During the nineteenth century, thousands of Irish migrants used Liverpool, Britain's Irish Sea entrepôt, as a departure point for the United States and the Antipodes. Many Irish, however, found themselves either too impoverished, ill, or drawn to the “black spot on the Mersey” to leave. By 1851, the Irish born composed nearly one-quarter of Liverpool's population, Britain's highest percentage. Although Irish Protestants likely were up to 25 percent of all Irish migrants at this time, John Belchem notes in his remarkable book Irish, Catholic, and Scouse that “Irish and Catholic came to carry synonymic force in nineteenth-century Liverpool” (8). He seeks to explain how these Irish Catholics “acquired a distinctive hybrid hyphenated identity as Liverpool-Irish” (xi) and instead of cowering as “passive victims of prejudice” became proud and assertive activists for their causes (28).
Belchem attributes the formation of the Liverpool-Irish to myriad forces. He begins by examining the Liverpool-Irish workforce because he recognizes that the vast majority of the Liverpool-Irish toiled in unskilled manual labor jobs on the waterfront, where they became crucial but cantankerous cogs in the port's economic machinery. Over time, these Irish workers “developed a wider ethnic solidarity which gave them some influence within the otherwise free-for-all casualism of the waterfront labor markets” that enabled them to overcome bias and discrimination (28).
Meanwhile, a middle class of Irish ethnic entrepreneurs emerged who profited by promoting Liverpool-Irishness. Because they catered to the Liverpool-Irish working class, it made good business sense for culture brokers to promote the Liverpool-Irish's burgeoning identity by helping to build a rich associational apparatus of friendly societies, cultural organizations, and nationalist groups and then to reap the profits by hosting these associations in their pubs or by supporting their causes in their newspaper columns. These ethnic entrepreneurs often clashed with the small fraction of Irish Catholic businessmen who thrived upon Ireland's close connection to Britain and the empire's extensive reach. They tended to prioritize Catholic interests over nationalist goals because they had nothing to gain (and possibly much to lose) by aligning themselves too closely with the Liverpool-Irish (124).
Certainly, the Catholic Church ministered faithfully to the Liverpool-Irish. Liverpool-Irish priests and nuns developed a Catholic cradle-to-grave welfare and educational system, which they boldly asserted should be paid by public funds. Most important, they did not view the massive numbers of Liverpool-Irish poor as a stain or an embarrassment but rather as the “ancient Catholic virtue of Holy Poverty” that “became the proud hallmark of being genuinely Irish” in Liverpool (72). Although Irish clergy and nuns often acquired tremendous popularity in their parishes by reaching out to the Liverpool-Irish poor regardless of their impoverishment, they experienced constant pressure to save the Liverpool-Irish from disease, death, moral decay, and worst of all for them, Protestantism.
The sectarian rivalry between Catholic and Protestant Irish in Liverpool led to the most regular cases of “pat-riot-ism” anywhere in Britain outside of Belfast (186). Protestant demagogues like Hugh McNeile and George Wise inflamed Liverpool Protestants (most of them working class, many of them of Irish descent) by dramatizing the dangers of the Irish Catholic menace in their midst. This sectarian rhetoric catapulted the Conservatives into local political dominance and mobilized Orangeism. In response, Liverpool-Irish pride and protectionism grew, which resulted in regular riots and the development of a sectarian geography marked by “well-defined enclaves” (190).
Despite ugly sectarianism and Conservative dominance, the Liverpool-Irish built the Irish National Party (INP) into a powerful political force. The Liverpool INP served as Parnell's key constituency in Britain, and then after the divorce crisis shattered his party elsewhere, it continued to treat the Scotland Ward parliamentary seat as its birthright. Under Austin Harford, the Liverpool-Irish developed “Nat-Labism,” a potent political hybrid that combined a commitment to Irish nationalism, an attention to social reform, and a defense of denominational education. By rejecting Liberalism and co-opting Labor's reform agenda, “the INP under Austin Harford was the hegemonic political force in Edwardian Irish Liverpool, leaving little space or need for class, confessional or gaelic alternatives, such as the Labor Party, the Catholic Federation, or Sinn Fein” (18). The “Irish Revolution” of the 1920s and 1930s ultimately led to the Liverpool INP's demise and Labor's rise, but its shelf life was longer in Liverpool than elsewhere in Britain, and it was a key component in the formation of a Liverpool-Irish identity.
The book reads like a dozen relatively independent articles, and much time is spent in the index trying to connect the dots. Nevertheless, this book is a courageous and impressive accomplishment. Having researched the Liverpool-Irish, I fully recognize the frustrations that Belchem faced while seeking sources in Liverpool (23). He overcame that problem, however, by uncovering an incredible amount of manuscript sources from the National Archives in Kew and from archives in Ireland and Northern Ireland. As a result, he provides us with a rich and detailed multigenerational history of the Liverpool-Irish that exhaustively covers nearly every important aspect of their experience. The book does not consistently provide the “international comparative perspective” that he desires (xii), but he does include a fascinating chapter on Liverpool-Irish recreation that examines the city's importation of American blackface minstrelsy (234). In fact, Belchem's discussion of the intersections among class, race, and ethnicity is one of the book's strengths, particularly his examination of the Liverpool-Irish's bigotry toward blacks and Asians (302–23). Overall, Irish diaspora scholars are greatly indebted to this book.
