Time for a zero refugee policy? - *Read OP for mod warnings and threadbans - updated 11/5/24*
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Irish have nothing to be guilty over, we never had an empire
Just took active part in a few empires?
”[excerpt]
Ireland’s projected slave-trade companies
Merchants in Ireland’s ports and towns were well aware of the importance of the slave trade and the slave colonies. The eighteenth-century economies of Cork, Limerick and Belfast expanded on the back of salted and pickled provisions specially designed to survive high temperatures. These were exported to the West Indies to feed slaves and planters, British, French, Spanish and Dutch. Products grown on slave plantations, sugar in the Caribbean and tobacco from the North American colonies, poured into eighteenth-century Ireland. Commercial interests throughout the island, and the parliament in Dublin, were vividly aware of how much wealth and revenue could be made from the imports. The fact that mercantile regulations, laid down in Westminster, meant that ‘plantation goods’ only reached Ireland via British ports was a source of growing indignation. In 1779 the Dublin parliament and the Volunteers successfully worked together to make Britain’s American difficulty Ireland’s opportunity, demanding that Westminster repeal mercantile regulations to allow ‘a free trade for Ireland’.
”
The importance of enslaved Africans in furnishing these Irish gains is vividly illustrated in a commemorative print of 1780 entitled ‘Hibernia attended by her Brave Volunteers, exhibiting her commercial freedom’. At the centre of the picture a youthful Hibernia, barefoot and barebreasted, hair flowing in the breeze, lifts up both her arms to display a banner bearing the words FREE TRADE. Behind her two armed and uniformed figures stand on guard while merchant ships approach at full sail. In the foreground, flanked by tobacco barrels, are three figures, kneeling before Hibernia to offer gifts. On the left an Irish woman holds out cloths, presumably a reference to the right of Ireland to freely export her textile production. Beside her an American Indian offers an animal pelt. On the right a black slave, strong, sinewy and briefly draped, extends a neoclassical urn, its precious metal representing the untold wealth of Africa and America. These three ‘volunteers’ carrying riches to Hibernia recall paintings of the Magi and the Christ-child, that biblical scene in which, since the fifteenth century, one of the kings was invariably depicted as an African.
“This newly won ‘free trade for Ireland’ was not restricted to Atlantic voyaging; it also allowed Irish ships to sail direct to West Africa—in other words, to enter the slave trade. By 1784 Limerick and Belfast had drawn up and published detailed plans for the launching of slave-trade companies. Both ports contained leading merchant families who had made fortunes in the Caribbean. Creaghs from Limerick can be found slave-trading down the century from Rhode Island, Nantes and St Eustatius, and plantation-owning on Barbados and Jamaica. In Limerick by mid-century John Roche (1688–1760) had emerged as the city’s foremost Catholic merchant, richer even than the Creaghs, supplying the West Indies with provisions, buying their sugar and rum, smuggling and privateering during wartime. A similar pattern was established by Thomas Greg and Waddell Cunningham in Belfast. Their activities in the Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War enabled them to improve port facilities at home and to establish sugar plantations in the Ceded Islands.”
Hibernia [or Erin] is depicted holding up a banner with the words "Free Trade" above her head; she is surrounded by an African, an American Native Indian, and a woman - all of them offering gifts up to her. Two soldiers stand next to a tree watching the scene while ships sail on a stormy sea in the background behind her. Barrels of tobacco lie to her left, her harp and a cornucopia lie at her feet. The free trade banner she is carrying is a reference to the campaign that led to the British Act of 1800 which allowed Ireland to trade with British colonies in America, West Indies and Africa on equal terms with Great Britain. A banner is illustrated under this image with the words "Vincit Amor Patriae" ["Love of Country Conquers"].
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