Liam's Irish Traditional Music - Irelands culture and tradition

Because Britain was so powerful, it was possible for British people to believe that they were racially superior to those who lived in the lands conquered by British armies, and linked by the British navy. The Irish people were amongst those viewed as an inferior race. The Irish playwright J.M. Synge wrote about the effects of anti-Irish attitudes. As a young writer he became deeply involved in the Gaelic revival movement, which aimed to restore the place of Irish history, which had been rejected by English writers and historians. He considered that the anti-Irish bias in English writing could only be described as racist.

It should never be forgotten that half the troubles of England and Ireland have arisen from ignorance based on the biased view of historians and on the absurd caricatures, which have achieved much in the way of making the Irish character a scaled book to the Englishman.

Source: quoted in Nothing But The Same Old Story. The Root of Anti-Irish Racism. Information on Ireland, 1984

Scientific racism had some intellectual followers in the nineteenth century. The people who studied this believed in white supremacy. The people who lived in Germany, Britain and America were the most civilized and successful. Other Europeans came next. Indians, Africans, Chinese and Aborigines were all considered inferior because of their racial origin.

Some scientists believed that people could be grouped according to their size and shape of their skulls. These drawings show how they tried to explain their ideas. Negro and Irish people were considered primitive because they had lived isolated lives. English and German people were superior because they had competed successfully against other nations in the world. They were a part of a white master race.

This extract comes from a letter written by Charles Kingsley to his wife in 1860. He had been to Ireland on holiday.

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country, to see white chimpanzees is dreadful, if they were black, one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.

Kingsley was a famous nineteenth-century novelist. He also had close connections with a small socialist group called the Fabians. Some of these were supporters of the British Empire and strongly racist in their views about the peoples who were governed by the British Parliament.

Attitudes like this were quite common in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Friedrich Engels, a close friend of Karl Marx, the founder of the Idea of Communism, wrote a book called The Condition of the Working Classes in England. Many of the large industrial towns had growing communities of Irish migrants, who lived in appalling poverty. Engels describes their houses, and animals, and condemns them as lazy and filthy. Canadians and Americans who lived in areas where there were large groups of Irish migrants expressed similar attitudes.