Book Review by Dr Enda V Murray
Sean Connolly: On Every Tide
Sean Connolly begins his book On Every Tide with the stories of Gerald O’Hara and Patrick Durack. One is the fictional hero of American classic Gone with the Wind, the other a very real figure of Irish Australian history who in 1883, less than 25 years after his arrival in the country, staked his claim on a vast swathe of land in the Kimberley. Connolly’s aim is to show ‘the prominent place that each holds in a national epic of his adopted country’ and portray the place of the Irish diaspora in both the USA and Australia.
Sean Connolly was Professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast from 1996 to 2017 and has made a long career writing on the complexities of Irish identity. On Every Tide is an attractive mix of academic rigour and everyman prose. Connolly’s observations on the travails of the Irish diaspora in their selected destinations is backed up with extensive and detailed research.
Where On Every Tide differs from other works on the Irish diaspora is the comparative nature of the different strands of experience according to the countries where the Irish settled. Ordinarily, histories of the Irish in Australia will examine the experiences of the Irish in that country while histories of Irish America will explore that story. Connolly is able to make intelligent observations on the different patterns of settlement, for example, between Australia and the USA and the reasons why these occurred. The experiences of the Irish in Britain, Australia, Canada and Argentina are also compared and contrasted. This is the great strength of this book.
The sheer distance between Ireland and Australia and the cost of the 12,000 mile passage for example meant that Australia was spared the ‘hundreds and thousands of refugees…ragged, starving and diseased, that were cast up on the shores of Great Britain and North America.’
This comparative analysis is fascinating in observing how the Irish adapted to their new adopted lands in the 19th century. In the USA, for example, the Irish fitted into an already established economy taking the lowest level jobs and staying in the urban areas. In Australia, though, the Irish communities developed in colonies that were still in the process of construction. Here, although subject to more pointed sectarianism, the Irish were able to fill a range of social roles in both urban and rural settings.
While the Irish in America constructed parallel societal organisations under the guidance of the Catholic Church, the Irish in Australia were not as separated from the mainstream society. According to Connolly, this explains the rise of the Irish within the labor organisations and their dominance of Tammany Hall (the de facto centre of power in New York City from the 1850s to the 1960s).
Connolly concludes his book by examining contemporary notions of the Irish diaspora. These range from Mary Robinson’s focus on the diaspora in 1990 with a candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin, to the glamorous international view of the Celtic Tiger typified by the proliferation of Irish pubs such as the Loafing Leprechaun in Atlanta and Molly Malone’s in Hiroshima. (Guinness alone claimed to have opened 1,700 ‘Irish pubs’ globally between 1992 and 1998). Rather than ‘huddling in ghettoes and clinging to memories of a lost homeland’, the diaspora of the early 21st century is seen as ‘a much looser and more widely dispersed collection of individuals and groups, no longer seen as exiles, but as potential ambassadors for the Irish brand.’
On Every Tide The making and remaking of the Irish world, Sean Connolly, 2022, Abacus Books, London. ISBN 978-0-349-14278-4
Tinteán 