Professor Bríona Nic Dhiarmada

Yeah, our links with Barbados, obviously, they're there today.

And it's wonderful to see the new embassy being opened in Bagot Street.

And Ireland is involved with the UN, with the Small Nations Development Project, sending young Irish people over there to work today.

But our links, as you mentioned, our links go right, right back.

And they go back to a very, it's a very traumatic period in Irish history.

and indeed in Bajan or Barbadian history as well.

It goes back basically to the 1620s.

So what you had in the 1620s, the Caribbean, the islands of the Caribbean, were being opened up and exploited by Europeans, the French, the Dutch and the British.

And Barbados was colonised by Britain, British planters.

You had a sugar boom.

Now, sugar was a hugely important commodity and it made fortunes for people.

But sugarcane, the production of sugarcane was very labour intensive.

So they needed people to work in these plantations on cutting sugarcane, a terribly hard job.

So basically what you had from the 1620s on was you had a number of indentured servants, people who were from Ireland and also people from Britain indeed, who would sign up for periods of indentureship, which meant basically they sold themselves as slaves.

temporary, I suppose, enforced workers on these fields.

They did.

They did here initially, in the very early days in the 1620s, you had numbers of maybe a couple of hundreds of Irish people signing on.

They were sent, in some instances, by planters in Ireland who sent people from there over to Barbados.

So they would have been sold there as indentured servants, as they were called.

Now, they would have signed