LIVERPOOL LETTER:NOW IN his 80s, Chris Johnson, who left Ardee, Co Louth, 58 years ago, leaned forward and spoke quietly into a microphone yesterday in Liverpool to mourn the passing last year of a friend, Tommy Walsh.
“I could go on for years about him. We were like brothers,” said Johnson. “He was one of the finest Irishmen that there ever was, even though he was born in Liverpool. He contributed so much to the community,” he said.
In 1963, Johnson joined Walsh, with “just a few others”, to form Liverpool’s first Irish Centre in Mount Pleasant, before it moved to Duke Street and to its recently opened new home in Dale Street.
Until his death last October, Walsh was one of the central figures in the Irish community in Liverpool – a city described by a Fr Cahill in the 1850s in a letter to Catholics as “the sickbed of Ireland, the hospital of Ireland, the churchyard of Ireland”.
Today, Walsh’s brainchild has developed into Irish Community Care Merseyside, led by Donegal-born director Breege McDaid. The group helps 1,000 people who are Irish or of Irish extraction annually.
Several hundred gathered yesterday at ICC’s new offices, including the Irish Ambassador to the UK, Bobby McDonagh, for the presentation of the Tommy Walsh Memorial to its first recipient, Chris Johnson.
The ties between Liverpool and Ireland are deep, said McDonagh, whose grandfather was Eamon de Valera, adding that Dev had once jokingly offered “to give Liverpool back, if England would give us back Northern Ireland”.
In a city where football is everything, McDonagh, who favours Tottenham, said Liverpool’s anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, was fitting for the ICC’s work but so too is Everton’s lesser-known motto, Nil Satis Nisi Optimum – Nothing but the Best is Good Enough.
Nearly 300 isolated elderly Irish are visited by the ICC’s 17 staff and 50 volunteers.
The Walsh family was brought up in the city centre, his sister Sadie recalled yesterday. “My father was a Gaelic speaker so we used Gaelic phrases without even knowing that they were Irish. So did the people around us.”
Her brother had been deeply involved in the centre and had run the family’s shop, she said, until he was asked to become the centre’s manager in the early 1970s, which he did until his retirement in the early 1990s.
A Famine memorial created with help from the Irish Government will next month be unveiled in the city. The calamity saw huge numbers of Irish stream from ships in the Liverpool docks to flee starvation at home.
In 1841, Liverpool already had a substantial Irish population of about 50,000, though historian David Fitzpatrick has argued that up to 250,000 a year arrived in the city during the Famine.
Two-thirds departed quickly for the US, Australia or elsewhere, though local journalist John Denvir wrote in the 1880s that many ”with their little means failing them, have been obliged to remain in Liverpool”.
The influx was not popular. Files from the Home Office, now in the National Archives in Kew, are filled with reports, complaints and petitions urging the British government “to do something to assist or to stem the crisis”.
“The object of the great majority of these immigrants is not for the lawful purpose of emigration or seeking work, but wholly and entirely to seek assistance, and to become chargeable to and demand relief from the Parochial Rates of the different Parishes in which they arrive,” one reads.
In May 1847, eight-year-old Luke Brothers, recently fled from Ireland, died of starvation in Banastre Street in the city’s poverty-stricken Vauxhall district in a cellar described by the coroner as “not fit for pigs”.
Brothers was one of 35,000 Irish forced by circumstance that year to live in nearly 6,000 cellars that were “wells of stagnant water”. Unable to cope, the city’s authorities used the recently introduced Poor Law Removals Act to send 15,000 of the immigrants back to Ireland.
That year, 60,000 people in the city were struck down by fever, while 40,000 contracted dysentery, Liverpool’s first public health officer recorded. Of that number 7,500 died, of whom more than 5,500 were Irish.
The deaths got little coverage in the Liverpool Mercury newspaper: “One reason for this is that the worst effects were felt in the working class areas, an alien world to the middle classes who made up the bulk of the readership,” according to historian Frank Neal.
In February 1884, Mr Justice Butt caused outrage among the city’s Irish when he complained at the opening of the Liverpool Assizes of the “great number of Irish names” on the list, seeing there “evidence of a criminal streak in the Irish character”.
Denvir, a journalist with a savage pen when the occasion demanded, responded angrily, saying of those charged: “They are chiefly of a class who have never seen Ireland and who have become contaminated by their surroundings in this country.”
Even by the 1930s the Irish immigrants were not popular, with the Liverpool Review saying in 1931 “a very grave injury is being done to the prosperity of Merseyside and to its population” by their arrival.
