Throughout much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries there were two prevailing identities in Liverpool: Irish Catholic and Lancastrian Protestant. As this book has discussed, this era was characterised by antipathy and often physical confrontation between these sects. By the mid-twentieth century, however, these clashes had become increasingly ritualised. This chapter will argue that it was not simply a case of an Irish assimilation into a dominant host community which led to a decline of sectarianism. Rather, it was the dual assimilation of both identities into the newly emerging and dominant local character of ‘Scouse’ which had the most profound effect of subjugating sectarian vehemence. In addition, as the century progressed, many people (Catholic and Protestant) had begun to look beyond religion towards other forms of fulfilment.

The Influence of the Irish and the Shaping of the Scouse Identity

In 1892, John Denvir wrote that ‘It is not without some justification that some consider [Liverpool] the Irish capital of England’. After all, the 1891 census showed that 47,000 of the Liverpool population of 518,000 was Irish born (9 per cent), whilst the 1901 census of neighbouring Bootle indicated that 5,800 of the town's population of 58,000 were Irish born (10 per cent). Such has been the influence of the Irish on the development of Merseyside's distinctiveness that Liverpool has also ‘frequently been dubbed the “real capital” [of Ireland]’. In 2013, the Guardianclaimed that ‘75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry’.

The Irish Independentnoted, in an article on footballer Wayne Rooney's Irish heritage, ‘Even today, when only 10% of the population of England is Catholic, 60% of Croxteth's children are baptised Catholic’. Importantly, the majority of Catholics in Liverpool are likely to have some Irish heritage as a result of nineteenth-century famine emigration which reshaped the demography of the city.