Anti-Irish sentiment
Anti-Irish sentiment, also Hibernophobia, is bigotry against the Irish people or individuals. It can include hatred, oppression, persecution, as well as simple discrimination. Generally, it could be bigotry against people from the island of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, or Northern Ireland. Specifically, it could be directed against Irish immigrants, or their descendants, throughout the world, who are known as the Irish diaspora.
It occurred in the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Age and the Age of Enlightenment. Also instances recorded during Irish immigration to Great Britain, North America, and Australia are notable. Anti-Irish sentiment can include internal conflict dealing with social, racial and cultural discrimination within Ireland itself. Sectarianism and cultural, religious or political conflicts are referred to as the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Perspective
Hostility increased towards the Irish over the centuries, as they steadfastly remained Roman Catholic despite the fact that Edward VI and subsequent rulers used coercion to convert them to Protestantism. The religious majority of the Irish nation was ruled by a religious minority, leading to perennial social conflict. During the Great Famine in the middle of the 19th century, some evangelical Protestants sought to convert the starving Catholics as part of their relief efforts.History
Pre-Modern era
Negative English attitudes towards the Gaelic Irish and their culture date as far back as the reign of Henry II of England. In 1155, Pope Adrian IV issued the papal bull called Laudabiliter, that gave Henry permission to conquer Ireland as a means of strengthening the Papacy's control over the Irish Church, although the very existence of the bull is disputed by modern historians. Pope Adrian called the Irish a "rude and barbarous" nation. The Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169 with the backing of Pope Alexander III, who was Pope at the time of the invasion and ratified the Laudabiliter, giving Henry dominion over Ireland. He likewise called the Irish a "barbarous nation" with "filthy practices".Gerald of Wales accompanied King Henry's son, John, on his 1185 trip to Ireland. As a result of this he wrote Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernia, both of which remained in circulation for centuries afterwards. Ireland, in his view, was rich; but the Irish were backward and lazy:
Gerald's views were not atypical, and similar views may be found in the writings of William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh. When it comes to Irish marital and sexual customs Gerald is even more biting: "This is a filthy people, wallowing in vice. They indulge in incest, for example in marrying – or rather debauching – the wives of their dead brothers". Even earlier than this Archbishop Anselm accused the Irish of wife swapping, "exchanging their wives as freely as other men exchange their horses".
Image:Ireland 1450.png|thumb|right|170px|Ireland in 1450. The Statutes of Kilkenny decreed that intermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers from using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs.
One will find these views echoed centuries later in the words of Sir Henry Sidney, twice Lord Deputy of Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and in those of Edmund Tremayne, his secretary. In Tremayne's view the Irish "commit whoredom, hold no wedlock, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience". In A View of the Present State of Ireland, circulated in 1596 but not published until 1633, the English official and renowned poet Edmund Spenser wrote "They are all papists by profession but in the same so blindingly and brutishly informed that you would rather think them atheists or infidels". In a "Brief Note on Ireland", Spenser argued that "Great force must be the instrument but famine must be the means, for till Ireland be famished it cannot be subdued... There can be no conformity of government where is no conformity of religion... There can be no sound agreement between two equal contraries viz: the English and Irish".
Anti-Irish sentiments played a role in atrocities which were perpetrated against the Irish. For instance, in 1305, Piers Bermingham received a financial bonus and accolades in verse after beheading thirty members of the O'Conor clan and sending them to Dublin. In 1317, one Irish chronicler opined that it was just as easy for an Englishman to kill an Irishman or English woman to kill an Irish woman as he would a dog. The Irish were thought of as the most barbarous people in Europe, and such ideas were modified to compare the Scottish Highlands or Gàidhealtachd where traditionally Scottish Gaelic is spoken to medieval Ireland.
To prevent the English from integrating into Irish society, the Parliament passed the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366. These acts forbade the speaking of the Irish language among English settlers and any Irish living with them. They also prevented marriages between English and Irish and segregated the churches. These were limited in area to the Pale and enforcement is debated. The first diligent attempt to phase out the Irish language and culture across the island came from Henry VIII in 1537. The 'Act for English Order, Habit and Language' required the Irish parishes to contain an English grammar school and required everyone to do their best to speak English and teach their children English language. The schools were not fully implemented till the National Schools in 1833. The act stated that the Irish possess "a certain savage and wild kind and manner of living" which it sought to remove.
Modern period
In the Early Modern period which followed the advent of Protestantism in Great Britain, Irish Catholics were subjected to social and political discrimination because they refused to renounce Catholicism. Irish Catholics lost many rights concerning land, inheritance, voting, and they lost more rights under the Penal laws. This discrimination sometimes manifested itself in areas with large Puritan or Presbyterian populations such as the northeastern parts of Ireland, the Central Belt of Scotland, and parts of Canada. Thinly veiled nationalism under the guise of religious conflict has occurred in both the UK and Ireland.The Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 barred Irish Catholics from most public offices and confiscated large amounts of their land, much of which was given to Protestant settlers.
Anti-Irish sentiment is found in works by several 18th-century writers such as the French philosopher Voltaire, who depicted the Catholic Irish as savage and backward, and defended British rule in the country.
19th century
Anti-Irish sentiments in Victorian Britain and 19th century United States manifested themselves the stereotyping of the Irish as violent and alcoholic. Magazines such as Punch portrayed the Irish as having "bestial, ape-like or demonic features and the Irishman, was invariably given a long or prognathous jaw, the stigmata to the phrenologists of a lower evolutionary order, degeneracy, or criminality."After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, a fall in agricultural prices occurred. During the ensuing depression, farmers in southern England were unable to pay their agricultural workers a sustainable wage. There was an excess of labour compounded by the men returning from the wars. In 1829 added to this mix, was an unprecedented influx of migrant Irish workers who were prepared to work for half what their English counterparts were earning. On the Isle of Thanet the local farm labourers rounded up the Irish workers. William Cobbett wrote:
Irish labourers were singled out in particular for rough treatment by the locals. Farms employing Irish labour were subject to violent threats and incendiarism. There were similar problems in 1830, however eventually the farmers became the target for attacks, rather than the Irish, in the disturbances that became known as the Swing Riots.
Similar to other immigrant populations, they were sometimes accused of cronyism and subjected to misrepresentations of their religious and cultural beliefs. Irish Catholics were particularly singled out for attack by Protestants. Anti-Catholicism, whether real or imagined, played to the Catholic respect for martyrdom, and was partly based on a fear of a reborn Inquisition whose methods clashed with the "Age of Enlightenment". Irish Catholics were not involved in formulating church dogma, but it became a stick to beat them with. Mostly they stayed with their church as it fostered a sense of community in an otherwise harsh commercial world.
File:MAXWELL p089 Murder of George Crawford.jpg|thumb|English atrocity propaganda depicting the behavior of Irish Catholics during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, by George Cruikshank.
In Liverpool, England, where many Irish immigrants settled following the Great Famine, anti-Irish prejudice was widespread. The sheer numbers of people coming across the Irish sea and settling in the poorer districts of the city led to physical attacks and it became common practice for those with Irish accents or even Irish names to be barred from jobs, public houses and employment opportunities.
In 1836, young Benjamin Disraeli wrote:
In 1882, five people were murdered in the Maamtrasna, on the border between County Mayo and County Galway in Ireland. Covering the incident, The Spectator wrote the following:
During the 1700s and 1800s, many states in the United States allowed non-citizens to vote. Anti-Irish Catholic sentiment following the War of 1812 and intensifying again in the 1840s lead many states, particularly in the Northeast, to amend their constitutions to prohibit non-citizens from voting. States that banned non-citizen voting during this time included New Hampshire in 1814, Virginia in 1818, Connecticut in 1819, New Jersey in 1820, Massachusetts in 1822, Vermont in 1828, Pennsylvania in 1838, Delaware in 1831, Tennessee in 1834, Rhode Island in 1842, Illinois in 1848, Ohio and Maryland in 1851, and North Carolina in 1856.
Nineteenth-century Protestant American "Nativist" discrimination against Irish Catholics reached a peak in the mid-1850s when the Know-Nothing Movement tried to oust Catholics from public office. Henry Winter Davis, an active Know-Nothing, was elected on the new "American Party" ticket to Congress from Maryland. He told Congress that the un-American Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the recent election of Democrat James Buchanan as president, stating:
Much of the opposition came from Irish Protestants, as in the 1831 riots in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Protestants of the nineteenth century would use crime statistics to allege that Irish Catholics were over-represented in crime. There were theories that the over-representation was due to a lack of morality stemming from Catholic religious belief, and other theories that Catholics were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons. A. B. Forwood of the Liverpool Conservative Party stated,
During the 1830s in rural areas of the U.S., riots for control of job sites broke out among rival labour teams which were from different parts of Ireland, as well as riots between Irish and local American work teams which competed for construction jobs.
Irish Catholics were isolated and marginalized by Protestant society, but the Irish gained control of the Catholic Church from English, French and Germans. Intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was strongly discouraged by both Protestant ministers and Catholic priests. Catholics, led by the Irish, built a network of parochial schools and colleges, as well as orphanages and hospitals, typically using nuns as an inexpensive work force. They thereby avoided public institutions mostly controlled by Protestants.
The Irish used their base in Tammany Hall to play a role in the New York State legislature. Young Theodore Roosevelt was their chief Republican opponent, and he wrote in his diary that: