Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Now, last night, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Motley, officially opened the nation's embassy on Bagot Street in Dublin. Ireland's links with this Caribbean nation run deep, with thousands of our forefathers being forcibly sent to Barbados 400 years ago to serve as indentured servants.
Writer, academic and filmmaker, Professor Brianna Nick-Diarmida joins me now to tell us the story of the Irish in Barbados. Good morning to you. You're very welcome to the programme. Good morning, Clare. Thank you so much.
Chapter 2: What historical event connected Ireland and Barbados?
So we are going back 400 years ago. How was this link established and what happened?
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.
So they did that willingly, some of them, Brianna, is that right?
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
up for, I suppose, periods of maybe seven to 10 years. And then they were replaced. They weren't getting enough of them. So they were being replaced then by enslaved Africans. So the Atlantic slave trade took off at this period. So you had thousands upon thousands of Africans who were sent as slaves, sold as slaves, as chattel slaves to Barbados.
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Chapter 3: How did the Irish become indentured servants in Barbados?
And the difference was, sorry to interrupt you, it's slightly on the line, but I'm just keen to know the difference. So the Africans were enslaved, the Irish were indentured servants. So at the end of their seven to ten years, what did they get in return for their work?
They sometimes were given a small plot of land or often they went on maybe perhaps to the Carolinas, to America. But the situation changed. That was the situation. up to, say, the 1650s. Things changed dramatically then for the Irish. They were still treated as indentured servants, which meant that after seven to ten years, they were freed.
However, in the 1650s, under Cromwell, under the Cromwellian conquest, these people didn't willingly sign off at all. They were actually gathered up, Shanghai press ganged. There were roving press gangs going all over Ireland Ireland was in a terrible state during the Cromwellian Rebellion. You had many orphans, you had women whose husbands had been killed. You had soldiers who had been defeated.
And these people were what they called Barbados. They were taken up from the streets, or soldiers whose lives were spared by Cromwell, were taken off and sent to Barbados, across the Atlantic Ocean, landing in a place where they were then sold. Now, there's a difference, and people, it's very controversial there because And there was a difference.
There was a very important legal difference between an indentured servant, although they didn't sign indentures. These were forced, basically kidnapped and forcibly working in these dreadful conditions, same conditions as the African chattel slaves. The important difference was that an African chattel slave was owned fully by their masters. Their children were born into slavery.
Whereas where the Irish who suffered the same conditions when they were working in the fields, malnourished, suffered very greatly from malaria, all sorts of yellow fever, diseases like that. They could be freed if they survived. Many didn't. Many, many thousands didn't because the conditions were so horrendous. But they were then given maybe 10, 15 acres of bad land there.
And, of course, many of them would have intermarried. Others remained, actually. They were known as the Red Legs. They were poor.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of sugar production in Barbados?
They had a very, very low position in that society. And... They would have been the remnants of the Irish transported servants, I suppose you'd call them.
So clearly there has to be a legacy of these people to this day in Barbados.
There is. In fact, if you go to Bridgetown, we went to film there as part of our documentary series from that small island. And it was fascinating to go there. and to look at the conditions that these people would have worked in. But also you see down in the quay in Barbados where these people would have, where the poor Irish would have been, would have been landed, would have been sold.
There's a wall with all these names, these Irish names. You know, we interviewed this man called Kevin Farmer. He's deputy director of the museum there. And he's done a lot of work into the Irish in Barbados. And he talks about the names. I asked him, did we leave a legacy there? He said, just look around you. He said, just look at the phone book. All of the names in the phone book.
And he said, more to that, just listen to how we speak, he said. He said, the lilt of the accent. And he sounds himself like he's a bit from County Cork, you know. He's got this wonderful lilt.
Recently, Thomas Gould, the Sinn Féin TD, there was a clip of him which went viral in Barbados over the last few weeks because they heard his accent and they said, is he from here? Because it was so similar. So there's certainly something in it.
There's certainly something there. I just listened to this man, Kevin Farmer, he says, the Lilton County Cork, we could be from County Cork. It's hilarious, you know. It's very, very interesting.
And clearly given, you know, your area of interest here, do you believe that we just don't appreciate our links as much as we should?
I think we do. I think we've always conceived of ourselves in too narrow a framework, you know. We think we're on this little island, we stayed on this little island you know, we were this kind of homogenous nation. That's not the case. You know, we went everywhere and we've left legacies everywhere.
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