The emigrant’s friend?

Abstract

Although it subsequently proved to be wishful thinking, the widely held notion that an Ireland governed by Irishmen would cease to export its population en masse was, as Kerby Miller has noted, a logical counterpoint to the belief that only British maladministration had made doing so necessary in the first place. 1 In the absence of the supposed balm of self-government, however, those wishing to prevent emigration had only one option: persuade would-be emigrants not to leave. That this was a tall order was starkly demonstrated by a competition held by the south Ulster newspaper The Anglo-Celt in 1901-02. An offer of a gold medal and 20 silver medals for the volunteer 'patriots' who prevented or postponed the most departures over the year attracted only one response, from a Fermanagh man whose paltry four stay-at-homes were themselves awarded silver medals for their troubles. 2 However, the belief that clergymen had the power to influence individual emigration decisions had considerable currency in nineteenthcentury Ireland. Radical constitutional and economic reform aside, this influence was long thought to be the best weapon in the antiemigration armoury. Following the pattern of opinion set out in Chapter One, it was a weapon mainly deployed from mid-century onward. An uncoordinated campaign of dissuasion, largely centred on the pulpit pleas of parish clergymen, was regularly given fresh impetus by the published accounts of priests who had either settled in or visited emigrant destinations. The first of such cautionary messages was a frightening, if poorly grounded, exposé of mass Catholic 'leakage' proffered in 1836 by a Cork native, Bishop John England of Charleston. 3 With its spurious statistics and scaremongering tone, England's letter set the standard for the myriad warnings 2