JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

ESSAYS89The Irish Immigrants' Contribution toScottish Socialism, 1880-1926'The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything incommon with the bourgeois - family relations; modern industrial labour, modern SUbjugation tocapital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every traceof national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind whichlurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.'Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,The Communist Manifesto'It is noteworthy that Frederick Engels, notwithstanding his long residence in England and acquain~tance with the English people, never in himself became completely anglicised. He always retained tothe last his German individuality.'Emest Belford BaxAlthough there were Utopian socialists in Scotland in the 1830s and 1840s, not one of themadvocated or subscribed to the class struggle. When socialism began to develop in Scotland around1880, it was restricted mainly to a minority of working class men and women. Yet despite the perennialmyths about the almost innate 'democratic intellect' of the Scot in the late eighteenth, nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, Scottish socialism - or should I say socialism in Scotland? - crystallised withina society characterised by Presbyterian' superiority', a suffocating Kail yard sentimentality, and ethnicconflict.!Although a small minority of the Irish immigrants were Protestants, the unspoken assumption ofScottish historiography is that the Irish immigrants in Scotland were exclusively Roman Catholics.There are really no statistics distinguishing Catholics from Protestants amongst the Irish immigrants.The census figures tabulating the number of Irish immigrants did not take account of men and womenof Irish parentage. Despite the Presbyterian critics' wild exaggerations of the large number of Irishliving in the Athens of the North between 1880 and 1914, historians of Scotland's shifting populationhave not been able to muster much detailed infonnation about their actual number. While the largeinflux of about 110,000 Irish immigrants during the 1840s was not sufficient to compensate for theheavy emigration from Scotland, Irish immigrants continued to arrive in a country with passionate anti­Catholic prejudices. What was not in doubt, according to the most recent research into Scottishpopulation history, was that many Scottish towns and cities 'contained a substantial population ofIrishimmigrants?In 1851 the population of Scotland was 2,888,742. By 1921 it had increased to 4,900,000. In the1920s as in the 1880s, the Presbyterian Establishment were raging about the very large number of Irish­Catholics in Scotland. In summarising one such critic, James Handley said: 'The writer estimated thatthe Catholic communion in Scotland (in 1926) numbered about 650,000 or 13.26% of the population- not in itself an alarming encroachment on the Protestant predominance of the nation if the balance werenot undergoing a constant modification in favour of the Catholics by their higher bihh-rate'. TheCatholic community in Glasgow was calculated at 250,000 in a population of 1,100,000 or 23 % of thetotal population. 3Furthennore, Irish-Catholic immigrants were concentrated in such courities as Lanarkshire,Renfrewshire, Dumbartonshire and Ayrshire. Despite the propaganda in the Kailyard novels, the Irish­Catholic immigrants were restricted to unskilled work, particularly in the coal mining industry of thewest of Scotland. In a vivid, graphic and racist essay Rublished in 1888, Robert Haddow divided 'theminers of Scotland' into 'the Scottish miner pure and simple, the Scoto-Irish miner and the miner whois altogether an Irishman'. The miners in the first group were 'the best' miners; and they had an