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Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914 : An Aspect of Anglo-Irish History
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April 15, 2025
‘The defeat of the Catholic military potential in 1690 led to the establishment of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, that is, political power held by a relatively few wealthy Protestant settlers, staunch supporters of the Anglican Church of Ireland and the Protestant monarchy. The term Protestant ‘Ascendency’ took on a more sinister meaning, when, following the victories of William of Orange, a series of harsh laws were passed, penalising Roman Catholic in a comprehensive manner...for example a Catholic priest could not celebrate mass, under the threat of severe penalties, however mass was frequently celebrated in the hedgerows and fields’
‘The Royal College of Saint Patrick was a Catholic seminary established in 1795 at Maynooth in County Kildare. It was financed by an annual vote of public money by the Irish parliament, and after the Act of the Union in 1801 the annual vote of funds was continued by Westminster. The reason for the establishment of Maynooth was to try and obtain the loyalty of Irish Catholics by providing facilities for training priests in Ireland, thus making it less necessary to train abroad, where exiled Irish nationalism might exercise a hostile influence’.
‘Significantly, as many of the founder members [of the Orange Order] were Freemasons, the signs, ceremonies and rituals of Masonry were adopted by the Orangemen’
‘1757 Lancashire was a coal mining and cotton manufacturing district.
‘In 1832 the radical Bolton Chronicle on Ralph Fletcher [who was from a coal pit owning family] ’ The whole policy of the spy system, of which, in this part of Lancashire he was the prime mover, is too well known’.’
‘Violent incidents involving Orangemen and Catholics [in Ireland] had raised the fear that those antagonisms could spread to English streets and so hostility was also directed at the English institution. The riot in Manchester in 1807 seemed to confirm these fears and it was to be the violence associated with Orange lodges that distinguished them from other Tory organisations’.
‘...The important part played by the Orange order in maintaining law and order in the Bolton area at the time of industrial unrest, giving credence to the argument that Orangemen acted as spies’.
Eventually the ‘Catholic question’ in English politics centred around the issue of what concessions could be made to Catholics to obtain a reduction in violence in Ireland, without at the same time provoking a Protestant backlash in England, politically damaging to those who made the concessions’
‘In retrospect there is something incongruous about a situation in which a small group of aristocrats and a member of the Royal family set themselves up as leaders of an organisation consisting overwhelmingly of uneducated labouring men, mostly lacking the vote, whose main activities were drinking , and increasingly, street fights with Irish Catholics’.
‘Colonel William Blennerhasset Fairman who was appointed Grand Secretary in 1832...wrote a letter to the Marquess of Londonderry, arguing that with such aristocratic leadership the pit men of the north east would join the institution, making them less likely to ally themselves to trade unions and similar seditious groups, ‘no less to the preservation of private property than to that of public peace’. Fairman was taking a line consistent with that of the founding members of the English Orangemen i.e. the working class should be recruited in the defence of law, order and private property.’
‘Where the officials of a Lodge were local mine owners, manufacturers, warehouse owners and so on, jobs would be given to Orangemen. This is not surprising, Catholics where possible exercised the same kind of patronage. Fletcher had absolute control over the lives of miners who worked down his pits in Atherton, so membership of the Chowbent Lodges would be a valuable element in job security. Publicans who were Orangemen could obtain custom particularly if the public house was used for lodge meetings and dinners. This system of patronage spread upwards through the Orange Order... (influence and assistance appear frequently to have been used) to procure licenses for public houses, pensions in the artillery and situations in the police and docks’
[The journey from Ireland to Liverpool where ] the overwhelming majority of passengers were carried on deck with virtually no shelter from the elements. The result was that they frequently arrived in a state of exhaustion, some died on the way...[as the ships were] overcrowded...[for example when due to] bad weather [those on deck were] told to go below deck and 72 died of suffocation’.
‘Sarah Burns...cellar where she and her children lived [in Liverpool] ‘a person could not stand upright in it, the floor was composed of mud; and in the hovel there were 17 human beings crowded together without even so much as a bit of straw to lie down on’.
‘Liverpool Board of Guardians –no legal obligation to provide continuing relief to migrants’.
‘The validity of a persons claim to poor relief depended on whether or not he or she had acquired the status of being settled in the parish where the claim was made...principle means of settlement was inheriting settlement from ones father...the Irish did not have settlement in English parishes which meant they could be moved back to Ireland if they were forced by circumstances to claim poor relief while in England’.
‘Poor relief (Ireland) Bill was introduced into Parliament...and became law.. in 1847. Irish Poor Law Unions now had to provide relief for the destitute, many could not afford to do so, and even when it was provided the diet was so inferior to that to be had in British workhouses and gaols’.
‘Anti Irish feeling 1847... the widespread sense of grievance over the cost of supporting the Irish poor; the relatively high proportion of Irish born people reported in the boroughs crime statistics, and fear of rebellion among the Irish community in Liverpool...the English perception of Irish ‘disloyalty’... Criminal statistics regarding minority ethnic groups are frequently a potent catalyst with regard to underlying prejudices in the host community. This is particularly the case given the unwillingness of the majority of people to submit such figures to any kind of analytical scrutiny... Many of the people arrested and designated English would be the children of Irish born persons and so almost certainly Catholic, hence the proportions of Catholics in various categories would be higher than those referring to Irish. For Protestant extremists it was the Catholicity of law breakers that provided grist to their particular mill...There is general agreement among those closest to the immigrants that drink was a major factor in their involvement with the police. Unimportant in organised crime, they were particularly prominent in crimes of violent assault.’
‘The business community in part certainly benefitted from the large pool of unemployed Irish to the extent that Irish labour was widely used and the presence of so many people looking for work could not fail to influence the wage levels paid to labourers’.
‘1848 The Liverpool Mercury...[the Irish] ’a slothful, improvident and reckless race’ [unlike the English] ‘industrious, thrifty and peaceful people’...’there is a faint of inferiority in the character of the pure Celt which has more to do with his present degradation than Saxon domination’... To remove any doubt of the racial nature of the piece, the article went on to claim that the Scots Irish of Ulster were superior to the pure Irish’.
‘The police... operated a system of surveillance over all potential trouble makers with such success that there was no chance of being taken by surprise’.
‘In 1829...14,0000 British soldiers had been slaughtered in the Khyber Pass’
‘Catholic children at the Kirkdale Industrial School. Of 795 children, 451 were Catholics, and all the pupils were the children of prostitutes and criminals’.
‘Major Grieg was successful in smashing the Fenian organisation in Liverpool using the well established method of paid informers’
‘It is as if all the frustration arising from poverty, overcrowding and unemployment broke the surface and found outlet in sectarian violence as the ‘readiest’ legitimate excuse. The positions of Catholics and Protestants alike who found themselves a minority in a street or neighbourhood became dangerous’.
‘Fr John Fitzgerald... claimed that since 1901 he and his fellow clergy, nuns and Catholic lay people had been subjected to non stop harassment which at times amounted to terrorism’
‘There was also economic terrorism [where Catholic business owners were forced to sell their businesses]...In another street Catholics received leaflets signed ‘the sons of death’ ordering them out of their houses, and many took the advice’.
‘Mixed marriages in particular caused much unhappiness. While Catholic clergy had never indulged in public attacks on Protestantism, their opposition was total and they would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent mixed marriages or to ‘safeguard the souls’ the children of such unions.’
Pre 1960 Liverpool (where for example a ham shank was frequently hung from a lamp post with a sign ‘Cured at Lourdes’)
James Sexton writing about Jim Larkin, the Liverpool Irish Labour Party leader...’he organised gigantic processions against Chinese labour on the road, [and] faced hostile mobs saturated with religious bigotry’.
The Second World War was followed by significant changes in Liverpool society; as in the rest of the country there was full employment until the early 1970s and working class people could enjoy television, a car, holidays abroad and other diversions... Slum clearance in the inner city broke up religious ghettoes, although the Pope’s visit in 1982 resulted in street decorations which clearly indicated the town centre is still predominantly Catholic’.
‘In Joyce's words... ‘In Lancashire even more than elsewhere, the Irish comprised a pool of often cheaper and unskilled labour. As the ‘external enemy’ they can also be understood as the ‘poor whites’ of the north, healing the wounds of dependence felt most by the less skilled’.
This point was made by Marx: ‘The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life...thus antagonism is kept alive in the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class’.
‘Central to the understanding of this tradition of sectarian bitterness is an appreciation of the reality of the conflict, in the concrete and individual experiences. To come home at night and find a brother, father or sister bleeding and battered after a fight over ‘religion’ was a traumatic experience which entered into the family stock of stories and prejudices, to be embroidered over time. The strength of the verbal tradition of storytelling in the working class has received little attention’,
‘An important factor, difficult to measure is simple tribalism, with all territorial and symbolic connotations. The Irish were resented as outsiders and had to be confined to their districts. In all cases, crowds and riots attract young men for whom fighting is fun and for whom ideological motivation is often difficult to sustain’.
‘The role of the present day Orange Institution is more complex than before World War Two. It provides a support system and sense of identity and community to people who have been battered by the upheaval involved in slum clearance and unemployment caused by the collapse of much of the local economy’.
‘The Royal College of Saint Patrick was a Catholic seminary established in 1795 at Maynooth in County Kildare. It was financed by an annual vote of public money by the Irish parliament, and after the Act of the Union in 1801 the annual vote of funds was continued by Westminster. The reason for the establishment of Maynooth was to try and obtain the loyalty of Irish Catholics by providing facilities for training priests in Ireland, thus making it less necessary to train abroad, where exiled Irish nationalism might exercise a hostile influence’.
‘Significantly, as many of the founder members [of the Orange Order] were Freemasons, the signs, ceremonies and rituals of Masonry were adopted by the Orangemen’
‘1757 Lancashire was a coal mining and cotton manufacturing district.
‘In 1832 the radical Bolton Chronicle on Ralph Fletcher [who was from a coal pit owning family] ’ The whole policy of the spy system, of which, in this part of Lancashire he was the prime mover, is too well known’.’
‘Violent incidents involving Orangemen and Catholics [in Ireland] had raised the fear that those antagonisms could spread to English streets and so hostility was also directed at the English institution. The riot in Manchester in 1807 seemed to confirm these fears and it was to be the violence associated with Orange lodges that distinguished them from other Tory organisations’.
‘...The important part played by the Orange order in maintaining law and order in the Bolton area at the time of industrial unrest, giving credence to the argument that Orangemen acted as spies’.
Eventually the ‘Catholic question’ in English politics centred around the issue of what concessions could be made to Catholics to obtain a reduction in violence in Ireland, without at the same time provoking a Protestant backlash in England, politically damaging to those who made the concessions’
‘In retrospect there is something incongruous about a situation in which a small group of aristocrats and a member of the Royal family set themselves up as leaders of an organisation consisting overwhelmingly of uneducated labouring men, mostly lacking the vote, whose main activities were drinking , and increasingly, street fights with Irish Catholics’.
‘Colonel William Blennerhasset Fairman who was appointed Grand Secretary in 1832...wrote a letter to the Marquess of Londonderry, arguing that with such aristocratic leadership the pit men of the north east would join the institution, making them less likely to ally themselves to trade unions and similar seditious groups, ‘no less to the preservation of private property than to that of public peace’. Fairman was taking a line consistent with that of the founding members of the English Orangemen i.e. the working class should be recruited in the defence of law, order and private property.’
‘Where the officials of a Lodge were local mine owners, manufacturers, warehouse owners and so on, jobs would be given to Orangemen. This is not surprising, Catholics where possible exercised the same kind of patronage. Fletcher had absolute control over the lives of miners who worked down his pits in Atherton, so membership of the Chowbent Lodges would be a valuable element in job security. Publicans who were Orangemen could obtain custom particularly if the public house was used for lodge meetings and dinners. This system of patronage spread upwards through the Orange Order... (influence and assistance appear frequently to have been used) to procure licenses for public houses, pensions in the artillery and situations in the police and docks’
[The journey from Ireland to Liverpool where ] the overwhelming majority of passengers were carried on deck with virtually no shelter from the elements. The result was that they frequently arrived in a state of exhaustion, some died on the way...[as the ships were] overcrowded...[for example when due to] bad weather [those on deck were] told to go below deck and 72 died of suffocation’.
‘Sarah Burns...cellar where she and her children lived [in Liverpool] ‘a person could not stand upright in it, the floor was composed of mud; and in the hovel there were 17 human beings crowded together without even so much as a bit of straw to lie down on’.
‘Liverpool Board of Guardians –no legal obligation to provide continuing relief to migrants’.
‘The validity of a persons claim to poor relief depended on whether or not he or she had acquired the status of being settled in the parish where the claim was made...principle means of settlement was inheriting settlement from ones father...the Irish did not have settlement in English parishes which meant they could be moved back to Ireland if they were forced by circumstances to claim poor relief while in England’.
‘Poor relief (Ireland) Bill was introduced into Parliament...and became law.. in 1847. Irish Poor Law Unions now had to provide relief for the destitute, many could not afford to do so, and even when it was provided the diet was so inferior to that to be had in British workhouses and gaols’.
‘Anti Irish feeling 1847... the widespread sense of grievance over the cost of supporting the Irish poor; the relatively high proportion of Irish born people reported in the boroughs crime statistics, and fear of rebellion among the Irish community in Liverpool...the English perception of Irish ‘disloyalty’... Criminal statistics regarding minority ethnic groups are frequently a potent catalyst with regard to underlying prejudices in the host community. This is particularly the case given the unwillingness of the majority of people to submit such figures to any kind of analytical scrutiny... Many of the people arrested and designated English would be the children of Irish born persons and so almost certainly Catholic, hence the proportions of Catholics in various categories would be higher than those referring to Irish. For Protestant extremists it was the Catholicity of law breakers that provided grist to their particular mill...There is general agreement among those closest to the immigrants that drink was a major factor in their involvement with the police. Unimportant in organised crime, they were particularly prominent in crimes of violent assault.’
‘The business community in part certainly benefitted from the large pool of unemployed Irish to the extent that Irish labour was widely used and the presence of so many people looking for work could not fail to influence the wage levels paid to labourers’.
‘1848 The Liverpool Mercury...[the Irish] ’a slothful, improvident and reckless race’ [unlike the English] ‘industrious, thrifty and peaceful people’...’there is a faint of inferiority in the character of the pure Celt which has more to do with his present degradation than Saxon domination’... To remove any doubt of the racial nature of the piece, the article went on to claim that the Scots Irish of Ulster were superior to the pure Irish’.
‘The police... operated a system of surveillance over all potential trouble makers with such success that there was no chance of being taken by surprise’.
‘In 1829...14,0000 British soldiers had been slaughtered in the Khyber Pass’
‘Catholic children at the Kirkdale Industrial School. Of 795 children, 451 were Catholics, and all the pupils were the children of prostitutes and criminals’.
‘Major Grieg was successful in smashing the Fenian organisation in Liverpool using the well established method of paid informers’
‘It is as if all the frustration arising from poverty, overcrowding and unemployment broke the surface and found outlet in sectarian violence as the ‘readiest’ legitimate excuse. The positions of Catholics and Protestants alike who found themselves a minority in a street or neighbourhood became dangerous’.
‘Fr John Fitzgerald... claimed that since 1901 he and his fellow clergy, nuns and Catholic lay people had been subjected to non stop harassment which at times amounted to terrorism’
‘There was also economic terrorism [where Catholic business owners were forced to sell their businesses]...In another street Catholics received leaflets signed ‘the sons of death’ ordering them out of their houses, and many took the advice’.
‘Mixed marriages in particular caused much unhappiness. While Catholic clergy had never indulged in public attacks on Protestantism, their opposition was total and they would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent mixed marriages or to ‘safeguard the souls’ the children of such unions.’
Pre 1960 Liverpool (where for example a ham shank was frequently hung from a lamp post with a sign ‘Cured at Lourdes’)
James Sexton writing about Jim Larkin, the Liverpool Irish Labour Party leader...’he organised gigantic processions against Chinese labour on the road, [and] faced hostile mobs saturated with religious bigotry’.
The Second World War was followed by significant changes in Liverpool society; as in the rest of the country there was full employment until the early 1970s and working class people could enjoy television, a car, holidays abroad and other diversions... Slum clearance in the inner city broke up religious ghettoes, although the Pope’s visit in 1982 resulted in street decorations which clearly indicated the town centre is still predominantly Catholic’.
‘In Joyce's words... ‘In Lancashire even more than elsewhere, the Irish comprised a pool of often cheaper and unskilled labour. As the ‘external enemy’ they can also be understood as the ‘poor whites’ of the north, healing the wounds of dependence felt most by the less skilled’.
This point was made by Marx: ‘The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life...thus antagonism is kept alive in the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class’.
‘Central to the understanding of this tradition of sectarian bitterness is an appreciation of the reality of the conflict, in the concrete and individual experiences. To come home at night and find a brother, father or sister bleeding and battered after a fight over ‘religion’ was a traumatic experience which entered into the family stock of stories and prejudices, to be embroidered over time. The strength of the verbal tradition of storytelling in the working class has received little attention’,
‘An important factor, difficult to measure is simple tribalism, with all territorial and symbolic connotations. The Irish were resented as outsiders and had to be confined to their districts. In all cases, crowds and riots attract young men for whom fighting is fun and for whom ideological motivation is often difficult to sustain’.
‘The role of the present day Orange Institution is more complex than before World War Two. It provides a support system and sense of identity and community to people who have been battered by the upheaval involved in slum clearance and unemployment caused by the collapse of much of the local economy’.
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