A lot of these would have been Anglo Irish/Ulster Scots, though given the times if an Irish person was to become wealthy enough to own a plantation with slaves then it would be a given for them to engage in it.
Excuse me our history started in 1916 I’ll have you know
A historian who discovered that at least 260 slave owners in South Carolina in the 1800s were Irish-born has said the number is “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Martine Brennan, from Kerry, began researching Ireland’s involvement in the slave trade after a DNA test revealed she had distant African American cousins in South Carolina.
“As I researched more I came across other Irish people who also discovered distant relatives that were African American,” Brennan told The Times yesterday. “It became very evident to me that while some of these relationships may have been consensual where races mixed, many were not as they aged back to the 1800s when a clear power dynamic was at play.”
The African American Irish Diaspora Network, a US-based organisation, estimates that about 38 per cent of African Americans have some Irish ancestry.
In 2020 Brennan began her Enslavement to Citizenship project, which focuses on South Carolina, where 40 per cent of enslaved people brought to America entered the country. The work has so far found 260 Irish-born slave-owners and has involved extensive record searching through images of headstones, archived letters, newspaper obituaries, records of property, auction listings and wills.
How many of these people were Protestant or Anglo Saxon? I’m not denying anything the evil slave owner in 12 Years a Slave was an Irish Catholic so I was aware it existed but saying 260 slave owners were born in Ireland is like saying 260 slave owners were born in South Africa, who they were matters not where they were born.
“Irish people have played a very varied role in empire — obviously being the subject of empire but also imposing and participating in empire,”
The same goes for any nation that was colonised. Some of the natives always had a part to play in oppressing their own people, it’s not something unique to Ireland or Irish people.
India too. Read “the patient assassin “
Given the incessant posts asking why we don’t teach the famine as genocide in schools (it wasn’t). It does beg the question: why don’t we teach the Irish as slaveowners in history class?
People didn’t honestly think that all Black people in America who have Irish names have them because their descendants married indentured servant Irish did they?
David La Touche, who’s family developed Marlay Park and founded Greystones in Wicklow owned slaves in Jamaica.
Rev Father Richard Wynne from Sligo owned 30 slaves in the Virgin Islands.
Patriot and writer John Mitchel campaigned on the pro slavery Confederate side of the US Civil War. Side fact, about 20k Irish fought for the Confederates.
Worst bastard of all was Philip Walsh. He was a descendant of the Wild Geese and basically ran the French slave trade in the early 1700s.
Like all White subjects of the British Empire back then, we Irish too were involved in slavery.
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A lot of these would have been Anglo Irish/Ulster Scots, though given the times if an Irish person was to become wealthy enough to own a plantation with slaves then it would be a given for them to engage in it.
Excuse me our history started in 1916 I’ll have you know
A historian who discovered that at least 260 slave owners in South Carolina in the 1800s were Irish-born has said the number is “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Martine Brennan, from Kerry, began researching Ireland’s involvement in the slave trade after a DNA test revealed she had distant African American cousins in South Carolina.
“As I researched more I came across other Irish people who also discovered distant relatives that were African American,” Brennan told The Times yesterday. “It became very evident to me that while some of these relationships may have been consensual where races mixed, many were not as they aged back to the 1800s when a clear power dynamic was at play.”
The African American Irish Diaspora Network, a US-based organisation, estimates that about 38 per cent of African Americans have some Irish ancestry.
In 2020 Brennan began her Enslavement to Citizenship project, which focuses on South Carolina, where 40 per cent of enslaved people brought to America entered the country. The work has so far found 260 Irish-born slave-owners and has involved extensive record searching through images of headstones, archived letters, newspaper obituaries, records of property, auction listings and wills.
How many of these people were Protestant or Anglo Saxon? I’m not denying anything the evil slave owner in 12 Years a Slave was an Irish Catholic so I was aware it existed but saying 260 slave owners were born in Ireland is like saying 260 slave owners were born in South Africa, who they were matters not where they were born.
“Irish people have played a very varied role in empire — obviously being the subject of empire but also imposing and participating in empire,”
The same goes for any nation that was colonised. Some of the natives always had a part to play in oppressing their own people, it’s not something unique to Ireland or Irish people.
India too. Read “the patient assassin “
Given the incessant posts asking why we don’t teach the famine as genocide in schools (it wasn’t). It does beg the question: why don’t we teach the Irish as slaveowners in history class?
People didn’t honestly think that all Black people in America who have Irish names have them because their descendants married indentured servant Irish did they?
David La Touche, who’s family developed Marlay Park and founded Greystones in Wicklow owned slaves in Jamaica.
Rev Father Richard Wynne from Sligo owned 30 slaves in the Virgin Islands.
Patriot and writer John Mitchel campaigned on the pro slavery Confederate side of the US Civil War. Side fact, about 20k Irish fought for the Confederates.
Worst bastard of all was Philip Walsh. He was a descendant of the Wild Geese and basically ran the French slave trade in the early 1700s.
Like all White subjects of the British Empire back then, we Irish too were involved in slavery.