The short sea from Ulster and the cheap deck passage from Dublin made Glasgow Ireland’s second city of refuge long before catastrophe struck: seasonal harvesters, weavers and labourers were crossing from the 1790s, and the mills and pits of the Trade pages were hiring them. Then came the Famine. Between 1845 and 1851 the starving poured through the Broomielaw in their tens of thousands, destitute and often fevered (the typhus year 1847 overwhelmed the city’s charity and filled its fever sheds), and by the 1851 census nearly a fifth of Glasgow’s population was Irish-born, among the highest proportions in Britain.
The numbers are startling. Glasgow’s Catholic community grew from a few hundred people around 1800 to tens of thousands within four decades, even before the Famine, and when catastrophe came the crossing was the cheapest escape on offer: a place on a crowded deck cost a few pence, far less than the passage to America. In 1847 alone more than fifty thousand Irish people arrived in the city. The Famine refugees were overwhelmingly Catholic, though around a quarter of all the Irish who settled in Glasgow were Protestants, many of them from Ulster.
They took the industrial city’s hardest, lowest-paid work (the navvies who dug the railways, canals and docks; the ironworks and pit labour of the coal and iron pages; the mill girls of the cotton districts) and its worst housing, packed into the wynds, the Calton, Bridgeton and above all the Gorbals reception streets. And they met a wall: ‘No Irish need apply’ was written and unwritten policy across trades and offices for generations, and the imported Orange-and-Green antagonism (for the migration was substantially Protestant Ulster as well as Catholic Ireland) fused with native anti-Catholicism into the sectarian system whose full account sits in this site’s Religion pages.
The community built its counter-city: parish by parish the Catholic church rose on pennies: churches, then schools (brought into the state system, explosively, in 1918), St Vincent de Paul relief, the Irish national societies. And in 1887–88 the East End’s Marist brother, Brother Walfrid, founded a football club to feed its children, whose story fills half the Football section. Celtic was the community’s flag as much as its team; its rise announced that the Irish were in Glasgow to stay, and to win.
The twentieth century was the long march inward and upward: from labouring to the trades, the classroom, the surgery and the council chamber (John Wheatley of the Red Clydeside pages the emblem of Irish-descended Glasgow entering power), through publican-and-shopkeeper prosperity, the professions after 1918’s schools took hold, and eventually every institution in the city, provosts and lord provosts included. The discrimination faded by degrees into the residual sectarianism the Religion pages describe: real, lamented, and dwarfed by the integration around it.
Today perhaps a third of Glaswegians carry some Irish descent, and the identity is worn lightly and loudly at once, in surnames and songs, a stadium’s green half, March’s parades and the ordinary texture of a city that, more than anywhere in Britain, is partly an Irish city that happens to stand in Scotland.
Related questions
Why does Glasgow have such strong Irish roots?
Because of large-scale migration from Ireland in the nineteenth century, above all during the Great Famine. The crossing was short and cheap, Glasgow’s industries were hungry for labour, and by 1851 nearly a fifth of the city’s people were Irish-born. Their descendants shaped Glasgow’s religion, culture and character.
How many Irish people came to Glasgow during the Famine?
In 1847 alone more than fifty thousand Irish people arrived in Glasgow, and by 1851 the Irish-born made up over eighteen per cent of the city’s population.
Why did Irish people come to Glasgow?
The sea crossing was short and cheap, and Glasgow’s fast-growing industries offered plentiful work. During the Famine, many came simply to escape starvation.
Were all the Irish migrants Catholic?
No. A significant minority, around a quarter, were Protestant, many of them from Ulster. The great Famine influx, however, was overwhelmingly Catholic.