AN OPEN ISLAND

Ireland is a beautiful, complex and oftenmythologised country.

For thousands of years, Ireland has been shaped by migration. Wave after wave of people have come and gone. But Irish migration isn’t one long tale of hardship and pain. Rather, it’s the unique story of how an island people made their impact on the world, and how migration shaped what it means to be Irish. Ruined stone cottages and overgrown lazy-bed furrows pay testament to Ireland’s long history of departure. The diverse, rich and varied character of its people truly reflects Ireland’s story of migration.

‘Where dips the rocky highland of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we’ve hid our faery vats, Full of berries, And of reddest stolen cherries.’

An excerpt from ‘The Stolen Child’ by W.B. Yeats

Over 10 million emigrants have left the island of Ireland over the last 1,500 years. Between the sixth and seventh centuries, Irish monks such as St Brendan the Navigator made sea voyages in open boats called currachs. In the 17th century, the first passenger ship, The Friends Goodwill, took five months to reach Boston.

In the 18th century, convict ships bound for Australia spent five months at sea, while transatlantic steam ships in the 19th century could reach Argentina in a month. Many Irish emigrants fleeing the famine experienced cramped conditions on ‘coffin ships’. By the 20th century, great ocean liners arrived in New York in a mere eight days, whereas today it is a seven-hour flight away.

The City Of Dresden

St Brendan The Navigator

St Brendan the Navigator was born in the fifth century AD near Tralee Bay, Co. Kerry. Today he is best remembered for his legendary journey to the Isle of the Blessed, as recounted in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot). Whether merely religious allegory or a partly accurate account of a remarkable voyage, it was one of the earliest accounts of an Irish person attempting to cross the North Atlantic. In 1977, explorer Tim Severin proved it was possible to complete such a passage in a leather-clad Irish currach, raising the possibility that St Brendan was the first European to reach North America.

When The City of Dresden sailed into Buenos Aires harbour from Queenstown (Cobh) in 1889, it was carrying the largest number of passengers from any one destination aboard a single vessel to ever arrive in the country. All 1,774 immigrants who landed in the city found little but hardship awaiting them, and the handsome promises of homes, land, seed and machinery failed to materialise. The new arrivals were either neglected or exploited, and their treatment was widely condemned back in Ireland. The ‘Dresden Affair’, as it came to be known, brought an end to mass Irish emigration to the Argentine Republic.