BOOK OF THE DAY: The Irish (and Other Foreigners): From the First People to the PolesBy Shane Hegarty, Gill and Macmillan 227pp. €14.99
SHANE HEGARTY’S informative and very accessible popular history of Irish immigration begins by transporting us back some 370 million years to the oldest known footprints in the northern hemisphere, left by an amphibious creature in rocks on Valentia Island. From there, we spool forward through the millennia until we come to the island’s first Stone Age settlers around 7000 BC, the evidence for which comes from counties Derry and Offaly. After brief detours to survey the Neolithic settlements at Lough Gur and the Boyne Valley, Hegarty expertly guides us through the myths and debates surrounding the most historically contentious of all our immigrant groups, the Celts, concluding that although we cannot meaningfully speak of “Celtic nations”, there are enough genetic clues to substantiate an ancient connection between the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Basques, Bretons and Galicians.
Hegarty then turns to the Vikings, pointing out that they were not only rampaging pillagers but also zealous entrepreneurs. After all, it was Viking money and technology that transformed Dublin into a bustling economic hub. Scandinavia was not the source of all newness, however. Dublin already had a thriving slave trade by the eighth century, such that a female slave (cumal) was an established unit of Irish currency.
The year 1169 witnessed the invasion of the Anglo-Normans, spearheaded by two half-brother barons from Wales. King Henry II followed two years later, and in his wake came new legal and political systems, as well as leather shoes and rabbits. By the 1500s, the Normans had gone native and were “degenerate” in the eyes of the Protestant New English, who would themselves devise a much more systematic – and bloody – tool of colonisation, that of plantation.
In his closing chapters, Hegarty surveys the history of more recent Irish immigrants, many of whom fled from war or persecution elsewhere in Europe. He provides a neatly potted account of the impact and legacy of the French Huguenots and reminds us that the first synagogue was built in Dublin in the mid-1600s, though it was not until the early 1900s that the city spawned a “Little Jerusalem” in the Portobello district – an area that is now home to many Muslims, ironically.
In discussing the contemporary influx of nationalities, Hegarty rightly emphasises the uneven and fluctuating impact of EU enlargement and the current recession on the country’s demographics. With sudden surges giving way to dramatic reversals, Ireland’s recent migration graph is “sharper than a shark’s teeth”. In all of this, there is a curious constant: the English and the Welsh still constitute by far the largest group of foreigners in the Republic (66 per cent in the 1996 census).
For an avowedly non-academic book, The Irish (and Other Foreigners)distils a great deal of scholarship into its 200-odd pages. Shaming episodes of xenophobia are duly dealt with, from the anti-Semitic boycotts in Limerick in 1904 to then minister for Justice Patrick Cooney's desire to exclude a tiny cohort of Chileans fleeing Pinochet's regime 70 years later, on the grounds that their "absorption" could prove "extremely difficult" for Ireland's monochrome society. Intriguing details punctuate each chapter, such as the fact that the genetic make-up of modern Icelanders is heavily influenced by the Gaels who accompanied the Viking colonisers; that there was one, lone Jew living in Tyrone in 1891; that 10 times as many people moved from America to Ireland in 1932 as went in the other direction; that Polish was the Republic's unofficial second language in 2006; and that there were 400 "lost" immigrant children in the state in 2008.
A lively and engaging travelling companion, the book deserves an especially prominent place in the bookshops of the country’s ports, airports and train stations.
Liam Harte's latest book is The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He teaches Irish literature at the University of Manchester