Population, Providence and Empire: the Churches And
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Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Population, providence and empire Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 1 15/09/2014 11:47 Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 2 15/09/2014 11:47 Population, providence and empire The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland SARAH RODDY Manchester University Press Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 3 15/09/2014 11:47 Copyright © Sarah Roddy 2014 The right of Sarah Roddy to be identifi d as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC- BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of The University of Manchester, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9019 6 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset in Minion with Rotis Sans display by Koinonia, Manchester Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 4 15/09/2014 11:47 For Seamus Roddy (1947–2011) Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 5 15/09/2014 11:47 Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 6 15/09/2014 11:47 Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xii Introduction 1 Part I 1 Talk of population: the clergy and emigration in principle 23 2 The emigrant’s friend?: the clergy and emigration in practice 62 3 ‘Scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd’: the pastoral responses of the Irish churches to emigration 91 Part II 4 The battlefield against popery: emigration and sectarian rivalry 149 5 The spiritual empire at home: emigration and the spread of Irish religious influence 181 Conclusion 234 Select bibliography 244 Index 269 Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 7 15/09/2014 11:47 Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 8 15/09/2014 11:47 Preface We hardly need proof that historians are influenced by the times in which they write, but this book might provide some. I began my research in 2006, as the Republic’s Tiger economy was as its roaring height, and as the end of the long Northern Irish Peace Process was in sight, at which time ‘emigration’ did not seem quite the dirty word it may have been to previous generations. Being from one jurisdic- tion, and living and studying in the other, I was aware that ‘the Irish diaspora’ – a term prematurely introduced to my childhood conscious- ness by President Mary Robinson in the mid-1990s – had played key parts in these two apparently welcome developments. Moreover, at the time, my personal experience of migration amounted to aunts and uncles who seemed happily settled abroad and who managed to make regular return visits (in one case a permanent one), and friends and peers who, at that point, had very definitely left Ireland for adventure and opportunity with no sense of being surplus to the requirements of the economy at home. Indeed, the papers I gave early in my research career tended to note that, for the first time in several centuries, Ireland was a country of relatively happy mass immigration, rather than of miserable mass emigration. Thus, the twenty-first-century Irish migration I knew and the nineteenth-century Irish emigration I was researching seemed initially to be very different beasts: one a voluntary movement of the skilled and professional in search of ‘a change of scene’, the other a needful and largely resented migration of the poor and unskilled. Revising the text more recently, as one of many in a vast new wave of Irish ‘exiles’ – most of whom, educated, skilled, or not, were very much surplus to post-Tiger requirements – I came to see things slightly differently. Though the experiences of most of today’s Irish migrants are still a Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 ixDownloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 9 15/09/2014 11:47 Preface world away from those of the nineteenth century, it was instructive to monitor, from afar, the reactions to this new outflux in Ireland itself. The old tropes seemed to be dusted off at the merest hint of increased emigration: newspapers wrote lamenting editorials, priests said masses – these days even online – for the departed, and politi- cians lamely blamed external forces. On the surface, the way Ireland publicly discusses and rationalises its intermittent need to export large sections of its population hasn’t changed very much in two centuries. Future historians will have to determine the extent to which these public responses were matched by private action, and how Ireland itself was again changed – as it inevitably will be – by this current wave of emigration. This book came to fruition with a great deal of help from other people. I am first and foremost grateful to the staff and students of the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, where the book started life as a doctoral thesis. I particu- larly thank Professor Peter Gray who provided supervision that was invariably thorough, stimulating, kind and encouraging. At various points, Professors Liam Kennedy and Sean Connolly, and Drs Marie Coleman and Andrew Holmes read sections and offered useful criti- cism and suggestions, for which I thank them. I am also indebted to Professor David Hayton for securing the University Studentship that made the research possible, and to many of my then fellow postgrad- uate students, particularly Aidan Enright, Pierre Ranger and Jonathan Wright, for enlightening discussion and welcome distraction. I wish also to express my gratitude to Dr Enda Delaney, who examined the original thesis and has been an encouraging influence ever since. Professors Kerby Miller and David Fitzpatrick offered generous encouragement and much appreciated advice at early stages, and I am grateful to Oliver Rafferty, Liam Kennedy, Ciaran O’Neill and Joseph Hardwick for allowing me to read drafts of their unpub- lished work. The staff at a number of libraries and archives across Ireland courteously facilitated my research. In Belfast, I thank the following: Diarmuid Kennedy and the staff of Special Collections and of the McClay library at Queen’s; Stephen Gregory and staff at the Gamble Library, Union Theological College; Jennifer Dickson, Valerie Adams and Godfrey Brown of the Presbyterian Historical Society; the respective staffs of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Sarah Roddy - 9781526147226 Downloadedx from manchesterhive.com at 10/06/2021 11:02:16AM via free access Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 10 15/09/2014 11:47 Preface Belfast Central Library, Belfast Newspaper Library and the Linenhall Library. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland I received help from staff at the Cardinal O’Fiaich Library in Armagh and Mary McVeigh of the Ulster and Local Studies Library in the same city; Patrick Fitzgerald at the Centre for Migration Studies in Omagh and Joe McLaughlin at Magee College, Derry. In Dublin, I was grateful for the efficiency of the staffs of the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Library. I also thank Noelle Dowling of the Dublin Diocesan Archives, Greg Harkin of All Hallows College, Susan Hood of the Representative Church Body Library and Andrew O’Loughlin at St Paul of the Cross Retreat, Mount Argus. The British Library proved the repository of last resort for a number of obscure pamphlets consulted, but I must also acknowledge an enormous debt to the digitisation projects of a number of North American and British libraries, which made accessible several impor- tant works that could not otherwise have been read. In the same vein, the briefly available digitised records of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome were – perhaps not literally – a godsend and I thank the former archivists, Vera Orschel and Martin Fagan, for help in navigating the project. In Manchester, my colleagues in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, particularly Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, have helped in many ways, primarily in making me (I hope) a better histo- rian. The staff of Manchester University Press have been a pleasure to deal with, and I thank their two anonymous readers for saving me from several errors of fact, interpretation and style. I finally thank my family in Westmeath, Galway and Belfast, especially my mother Eileen, for their love and great support; Colm, who knows what he did; and friends in Ireland and the UK, some of whom might still be under the impression that the following book is about potatoes.