Was there ever slave trading or slaves in Ireland.

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

(In discussing the links between Irish Americans and African Americans it is always easy to oversimplify history. There have been Irish people on both sides of the slavery's coin -- some historians have asserted that during Oliver Cromwell's reign in the mid 17th century, up to 130,000 Irish people were sent into slavery. Most of these were sent to the Caribbean, but many were sent to the colonies of the New World.)





Mixing it up


When the history of relations between the two ethnic groups is retold, tales of misdeeds, mutual suspicion and bad blood tend to dominate. Episodes ranging from the New York City draft riots during the Civil War through to the "white flight" from inner cities a century later are highlighted. So too are the tensions that flowed from things as diverse as Irish domination of urban city police departments and the high-profile attained by some ethnic Irish bigots (most notably the vituperatively anti-Semitic and racist priest Fr. Charles Coughlin) in the early-to-mid decades of the last century.


But an accurate attempt at retelling Irish and African-American history should not occlude areas of racial cooperation. Irish and black Americans workers, for example, have fought side-by-side for rights in the labor movement since its earliest days. During the recent MTA transport strike, during which the heavily African-American TWU was led by Trinidadian immigrant Roger Toussaint, labor activists often invoked the name of a previous TWU leader and immigrant, Mike Quill of County Kerry, as inspiration.