The Irish diaspora down under

MALCOLM CAMPBELL

Ireland's Two New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815-1922

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, $29.95

In Ireland's New Worlds. Immigration, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, Malcolm Campbell stresses that Irish Diaspora scholars should broaden their perspectives by comparing Irish communities in various parts of the world. Like Linda Dowling Almeida's Irish Immigration in New York City, 1945-1995 (2001), Campbell provides evidence that the quality of immigrants and the lives they led relate to when they left Ireland and when they arrived on distant shores.

Most scholars investigating Irish emigrants, 1800-1922, and their experiences in Diaspora settlements tend to focus on the United States. Certainly they represented the largest portion of those departing Ireland. However, as Campbell points out, other places provided homes and opportunities to Old Country leavers, and their experiences differed from ethnic cousins in America. He applies this thesis by comparing Irish Australians with Irish Americans.

Experts usually agree that Irish America has been essentially urban, perhaps because its immigrants had few agricultural skills and possessed communal personalities unsuitable for rural habitation. Campbell agrees that Irish Americans tended to settle in cities and towns but reminds readers that is where the jobs were and that most immigrants lacked financial resources to move beyond arrival ports. He does give attention to those who did farm, with an emphasis on Southeast Minnesota. He blames poor planning and choices of immigrants on failed attempts to place Irish newcomers on the land. For a considerable period of time, the Irish arriving in early Australia entered a country that hadn't yet entered an urban-ndustrial age, so most participated in an agrarian economy. While many of the early Irish in Australia were transported convicts, in many cases their crimes were minimal, and often they were victims of a harsh criminal system. Others were political prisoners, Irish nationalists who attempted to liberate their country through physical force. In general, it seems that nineteenth-century Australia received a higher quality of immigrants than the United States, especially when the late Famine years deposited a mass of impoverished, hungry, and illiterate peasants in America.

The wretched condition of many Irish immigrants and their social problems, even more so their Catholicism, triggered and fed American nativist bigotry. Well into the twentieth century, no-popery continued to label the Irish as strangers in the land. Catholic Australians got along much better with the Anglo-Protestant majority. However, beginning in the 1860s a strong Evangelical movement and the impact of Ireland's "Devotional Revolution" incited sectarian tensions, and community social isolations.

Irish America and Irish Australia reacted quite differently to Ireland. Influenced by American republicanism, their poverty, nativist prejudices, and the desires of an increasing middle-class for respectability, related to Ireland as an independent nation, Irish Americans strongly supported constitutional and physical force efforts, especially the latter, to liberate the home land. The respectability motive is emphasized in Thomas N. Brown's pioneer work Irish-American Nationalism (1966). A long way from Ireland, quicker assimilation, and pride in Empire gave Irish Australians less of an interest in Irish nationalism. During the 1880s, when such Irish Parliamentary Party MPs as John and William Redmond, John Dillon, and Michael Davitt visited Australia, Home Rule acquired a constituency. It attracted adherents because of seemingly strengthening rather than disrupting the Empire and represented Ireland's search for Commonwealth status, which Australians wanted then achieved. At the commencement of World War I, Irish and German Americans joined in agitation for United States neutrality. In contrast, Irish Australians strongly supported and bravely fought for Britain and Empire. Easter Week 1916 thrilled Irish America and disturbed and puzzled a majority of Australian Irish. In both countries, the 1922-23 brother against brother Irish Civil War, along with fewer immigrants, diminished interest in Ireland and its nationalism.

Catholicism and loyalty to the Democratic politics were more important for Irish-American cohesiveness than nationalism. Both provided leadership opportunities when other avenues were closed to Catholics. Ireland's "Devotional Revolution" shaped the American Church in strict and disciplined ways. Politics gave Irish-Americans influence, particularly in the form of urban machines. But like Catholicism, it contributed to mental and social ghettos and isolation from reform movements. And many Americans rejected the Irish political style as they did the personality of Catholicism. English Benedictine influences on early Australian Catholicism made it more flexible and adaptable to Australia's cultural and social mainstreams than Irish and Irish American versions. But immigration eventually brought bishops and priests, also committed to the "Devotional Revolution," to Australia, structuring its Church on the Irish model, and, as previously mentioned, provoking sectarian separateness. Australian Irish politics was more factional than American and usually more liberal.