The Impact of the Irish Famine: Slums and Poverty

The growth of sectarianism owed much to the rapid influx of Irish immigrants and the economic dislocation, social upheaval, and religious antipathy which followed this mass arrival. Much of the emigration from Ireland was due to an Gorta Mór, or the ‘Great Hunger’, caused by a potato blight, which ‘robbed more than one-third of the population of their usual means of subsistence’, and contributed to the death of one million people. Two million people emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1855, with Liverpool, as the nearest port, permanently transformed by this influx.

The dynamics of Liverpool sectarianism were already in place even prior to the new arrivals. However, the hundreds of thousands of Irish who arrived in Liverpool during this period did much to shape and strengthen sectarian attitudes amid economic rivalry. There was ‘a large and permanent increase in spending on Irish destitution in Liverpool’ but employers ‘benefited from the large pool of unemployed Irish to the extent that Irish labour was widely used, and the presence of so many people looking for work could not fail to influence the wage levels paid to labourers’. The religious affiliation of the majority of the immigrants, Roman Catholicism, was already despised by many Protestants. These economic and religious factors, coupled with racist attitudes perpetuated by the local and national media, meant that the Irish Famine gave sectarianism powerful motivations.

Liverpool's proportion of Irish-born multiplied in the nineteenth century: 5,000 in 1800, 11,000 in 1820, and 35,000 in 1840. By 1841, about 20 per cent of the total Irish in England and Wales were to be found in Liverpool. The scale of famine-based immigration into Liverpool hugely exacerbated pre-existing tensions. Even though, of the 500,000 Irish who entered Liverpool before July 1848, many re-emigrated, by spring 1847, 105,000 remained and the Select Vestry of Liverpool complained to Parliament that ‘this increase was not one of the people of all classes, but of the poor’.