Irish Australians
Irish Australians are residents of Australia who are either fully or partially of Irish descent. Irish immigrants and their descendants have had a prominent presence in Australian society since the First Fleet's arrival in New South Wales in 1788.
Irish Australians have played a considerable role in the history of Australia. They came to Australia from the late eighteenth century as convicts and free settlers wanting to emigrate
from their homeland. Some of those who were transported to Australia were prisoners of war, many of whom had fought in the 1798 Irish rebellion for independence, whereas others were settlers who struggled to establish their lives during the Irish famine and the harsh years in Ireland that followed. They made substantial contributions to Australia's development in many different areas. In the late 19th century, Irish Australians constituted up to a third of the country's population.
There is no definitive figure of the total number of Australians with an Irish background. At the 2021 Australian census, 2,410,833 residents identified themselves as having Irish ancestry either alone or in combination with another ancestry. This nominated ancestry was third behind English and Australian in terms of the largest number of responses and represents 9.5% of the total population of Australia. However this figure does not include Australians with an Irish background who chose to nominate themselves as 'Australian' or other ancestries. The Australian embassy in Dublin states that up to 30% of the population claim some degree of Irish ancestry.
History
Demographic history
An estimated 40,000 Irish were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, including at least 325 who had participated in either the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the rebellion of 1803 or the Young Ireland skirmishes in 1848. Once in Australia, some were involved in the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion. Continual tension on Norfolk Island in the same year also led to an Irish revolt. Both risings were soon crushed. As late as the 1860s Fenian prisoners were being transported, particularly to Western Australia, where the Catalpa rescue of Irish radicals off Rockingham was a memorable episode.Other than convicts, most of the laborers who voluntarily emigrated to Australia in the 19th century were drawn from the poorest sector of British and Irish society. After 1831, the Australian colonies employed a system of government assistance in which all or most immigration costs were paid for chosen immigrants, and the colonial authorities used these schemes to exercise some control over immigration. While these assisted schemes were biased against the poorest elements of society, the very poor could overcome these hurdles in several ways, such as relying on local assistance or help from relatives.
Most Irish immigrants to Australia were free settlers. The 1891 census of Australia counted 228,000 Irish-born. At the time the Irish made up about 27 percent of the immigrants from the British Isles. The number of Ireland-born in Australia peaked in 1891. A decade later the number of Ireland-born had dropped to 184,035. Dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1922 did not diminish arrivals from Ireland as Irish people were still British subjects. This changed after the Second World War, as people migrating from the new Republic of Ireland were no longer British subjects eligible for the assisted passage. People from Northern Ireland continued to be eligible for this as British citizens. Only during the 1960s did migration from the south of Ireland reduce significantly. By 2002, around one thousand persons born in Ireland – north and south – were migrating permanently to Australia each year.
Irish and Aboriginal People
It has been argued that Irish Australians and Aboriginal people feel that there is a historical and sentimental link between the two groups. The shared oppression of Aboriginal and Irish people by the British is seen as giving them common historical ground.The historian Patrick O'Farrell argued that Irish Catholics treated Aboriginal people as equals, as evidenced by their willingness to intermarry, thus giving rise to the Irish surnames prominent among Aboriginal activists.
This argument has been questioned. It has been pointed out that under the new colonial and state administrations, a European-style surname was required for official records relating to Aboriginal people. The local police collected the relevant census data and allocated their own names to Aboriginal people for official purposes. In addition, however, many such policemen fathered children to casual or long-term partners from Aboriginal communities.
Orphans
Over four thousand young female orphans from Irish workhouses were shipped to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine to meet a demand for domestic servants. Some settlers greeted them with hostility and some were exploited or abused by employers and others. Although a number eventually died in poverty, others made upwardly mobile marriages, often surviving older husbands to experience long widowhoods. The Catholic Church only became involved in the 1870s, when its relief agencies in England were overwhelmed with Irish immigration. Even so, only about 10% of the resettlements were through Catholic agencies until after World War II. Australian Catholic groups began importing children in the 1920s to increase the Catholic population, and became heavily engaged in placing and educating them after World War II. The practice quietly died out during the 1950s.Irish language
The first convicts and soldiers to arrive in Australia included a large number of Irish speakers, an example being private Patrick Geary, who in 1808 acted as court interpreter for Patrick Henchan, a convict accused of theft. An account from 1800 refers to convicts speaking Irish among themselves, and it was acknowledged in the 1820s that priests could not perform their duties in the colony of New South Wales without a knowledge of the language. There is a reference to Irish-speaking bushrangers in Van Diemen's Land in the early nineteenth century.The gold rushes of the 1850s attracted many Irish to the colony of Victoria, with a high proportion of Irish speakers. An Irish-speaking priest, Fr Stack, was appointed to minister to Irish miners in the gold-rush locality of Bendigo. Irish immigration was at its height in the 1860s, the main counties of origin being Clare, Tipperary, Limerick and Kilkenny, all of them areas where the language was still strong. Irish continued to be spoken in Australian country districts where the Irish had settled, and there is some evidence of its being transmitted to the next generation.
The Gaelic revival in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century found a response in Melbourne and Sydney, with branches of the Gaelic League being established. The 1970s saw a renewal of interest in the language, chiefly among Australians of Irish descent, and there is now a network of Irish speakers in the major cities. The Department of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney offers courses in Old Irish and Modern Irish, and Newman College houses a collection of books and manuscripts in Irish often used by scholars. Australians have published fiction, poetry and journalism in Irish.
Australian Irish Sign Language
Alongside the oral Irish language, ISL arrived with Dominican Nuns in 1875 with the construction of three schools where Australian Irish Sign Language was taught. As a Francosign language, AISL is quite distinct from Auslan and other Banzsl languages, though it is also notably unrelated neither to Gaeilge nor to the numerous Australian Aboriginal sign languages.AISL and the more dominant Australian sign language, Auslan, were used as the primary languages of Deaf instruction from the late 1800s to the early 1950s. By this point, however, with all sign languages experiencing the effects of oralism and audism, AISL has over time become relegated to small groups of friends and families.