March 17 is St Patrick’s Day, celebrated in most of the British Commonwealth, and certainly in non-Commonwealth countries such as the US, in New York. which often seems to be a country of its own with strong Irish roots. and where traditionally a huge parade takes place through the streets of that city.
The Irish, like Trinidadians, have a diaspora that can be found almost everywhere on the globe. In Montserrat, St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday. as so many of its early settlers came as indentured labourers from Ireland and their descendants, those who survived the volcanic eruption in 1995, are still there.
The Irish diaspora is as notable as those of most island peoples. Before the great famine of 1847, during which over a million Irish people died of starvation, the Irish were shipped out to the West Indies as indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery in 1834.
Just as people from India were rounded up by press gangs and shipped out to the colonies to replace the emancipated slaves, the Irish, treated as somewhat lesser mortals, were arrested for trespassing on private property or being drunk and disorderly (which they often were)and shipped off to faraway colonies, separated from their families for life, destined to labour as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
BV Lass, an historian from India wrote about it thus: "In relation to the British Empire, the largest and most concerted expression of indenture occurred between 1834 and 1920, when two million Indians, and thousands of others from across Asia, Africa, and Oceania were exploited under a system intended to replace enslaved African labour in the Caribbean and Mauritius. Thousands of Irish, English and Scottish people were also forced into indentureship in the New World."
We don’t read much about them in our schoolbooks, though.
[caption id="attachment_945130" align="alignnone" width="838"] Britain's Prince Charles pours a pint of Guinness during a visit to the Irish Cultural Centre in west London, Tuesday, to celebrate its 25th anniversary in the run-up to St Patrick's Day. - AP Photo[/caption]
Although diversity is a feature of Trinidadian culture and society that is often boasted about now, there are many Trinis who are not even aware that they have Irish DNA. Noted historians such as Fr de Verteuil, who has been the main person who has preserved the history of this country, a gift he has thereby given to the nation, wrote about the Irish presence in Trinidad as early as the late 1700s.
In fact, following periods when the Royal Irish Regiment was sent to Trinidad to quell the rebellious locals, Fr de Verteuil noted that they left behind them more illegitimate than legitimate offspring. Of the legitimate ones alone, anyone with an ancestor with a surname like Kernahan, Fitzgerald, Devenish, O’Connor, Waldrond, Kelly, or Lloyd can trace their Irish heritage in TT, some to dates before the abolition of slavery and indentureship.
The Irish, known to be hot-headed, were made
