In just one year, 1847, around 300,000 starving Irish people landed in Liverpool. The city’s own population was about 350,000.

They came across on the deck of small steamers from Dublin and Cork, some paying a few pence, some carried free as ballast. Most were trying to get to America. Many never got further than the dock gates.

Liverpool could not cope, and it was never meant to. The lodging houses near the docks filled, and the fever came with them.

In that one year, the city’s first public health officer estimated that 60,000 people caught typhus and 40,000 caught dysentery.

Liverpool the cemetery of Ireland

Ten priests died attending the sick, and there’s a Celtic cross in the city that remembers them. The Registrar-General’s report of 1847 called Liverpool the cemetery of Ireland.

The welcome ran out fast. Under the Poor Law Removal Act, about 15,000 Irish were shipped straight back to Ireland in June 1847 alone, and tens of thousands more over the following years.

But they stayed anyway

By 1851, roughly a quarter of everyone in Liverpool had been born in Ireland.

They worked the docks, the warehouses, the chemical works and the building sites, and made Scotland Road the spine of Irish Liverpool.

Other cities too

FORTY SHADES OF VERSE by Michael Walsh. In legend, verse and stories this perfect gift provides the enigmatic mirror image of the ancient Irish Nation. Click the picture to access information.

It wasn’t only Liverpool. By 1835 a sixth of household heads in Manchester were Irish. In Glasgow the Irish filled the east end, and in 1887 a Marist brother founded a football club to feed the poor Irish children of that parish. He called it Celtic and today it still thrives.

At the Clarence Dock gates in Liverpool there’s a bilingual plaque. It records that through those gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish who fled the artificial, Westminster-bankers-induced famine to Liverpool between 1845 and 1852.

Liverpool is often called the most Irish city in Britain. Three of the Beatles had Irish roots. Ken Dodd, the celebrated entertainer, called Liverpool ‘Murphyside.’ Did your people land at Liverpool?

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