At the heart of the Ulster-American Folk Park in Omagh, Co Tyrone, is Camp Hill Cottage, the birthplace of Thomas Mellon. Born in 1813, Mellon and his family emigrated to the United States in 1818. Sailing from the port of Derry, the commencement of a journey that lasted 17 weeks, they were following in the footsteps of Mellon’s grandfather and uncle who had settled in Pennsylvania two years previously.
Mellon became a successful businessman and investor; he also served as a judge and became president of the People’s Savings Bank in 1866, later establishing the bank of T Mellon and sons; the family in time became one of the wealthiest in America. Mellon did not return to Ireland to visit his humble birthplace until 1882; he referred to himself as a “Yankee” and an “Irishman” or a “Scotch-Irishman”, who was “nurtured in the moral, social and religious sentiments of the Scotch”.
Few prospered as grandly as Mellon, but he was part of a large wave of pre-famine emigrants from Ulster. In his 1993 book The Irish Diaspora, Donald Akenson, a renowned historian of Irish migration, highlighted surveys of Americans in the 1970s and 1980s who considered themselves Irish. Over 50 per cent of them were Protestants. It was a reminder that the story of the Irish exodus to America was far from just a Catholic, famine inspired journey.
It is difficult to establish precise figures for those who emigrated from Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries, but historian Louis Cullen suggested the number who left Ireland before 1800 “represented a higher proportion of the total movement of people who crossed national boundaries within and out of Europe than did the 19th century outflow”.
Up to 250,000 people left Ulster before 1776. The Ulster Presbyterians who went to North America in the mid-18th century were mostly from Antrim, Derry, Donegal and Tyrone. As Irish Presbyterians made their presence felt in Philadelphia and Boston there was also increased concern with the poor and destitute arriving, prompting Irishmen of Ulster birth and ancestry to establish the Charitable Irish Society in 1737, the oldest Irish society in North America. The emigrants experienced mixed fortunes. In New York the same year, James Murray wrote to the Rev Baptist Boyd in Tyrone: “Read this Letter, and look, and tell aw the poor Folk of your Place, that God has open’d a Door for their Deliverance ... I will tell ye in short, this is a bonny Country, and aw Things grows here that ever I did see grow in Ereland ... Trades are aw gud here”.
The Charitable Irish Society was followed in time by other welfare organisations, including, in 1790, the Hibernian Society for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland. As well as distress, the archives documenting some of the emigrants’ experiences highlight those faring well. Letters collected by Kerby Miller, another great chronicler of Irish migration during this period, and held in the University of Galway, include one from Alice Walsh from Dungannon, Co Tyrone. In 1823, she wrote to her husband, James Walsh, in Philadelphia, whom she had not heard from in almost seven years, requesting he either return home or send for her and their two children to come to Philadelphia, where she had heard he had obtained a “very advantageous situation”.
The distressing scenes in Moygashel, Tyrone, last weekend, as loyalists set fire to their bonfire topped with an effigy of migrants on a boat, are bitterly ironic given the centrality of the migrant boat to the history of Tyrone.
It is estimated that about 293,000 long-term international migrants arrived in Northern Ireland between the years 2001 and 2023, initially from central and eastern Europe, but more recently from Africa and Asia. A paper prepared for members of the Northern Ireland Assembly by Raymond Russell earlier this year suggests that of those 293,000 migrants, 231,000 subsequently left, leaving a net total international migration flow of 62,000 people. Northern Ireland’s 2021 census showed that the total number of people belonging to a minority ethnic group stood at 65,600 people (3.4 per cent of the population), meaning Northern Ireland is by far the least ethnically diverse part of the UK.
Russell also notes that “hate crime is more prevalent in Northern Ireland than generally realised, with the number of racist incidents and crimes regularly exceeding the number of sectarian crimes.” This is at a time when, with Northern Ireland’s “ageing population, and a growing shortage of young people moving into the labour market, a regular flow of young, international migrants will be essential to maintain public services and the economy in general”.
Such realities get lost in hateful Tyrone July fires, as does any honest reckoning with an Ulster history that is filled with boats, hopes of a better life and contented settlement, and the precarity of the emigrant’s voyage and challenge.
