Who paid for the Irish to emigrate?

[MBR1965]

As in most cases, I think you will find there were many different methods used , depending on where they came from.

My great grandfather and his brother, from Castlecomer, Kilkenny,  had their fares paid by an agent who was recruiting for a mine in Wrekenton, Gateshead although in those days, travelling from Ireland was probably not considered emigration as it was part of the British Isles and nowhere near as expensive as emigrating to the USA.

Having researched ancestors in Ireland, I found out that the local protestant landowners (who were given the land owned by the Catholics from the times of Queen Elizabeth I though to William of Orange) could be either monstrous or benevolent with many in between.

The Wandesforde family, who were given swathes of land in Kilkenny,including the ancient domains (demesnes) of Idough,  actually paid for many of their destitute tenants to leave Kilkenny and travel to the USA in the 19th Century.

[Clarrie]

Three quarters of Irish labourers had no work.  Potatoes were usually the only option, as far as I understand, because you could grow them for free. I gather that they were a more complete food than potatoes nowadays, with more vitamins and nutrients than now and that, until the famine, Irish labourers were taller and more well nourished than those in England.   Telling people to grow something else without any money or work was a bit "let them eat cake" really.

I'm fairly sure that my family felt they were emigrating, not moving elsewhere in a home country.  Fifty years later, they still described themselves as Irish in the census, despite having been born in Sunderland.

MBR1965, do you mind me asking where inIreland your family came from?

Thanks again everyone.

[Elwyn Soutter]

   Telling people to grow something else without any money or work was a bit "let them eat cake" really.

In the cases I am thinking of in Co Antrim, the labourers had land, and they put a proportion of their crops aside each year as a seed crop for next year. Apart from some linen weaving (which did generate cash) it was a barter economy, and you could easily trade spuds for turnips (one of the alternatives recommended), or any other root vegetable. Just you didn’t get the same volume from the land and it required more work. It wasn’t about lack of money, more about lack of land, large families  and perhaps a lack of foresight. (There was also the fact that growing potatoes year after year on the same strip of land exhausts the soil. As true today as it was in 1848). It wasn't going to end well.

[MBR1965]

MBR1965, do you mind me asking where inIreland your family came from?

Thanks again everyone.

My ancestors all came from Castlecomer, County Kilkenny with the name Brennan ( almost 40 % of the population were Brennan's as it was their ancestral heartland so each Brennan family was given a nickname to identify them from everyone else - Brennan Durrick or Roe or Ajax or Dan or Prince & other names like that. We are Brennan Franks   -

[Clarrie]

Thanks!

[Skoosh]

You can't feed a growing family on turnips and in a wet climate like much of Ireland, potatoes were a better bet than grain. In the Hebrides every bit of land was cultivated as the ubiquitous lines of the rigs still show. The folk had been cleared from the better land to make way for sheep but the lairds still demanded their rents, and the loss of the hill grazings meant no summer grazing for the cows, together with the collapse of the kelp-burning industry, whose profits went into the landlords pocket, meant people lived on a knife edge.
 I very much doubt lords Antrim & Erne knew one end of a spade from the other, the Land League's successes in Ireland greatly influenced the West Highlands via contacts at the fishing hence the rise of the Crofters agitation and the Napier Commission. The problem was absentee landlords and the rack-renting of the tenants to pay for their masters extravagances in Edinburgh, Dublin & London.
The land's resources could support the people but not the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy on their backs.

Skoosh.

[Elwyn Soutter]

Skoosh,

I don’t really want to get drawn into a debate that will probably only escalate but in my opinion there’s sometimes inaccurate reporting and sweeping statements made about these issues. Not all Irish landlords were absent, nor rack renters. The Earls of Antrim were resident and of Scottish descent, and the Antrim Estate files at PRONI make it clear that their estate factors/managers spent a lot of time on their tenants affairs during the 1800s. Rents were reduced and sometimes waived, and they weren’t all out to exploit their tenants.

The Earl of Antrim was a landlord who did rent directly to agricultural labourers and weavers, but on many of the other estates the big landlord rented to medium sized farmers who then sublet. The medium sized farmers got by during the famine (because they had a variety of crops). It was their subtenants who couldn’t pay the rents but it was the middle landlord who often took the financial hit, rather than the superior landlord. It’s a complex issue.

And I’ll think you’ll find that both Antrim & Erne (Scottish origins again - Crichtons from the Borders) knew their spades very well.

Let’s leave it at that.

Elwyn