of a Catholic culture engendered among Irish immigrants slowed the pace of their assimilation into Scottish society, whilst the absence of similar provisions for Highlanders by Gaelic congregational life retarded the development of distinctive sets of social relationships, shared activities and common bonds and therefore enabled them to assimilate more quickly than Irish Catholic migrants.

The final two papers explore different aspects of the Irish Catholic role in labour movements and radical politics in Scotland. Bernard Aspinwall explores the processes through which a moderate conservative though hardly uncritical attitude towartds contemporary society emerged among the Catholic Irish in Scotland. In questioning some traditional socialist myths about the incapability of Irish Catholics to do anything to advance their own economic interests, Aspinwall provides a cogent explanation of the ways in which Catholicism remained a counter-culture to both capitalism and socialism. Moreover, Aspinwall suggests that the Catholic Irish, who could be both revolutionary and reactionary at the same time, and who possessed little faith in political theorists, did not see their economic salvation in the politics of the left; rather, as part of a Catholic international and even an Irish ethnic international, they looked to themselves, to their ethnic identity and faith, for solutions, in part through self-help organisations supported by wealthy Catholic patrons, both clerical and lay.

In his study of the contribution of Irish issues to Scottish radicalism, John McCaffrey acknowledges that this contribution, like the relationship of Irish immigrants to Scottish society, was an ambivalent one. Yet he shows - with reference to the Irish contribution to early nineteenth century radicalism, to late nineteenth century trade unionism, and to the growth of the Labour party tradition during the 1920s and 1930s - that Irish issues were an intrinsic and evolving element in the making of the Scottish radical tradition and that Irish interests had their own validity and justification and were accomodated within a developing Scottish radicalism. In this context, McCaffrey provides a succinct reminder of the limitations of the long tradition of history writing in Scotland which seeks to explain issues in terms of external factors (such as the English or the Irish) rather than by concentrating on forces within Scottish society, viewed within a Scottish context.

As Professor Devine acknowledges in his introduction, not all the major aspects of the Irish immigrant experience in Scotland are examined in this volume. Indeed, these essays focus largely on political and religious themes. Yet this important book nevertheless sets the agenda for future studies of the Irish in Scotland by illustrating the range of approaches now being used by scholars in examining the Irish immigrant experience and by delineating some important gaps in our knowledge of those communities. In this context, a companion volume to this excellent collection - focusing on social and economic issues and incorporating local and comparative studies - must surely follow.

Roger Swift
University College Chester
Chester
England

This review originally appeared in Irish Historical Studies, XXVIII, 112 (Nov., 1993) 453-4, and appears here with the permission of Roger Swift.