From the beginning of the eighteenth century there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Ireland to Britain, so that by 1841 there were about 300,000 Irish-born men and women living in the country. Then, in 1846-7, came the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and famine stalked the land. The immediate result was that the flow of immigrants became a flood. By 1851 the figure for England and Wales had risen to 500,000, and ten years later it had increased to over 800,000.

The vast majority of these immigrants had landed at Liverpool and then fanned out through the mining districts of south Lancashire to the cotton towns of east Lancashire, on to the woollen mills of Yorkshire, south to the industrial Midlands and London, or north to the coalfields on the north-cast coast and Tyneside. At first they presented problems not unlike those of the Diaspora in Germany at the present day. They arrived in areas where there was little or no provision for Catholic worship, where the Catholics (what few of them remained) were emerging from three centuries in the catacombs, and where there was a great dearth of clergy. In the early days many thousands were lost to the faith due to their lack of opportunity to practise. For example, it has been estimated that had there been sufficient clergy the population of industrial Yorkshire would have been more than half Catholic instead of less than the third that it is at present.