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Irish
Contents
Irish Immigration to New York City >The Irish at 97 Orchard
Street > 19th Century Dublin > Irish Immigrants in the Workplace
> Irish Immigrants and the Catholic Church in America > Tammany
Hall and Irish Political Participation > Irish Nationalism >
Irish Fraternal and County Organizations > 19th Century Health
Care and the Immigrant Irish > The Irish Wake
19th Century Dublin
Beginning with the onset of the Famine in the
rural areas of Ireland in 1845-46, Ireland's population declined
from eight and a half million people to six million by 1855 as a
result of emigration, death from starvation, and disease and illnesses
associated with malnutrition. The city of Dublin assumed the role
of a "catch-basin" for the impoverished peasantry of western
and southern Ireland, who could no longer sustain themselves with
the failure of the potato crop. In the post-Famine years, many Irish
from the rural areas of Connaught and Munster who did not emigrate
traveled to Dublin in search of employment. Irish migrants arriving
in Dublin were in most cases disappointed by the lack of economic
opportunities that greeted them. For the working class, most employment
in Dublin came in the form of casual labor and services (not too
dissimilar from the jobs Irish would take upon their arrival in
New York, yet not nearly as prevalent in number).1
The 1801 Act of Union would do dire damage to Dublin's working-classes,
who relied on the wealth of the City's Protestant ascendancy to
support service and laborer jobs. The Act of Union abolished the
Irish Parliament in favor of a singular British Parliament, to be
housed in Westminster. Irish MPs and political functionaries summarily
relocated to London. The exodus of Dublin's wealthy was coupled
with the fact that Ireland's population had dropped precipitously
since 1845. This abandonment was exacerbated by the decision of
many of the wealthy who chose to move to Dublin's nearby but independent
suburbs. In Dublin, as a waiter or waiter-in-training, Joseph Moore
would have certainly been impacted by the veritable disappearance
of the class of people who were most likely to eat out in restaurants.2
By the mid-nineteenth century, Georgian townhouses that had been
constructed in the previous century were being subdivided into tenements
and coach and stable houses converted to residences (an interesting
comparison to New York's rear tenements). Formerly affluent areas
of the city were being visibly overtaken by the growing poverty.
The corresponding move of the wealthy to the suburbs only served
to hasten this decline.3
In the second part of the nineteenth century, Dublin possessed a
reputation for having perhaps the worst living conditions of any
European city. While other cities in the British Isles, such as
London, Manchester, and Glasgow, had factory districts and slum
areas of equal destitution, they accounted for relatively small
portions of the total city in comparison to the ubiquity of Dublin's
poverty. According to the 1861 Irish Census, tenement houses numbered
about 11,000 or more than 40% of the total houses in the city. Even
more strikingly, of the 58,246 families living in Dublin in 1861,
27,290 (47%) occupied one-room accommodations. It was not uncommon
for more than one family to share a single room of a Georgian townhouse,
further dividing it by hanging sheets or creating simple barriers
of furniture.4
Given its destitution and widespread slums, it is no surprise then
that internal migrants coming to Dublin, and to a lesser extent
its native population, chose to use the city as a stopping-point
before emigrating abroad. This can be shown statistically by looking
at the percent change in Irish emigration between the decade 1861-70
and the previous decade, 1851-60. Whereas the rate of emigration
from the other 31 counties of Ireland declined, County Dublin experienced
an increase of 23%. Between 1851 and 1860, 25,196 people emigrated
from County Dublin, while in the following decade a total of 30,996
left. The decade of 1861 to 1870 would be the single largest decade
of emigration from County Dublin.5
1 Aalen, F.H.A. and Kevin Whelan, eds., Dublin City and County:
From Prehistory to Present (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992);
Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus
to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
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