A time when we were the ones waiting for the cash from abroad

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Through all the hullabaloo of recent weeks about the amount of money that being sent out of Ireland to the home countries of so-called ‘foreign nationals’ working here, I just thought to myself that some of us have very short memories.

We’ve had a troubled history here in Ireland from colonisations to wars and famines but despite a number of recessions and the infamous collapse of the Celtic Tiger back around 2018, we are in general a wealthy country.

That is not to say that we don’t have our ongoing problems, the most pressing of which is probably the homelessness issue, but the vast majority of our people are now highly educated; they are working in decent jobs; and they all have a reasonable chance of getting onto the housing ladder, even if that latter aspiration can be difficult near the bigger urban centres.

There was always a great tradition . . . nay, probably more of a necessity . . . back the generations of money and goods coming back from countries where often the main breadwinner had to move to foreign soils to earn the money that kept his family above the breadline.

The Great Famine or Gorta Mór, that peaked from about 1845 to 1851, is estimated to have claimed the lives of about one million people but it also set in train one of the great movements of people from a small country to different places around the world.

Somewhere in the region of two million people are estimated to have left Ireland during The Famine, the vast majority of them travelling across the Atlantic for new lives in the United States and Canada.

There was work there and consequently money, a significant amount of which had to be sent home, to keep the family they left behind in some kind of a position to maintain even a half-dignified lifestyle.

During a little trawl through some very informative data available from the Mayo County Library, historians estimated that during the latter half of the 19th century, the Irish in America sent $260 million back to Ireland, which one Dennis Clarke described as ‘the greatest transatlantic philanthropy of the nineteenth century’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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