Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society - Essay Example

To what extent were the Irish in Scotland a marginalized people between 1800 and 1850 The nineteenth century was marked in the history of Scotland as an age influenced by a powerful immigration movement coming from Ireland. Due to the many difficulties that the Irish people had to endure and especially to the food crisis, some of the Irish people were forced to leave their lands and find a new place; for many the only chance for survival became Scotland. The historical circumstances proved to be not so favorable for these immigrants as the Catholics began their new life under the fear of being prosecuted by the Protestants from Scotland. The debate whether the Irish immigrants and their descendants are to call themselves Scottish in a rightfully way or not still remains a debate subject not only for historians but also for the descendants of the people involved in this history. The arrival of the large mass of Irish immigrants belonging to lower social classes and carrying no educational values, but only the desire to survive, made it difficult for both sides to coexist and found the basis of a new society. The immigrants brought with them the religious and ideological conflict between Catholics and Protestants and supplemented in this way a problem that haunted British history from early times. As Tom Devine discusses in his paper there is a major crisis that started with the first wave of immigrants who came from area belonging to what is nowadays the Republic of Ireland and who were mostly Catholics. In such conditions, generated by what should be interpreted as the fled from famine and not immigration per se, the identity of the Irish immigrants transformed itself in a very spectacular way. Their values that were founded on religious beliefs represented an impediment in the process of assimilation that was supposed to take place between the Scottish society and its values and the newly arrived. The differences between the Irish and the Scottish are not to be analyzed only in terms of religion, but also from a social perspective; the nineteenth century meant for Scotland industrialization, new means of work and production that were not present in the rural Ireland. Lack of systematization of work generated not only the difficulties related to food in Ireland, but it triggered problems such unemployment and lack of education and working skills. After the first wave of immigrants, in the years following 1800, the Irish who came to Scotland carried with them a different aspect of Irish identity and, as Tom Devine points out, the interaction with the Scots was starting to open new paths, and the relationship between the two waves of immigration unveiled the fact that there were significant differences of mentality between them and that in the first decades there has been an agrarian improvement in Ireland and that Protestants developed a different intellect and thus were able to cope better with the new social environment. Comparing the two movements, the first one, the Catholics, were driven to Scotland by famine, these people who formed in Ireland a crafting society changed their lives in a significant way, leaving behind their rural homelands and throwing them in the middle of a society that they could not cope with because they lacked industrial skills. However, their identity was not shattered immediately because of the pride they took as Catholics, without realizing that to be an Irish immigrant is not all about expressing a religious statement. The stubbornness and will to survive shaped both English and Irish identities and the experience generated even by these uneducated and ill people imposed new values in the British history. Nevertheless, their desire to permanently reinforce their beliefs and also to create the necessary institutions devoted to its practice helped them surpass their minimal organizational status and rise in time to that of the more evolved Scottish society. The Protestant Irish belonging to the second wave provided a change for the Scottish society and Irish communities by bringing a superior labor force and a different reasoning when it came to stating their Irish heritage and identity. Their settling in the West areas gained a high significance and their work became extremely valuable for Scottish society as they helped not only with the production of ships but also with the railway works. In spite of the high amount of work the relationship between Scots and Irish Protestants was not yet at the level between a diaspora and the society nurturing it, but it constantly refuted the Irish as representing a social problem. As rough as it was the shaping of the diaspora thus began. Thus, once the second wave made its way within the urban life style, what was initially an exodus turned gradually into an industrialization movement made out of people, of skilled workers, willing to endure a very low life standard in order to surpass the famine they left behind. The threat shadowing the wholeness of Irish identity was coming from within their communities at that time and it led to a hardening of the lives of Catholics. Discrimination was not something generated by and belonging to Scottish society, but it was born from the religious conflict between the Irish. The Protestant Irish, mainly because of their skills, managed to create a monopole on the job market, thus reaching a better place in society. Devine observes that the gaps between Catholic and Protestant Irish immigrants grew in time due to several factors like the different social status, religious conflicts and contrasting economical evolution. Irish identity was mostly based in those years on the religious tradition and this made it more difficult for the immigrants to adjust to this new life, however none of them were really welcomed in Scotland and they were all seen as people lacking skills and tolerance. The religious matters gained too much importance and the marginalization imposed by the Scots was intensified by the self imposed one. The biggest separation line between the Irish was drawn once again by their need to create separate protestant congregations and by the exclusion of Catholics. The first decades of the nineteenth century shaped the parallel and intermingled at the same time, discourses of Irish and Scottish identities, thus allowing history to track the evolution of two sides which insisted on seeing themselves as separate nations, an evolution that, according to Tom Devine, taught Scotland a great deal about the concepts of nationality and independence. The marginalization of the Irish people settled in Scotland was a dynamic and double edged process that had two sources: the attitude of the Scottish society towards the dirty and uneducated people and an inner source, coming from the fierce Irish nationalists who were now in an odd circumstance, that of not belonging to their home country nor to the Scottish nation. The clash of nationalisms was reflected especially at a social level where new social classes came into being; the immigrants became the low working class who had lost the freedom and the status given by the agricultural society they left behind and the Scottish people turned slowly towards the middle class life style, fact which enforced their negative and discriminatory attitude towards the Irish. This social marginalization is paradoxical because in a way it helped with the integration of the new people, by absorbing them into the structures of employment and industrialization, making them part of a system that was the result of Scottish nationalist ideals. Another factor that contributed to the marginalization and discrimination of the Irish immigrants in Scotland has a particular nature and is related to the internal forces that shaped this very large and unique diaspora. The anxiety and almost alienated sense of nationalism that these people carried as their beloved values combined with a strictly Catholic perspective of all things created a medium of uncertainty and need of constant justification for the Irish. Being a social problem was not the main issue for the Irish, but they were more determined to stubbornly express their identity because of the fact that the place they received lacked identity. Hard work, humiliation and disease did not represent a threat for the Irish; the sense of belonging to something that is a voluntarily accepted value was what they needed in order to be able to continue their incursion into Scottish society. What the Irish immigrants requested as their prerogative, whether situated on the Catholic or Protestant side was related to their religious view that offered the assurance that things are no longer decided by other rulers and that religious values are their choice. Even though the process of assimilation meant many decades of hardships for the Irish and it was under the constant influence of social injustice and prosecution the industrial independence of Scotland was nevertheless influenced in its turn by the powerful and disturbing struggle of the immigrants. In spite of the opinions of those historians claiming that Irish nationalist ideology belonging to the immigrants had a negative influence upon Scottish society, the following years brought about, if not an immediate improvement of the treatment applied to the Irish, a more loose dynamics, since Scotland began a new process of transforming its national identity by accepting and using as its own the Irish nationalism that was blamed to be until then one of its most complex problems. Reference: Devine, Tom. Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society. John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1997. Read More