ABSTRACT

The Irish poor were for half a century the great support of the church, and it was the increase in their numbers, especially in the decades following the Famine, which was responsible for the

multiplication of Catholic missions and schools. So close, indeed, was the association that the church, which gratefully acknowledged their role as ‘eminent propagandists of the faith’,6 sometimes treated ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ as interchangeable terms. The appear­ ance of a settled body of Irish in any place was generally a signal for the planting of a Catholic mission to begin. Protestant mission­ aries, who suffered their persecutions in the street, were accus­ tomed to classify the Irish indiscriminately as ‘Romanists’, whose ‘superstition’ and ‘ignorance’ it was one of their painful duties to meet - one missionary even complained of ‘Papist charwomen’ at a London hospital, biasing the patients against the influence of ‘Bible instructions’.7 For working people, too, like the colliers at Airdrie who struck work in 1854 ‘until the Catholic miners were dismissed’,8 the religion of the newly-arrived immigrants might appear as distinctive a peculiarity as their race; the Roman Catholic church, a London street sweeper told Mayhew, was ‘a Irish religion’ which, as he explained, he ‘wasn’t to be expected to understand’.9 The Irish, for their part, rejoiced in the equation and seem to have sought out occasions on which it might be displayed.10 During the taking of the 1871 Census in Ancoats, for example, a batch of returns was found to have been completed at a local public house - ‘the House of Commons for Ireland’ - in which religion and social status were interestingly confused: ‘Numbers of papers were found filled up in the same handwriting, and the occupation of almost all of them returned as Catholic.’11