Ireland’s peculiar status under the Union is central to explaining its ambiguous involvement in the British Empire. The formal Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain masked a hybrid administration with manifest colonial elements, allowing variant interpretations of the character of Ireland’s dependency within the Empire. Was Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom, a peripheral and backward sub-region, or a colony in all but name? These were the conflicting assumptions of unionists, devolutionists and separatists respectively. The manner in which the contending parties specified Ireland’s current status reflected, yet also restricted, their visions of its future condition. Underpinning these perceptions of the present and future were incompatible beliefs about the Irish past, reinforced and mobilized by historians and polemicists. Yet the sense of destiny associated with historical mythology, whether unionist or nationalist, was repeatedly challenged by external influences such as legislative reform and changing economic opportunities. Even unionists, pledged to defend the liberties conferred by the Glorious Revolution and incorporated in the Imperial Parliament, might contemplate rebellion against a ‘radical’ government should it tamper with the Empire. Even those who viewed Ireland as a vassal colony within the Empire might hope to benefit from employment in the Empire’s service. Thus changes in the practical operation of the Union were capable of transforming Imperialists into rebels, and separatists into colonists. This paper concentrates on the Irish as colonisers and Irish attitudes towards the Empire, leaving aside the vexed question of Ireland’s own status as a colony. In what ways did political conflict concerning Ireland’s future intersect with broader issues of Imperial development? How important were the Irish as colonists? And in what ways did Ireland and the Irish influence the Empire?

The broad question of colonial qualities in Irish thought and imagination, which has recently provoked vigorous if opaque debate among literary critics and ‘cultural theorists’, cannot be totally ignored in a study of Ireland and the Empire. Said’s specification of Ireland’s colonial status, which it shares with a host of non-European regions: cultural dependence and antagonism together’, is based upon a premiss incapable of historical verification. Said assumes that ‘Irish people can never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French’, finding confirmation in the record of Irish protest against British government.’ As I shall argue, the political expression of Irish attitudes towards the Empire was far more various and discordant than this allows. Ireland had its rebels, its ‘mediators’ and ‘collaborators’ or ‘shoneens’, its Imperialists, and its unselfconscious metropolitans. The battlegrounds of Anglo—Irish and intra-Irish conflict are littered with the ghoulish shards of incompatible images representing the Empire, and Ireland’s place within it.

For republicans and separatists, Ireland’s colonial subjection to a foreign force of occupation was an article of faith. Republicanism rested on the belief that the Irish nation had remained essentially intact through centuries of oppression, requiring only reawakening to cast off its veneer of Anglicization. Not only did republicans long for the destruction of the British Empire in war, but they also viewed Imperial conflicts as providing an opportunity for rebellion. The spirit of 1798 was reinvoked in 1916, despite powerful evidence that war had augmented the oppressor’s coercive capacity rather than weakening it. Just as the Fenians had prayed for war with America or Russia, so their successors saw Germany as a potential saviour. As Maeve Cavanagh wrote in ‘Ireland to Germany’:

I watch the red flame fiercer grow,
The tide of war, its ebb and flow,
And see the nations writhe and strain
I, who my freedom strive to gain,
The while I pray "swift fall the blow
That lays the tyrant England low".²

Even nationalists hopeful of a constitutional settlement were inclined to relish the alternative path of Imperial collapse, as in the case of a Cork emigrant writing from Australia in 1887: ‘Myself and Pat often come to the conclusion that nothing will save Ireland but a home legislature or otherwise a war that will rake Ingland from one of her dominions to the other, May God send either of the two.’³ For a few Irish nationalists all of the time, and for many occasionally, the Union was tantamount to colonial annexation and the promise of freedom lay in its destruction. This interpretation shaped the behaviour not only of Irish rebels, but of many subsequent ‘anticolonial’ movements for which the Irish experience provided a ‘pathfinder’.

The manifest failure of successive rebellions and conspiracies between 1798 and 1916 fostered various less adventurous and more tactical programmes of nationalism. The movements for dual monarchy, repeal of the Act of Union, Home Rule, federation, and devolution all stopped short of demanding full separation, while deploring the economic, social, and moral consequences of the Union. One of the curiosities of Edwardian nationalism is Arthur Griffith’s pre-revolutionary Sinn Féin programme, with its demand for restoration of an idealized version of the Irish constitution of 1782, under a system of dual monarchy modelled on Hungary’s supposed autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.⁵ Despite its formal adherence to monarchy, Griffith’s nationalism was bitterly anti-Imperialist in its assault upon the Anglicization of Irish culture. This qualification did not apply, in general, to the Repeal or Home Rule movements. Daniel O’Connell was a powerful advocate of the application of English liberties, enlightenment and culture to backward Ireland. Isaac Butt, founder of the Home Rule League in 1873, demanded metropolitan status for Ireland within a federation which would ‘consolidate the strength and maintain the integrity of the Empire’. The Irish, having ‘paid dearly enough’ for the acquisition of Imperial possessions since the Act of Union, were ‘entitled to our share in them’.⁶ In 1880 J. L. Finegan, Parnellite representative for Ennis, could refer in the same speech to ‘the present unjust and tyrannous system of government in Ireland’ and the ‘great and noble Empire’, to which Ireland had contributed so much blood and muscle. Parnell’s party included several members with close Indian links, who variously campaigned for fairer Irish representation in the Indian Civil Service or for self-government in both countries.⁷ Frank Hugh O’Donnell, whose brother Charles James became a Commissioner in the Indian civil service, regarded Irish nationalists as the ‘natural representatives and spokesmen of the unrepresented nationalities of the Empire’. He himself attended the Indian Constitutional Reform Association’s inaugural meeting at Tagore’s London house in 1883, and campaigned unavailingly for the nomination of Naoroji for an Irish constituency.⁸ Like many nationalists, O’Donnell viewed the struggle for Home Rule as part of the broader demand for devolution of power throughout the Empire.

John Redmond, nationalist leader between 1900 and 1918, looked forward to ‘a measure of legislative autonomy similar to that enjoyed by any of your self-governing Colonies or Dependencies. If you want an illustration look at Canada, look even to the Transvaal.’9 Redmond’s admiration for the forms of colonial self-government was perfectly consistent with his own and his party’s indignant denunciation of the war against the Boers, drawing upon what the police termed ‘a seditious and treasonable spirit towards England which, in its extent and intensity, has surprised many who believed they had the fullest knowledge of the people’. Recurrent Imperial wars reminded the Irish of their own history of coercion and annexation; yet in its more benign aspect, evolving towards a ‘Commonwealth’, the Empire seemed to many nationalists to offer the prospect of an acceptable condition of self-government sheltered by Britannia’s protective shield. The relevance to Ireland of the Canadian precedent was repeatedly affirmed by advocates of Home Rule, recurring in the Anglo—Irish agreement of 1921—22. Gladstone presented Home Rule as being ‘strictly and substantially analogous’ to Canada’s status in the Empire, a comparison vigorously denied by unionists.¹¹ Viscount Milner, when privately discussing the possibility of future unionist acceptance of some form of Home Rule, insisted that Ireland’s autonomy should be restricted to that of Québec within Canada rather than of Canada within the Empire12 In reality, the scope of the three Home Rule Bills fell far short of the Canadian settlement of 1867, and responsible government on colonial lines was never a serious option before the First World War.

If nationalist attitudes towards the Empire were diverse and responsive to changes in its organization, ‘loyalist’ opposition to any form of devolution became ever more uncompromising. Though the abolition of the Irish Parliament had been deplored by many Irish Protestants as subverting the Ascendancy and opening the way to Catholic Emancipation (belatedly enacted in 1829), the Union once established was promptly redescribed as the most effective bulwark against further unwelcome reforms. More significantly, adherence to the Union was widely perceived as offering commercial advantages to both capitalists and their employees, and as protecting the security of Protestant tenant farmers from predatory Catholic neighbours. For a large minority of the Irish people, liberty resided in the reinforcement of the Union rather than its dismemberment. Despite Joseph Chamberlain’s early support for a devolved Irish administration and the federalist dreams of many Tory grandees, it became extremely hazardous after 1886 for any Conservative politician or Irish Protestant to question in public the desirability of perpetual integration in the United Kingdom. The expedient alliance between Conservatism and ‘Ulster’ in the campaigns against Home Rule reinforced the conviction of Irish loyalists that they were metropolitans rather than fringe-dwellers, let alone colonial subjects.

Nor did most Irish Protestants accept the nationalist innuendo that they were mere ‘colonists’ or settlers, proud though they were of the doughtiness of their distant ancestors who had admittedly performed those roles.’³ Instead, they pictured themselves as full citizens and redoubtable defenders of the Empire. Like the Marquess of Salisbury, they believed that ‘to maintain the integrity of the Empire must undoubtedly be our first policy with respect to Ireland’: the survival of the Union and the Empire were inseparable.¹⁴ Though it has been claimed that the Imperial element in Ulster unionism was a fabrication of the Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War, its imprint was obvious from 1867 in the triennial meetings of the Imperial Grand Orange Council.¹⁵ Orangeism, the fraternity at the heart of Ulster unionism, provided a microcosm of Ulster’s Protestant diaspora through its interlocking networks of lodges in Ireland, Britain, north America, and Australasia. The ceremonious conferences of the Imperial Grand Orange Council symbolised the Ulsterman’s dual role as metropolitan and empire-builder.

Irish Protestantism produced several outstanding exponents of poetic imperialism, including the Munster clergyman Richard Sargint Sadleir Ross-Lewin. In a scruffy volume published in 1907, he affirmed ‘our’ metropolitan status:

But our little western island
Could never stand alone,
And we share in the greatest Empire
That the world has ever known.
To Celt and Scot and Saxon
That Empire was decreed,
Twas won by Irish soldiers
Of the grand old fighting breed.

Ross-Lewin had only contempt for ‘the Little England Pygmies’, who ‘left the empire making to men like Cecil Rhodes’, while idly watching ‘the Tottenham Hotspur wipe out some rival team’ — an arresting repudiation of the games ethic as a foundation of imperialism.’⁶ The Irish Imperial vision

Erin’s moon would shine afar
O’er west’ring seas to distant lands
Where fair Columbia folds her hands.

Coyle’s ‘Homeland’ was ‘these British Isles’, for which ‘England’ was the most suitable equivalent term (‘for poetic purposes’). Like J. R. Seeley’s, his vision transcended the formal possessions: ‘The term ‘The Empire" . . . is used to connote all the English-speaking nations, and thus we include the United States, which, although having an independent and different form of government is really one with us in race, in language, in religion, and in laws."⁷ For Irish unionists, belonging to the Empire signified attachment to English civilization, not subjection to an external authority.

Irish responses to the Empire were modified through the nineteenth century by changing perceptions of its character and likely future evolution. The possibility of movement towards a devolved Commonwealth made many nationalists optimistic that membership might eventually be reconcilable with freedom. Yet the recurrence of punitive wars against subject peoples simultaneously reinforced the separatist conviction that the Empire was intrinsically oppressive. For unionists, the extension of the Imperial quest from strategic domination to cultural proselytism gave even greater force to their sense of being metropolitan participants. Interpretations of Ireland’s status, whether metropolitan or colonial, were also influenced by the practical consequences of Imperial legislation for various sectors of the Irish population. Altered perceptions of the relative benefits and costs of continued attachment were reflected in seeming inconsistencies of rhetoric, whether on the part of ex-Fenians becoming Home Rulers or devolutionists becoming intransigent unionists. Irish thinking about the Empire thus mirrored the broader complexities and uncertainties of the Anglo—Irish connection.

18 Prominent among these were James McNeill from Antrim, a Commissioner in the Bombay Presidency until 1914 and subsequently Governor-General of the Irish Free State; and Sir Michael O’Dwyer from Tipperary, who as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab after 1913 secured half a million recruits for the wartime forces. O’Dwyer had two brothers in the Society of Jesus, while McNeilI’s brother Eoin was the titular Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers who attempted to abort the Easter Rising in 1916.’19 Irish candidates were less successful in penetrating the Sudanese political service after 1899, and shrill complaints of discrimination by the Provost of Trinity ‘only confirmed’ the administrators ‘in the wisdom of preferring Oxford and Cambridge’.²⁰ At a lower level of administration, Irish Catholic emigrants became prominent in the public service in both Australia and Canada. In 1867, the Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald claimed credit for that achievement in Canada: ‘What Irish Catholic ever held office above the rank of a Tide Waiter or Messenger, until I did them justice.’²’ Among senior colonial administrators, however, Catholics failed to disturb the dominance of Protestant Englishmen, Scots, and Irishmen.

The armed services provided a still more important Imperial outlet for Irishmen of all religions and classes. For Irish as for Scottish university graduates, openings in the Indian army offered them ‘a stake in defending national, that is to say British, interests’.²² Protestant Ireland was over-represented among officers in the Bengal army between 1758 and 1834,23 as also in the British army. Census returns indicate that in 1851 Irishmen accounted for over a quarter of all regular army officers born in the British Isles, a proportion falling to a seventh by 1901 but usually exceeding the Irish component of the population at large. Military commissions provided employment for members of most families of Irish gentry, the pool of officers remaining virtually closed to the middle classes and to Catholics until the First World War. The feats of Irish generals and heroes provided the basis for numerous affirmations of racial superiority in war. As Ross Lewin boasted:

Nor shall we now relinquish the prize of field and flood,
Our share in glorious Empire won by our fathers’ blood.
Nor lack we still of heroes with Saxons to compete
While Roberts rules our Armies, and Beresford our fleet.²⁴

Both Roberts and Beresford chose Irish as well as colonial designations when accepting peerages; but in other cases, Irish birth was incidental or even embarrassing to the heroes of Britain’s colonial wars. Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl of Khartoum and of Broome in Kent, may have been born near Ballylongford in Co. Kerry; yet he cared as little for his nativity as had the Duke of Wellington. As Birrell observed, ‘Lord Kitchener was not a real Irishman, only an accidental one’.²⁵ Only occasionally did Irishness intrude upon military professionalism, as in the case of Sir William Francis Butler, son of a Tipperary landowner and Commander-in-Chief in South Africa on the eve of the Boer War. Butler was a Catholic Home Ruler, whose sympathy (according to Milner) was ‘wholly with the other side’.²⁶ In general, Ireland’s military heroes were drawn from a stock equally alien to ordinary nationalists and unionists, and the Irish deeds that won the Empire were those of a caste rather than a people.

Natives of Ireland were slightly over-represented among ‘other ranks’ in the regular army, though notably deficient in the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, and the merchant service.²⁷ Irishmen were only just outnumbered by Britons among soldiers enlisted in the Bengal army between 1825 and 1850.²⁸ After the official admission of Catholics to the British army in 1799, natives of Ireland quickly became a sizable component, reaching about two-fifths in 1830 and 1840, but falling to a quarter by 1872 and less than a tenth by 1911. This decline was mainly attributable to Ireland’s rapidly diminishing share of the United Kingdom’s population.²⁹ Though more than 150,000 men were raised in Ireland between 1865 and 1913, the Irish Command invariably provided less than its expected share of recruits; but this deficiency was outweighed by heavy enlistment of Irish emigrants in Britain.³⁰ The prominence of Irish servicemen in Imperial wars, particularly in South Africa, could produce strange juxtapositions, as at Ladysmith where two brothers from Co. Longford apparently lost their lives, one fighting for Blake’s Irish Brigade and the other for the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.³¹ It could also lead to the bitterness expressed in a letter sent home to Newry by a private in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers: ‘I was reading in the papers where the Irish people were subscribing for the Boers, and are backing them up; but the Irish people will want to be careful of themselves, or we will do the same with them as we are doing with the Boers.’³² In addition to service in the Imperial forces, Catl\olics (mainly of Irish descent) were well represented in colonial units such as the Australian Commonwealth Horse in South Africa.³³ Nationality did not effectively discourage unemployed Irishmen, mostly Catholics, from volunteering to fight the Empire’s wars.

The most far-reaching contribution of the Irish to the development of the Empire was through emigration. Although most Irish emigrants made for the United States or Britain, there were nearly 300,000 natives of Ireland living in Canada in 1861 and close to a quarter of a million in the Australian colonies by 1891. As a proportion of the entire overseas-born population, the Irish were as prominent in Australasia and Canada as in the United States itself. In about 1870, for example, a third of immigrants in the United States were Irish, a slightly smaller proportion than in Canada. In Australia the Irish component exceeded a quarter, compared with less than a fifth in New Zealand. Even in the quieter period between 1876 and 1914, Canada and Australia each attracted over 90,000 emigrants from Irish ports. In the course of the century Irish emigrants scattered throughout the Empire. Census returns testify that in 1911 there were about 14,600 Irish natives in the Union of South Africa, 12,200 in the Indian Empire, 1,000 in the Maltese islands, 400 in Ceylon, 250 in the Straits Settlements, and 160 in the Federated Malay States. In almost every Imperial possession, Irish colonists had become a significant element of the settler population.

Irish emigration to the more distant colonies was facilitated by state subventions, without which the much cheaper British or American options would have seemed irresistible. About half of all emigrants from the United Kingdom to the Australian colonies up to 1900, and the large majority of Irish settlers, received some public assistance. For the 160,000 convicts transported there between 1788 and 1867, of whom over a quarter were Irish-born, settlement at public expense was involuntary though not always unwelcome — during the Great Famine, the impulse to escape Ireland was sufficient to induce paupers to smash a window or steal a handkerchief in the hope of being sentenced to transportation. The system of convict labour was surprisingly efficient in satisfying colonial demand for domestic and outdoor service during the first half of the nineteenth century, compensating for Australia’s lack of slaves.³⁴ Voluntary emigration was encouraged by a variety of schemes, mostly funded from colonial land revenues with supplementary contributions from the emigrants or from private sponsors already in the colonies. Nearly a quarter of a million Irish settlers were assisted to Australia between 1836 and 1919 (a third of the total from the British Isles), and 30,000 were shipped to Vogel’s New Zealand during the 1870s. The most lavish scheme involved the removal to Australia of 4,000 female ‘orphans’ from Irish workhouses between 1848 and 1850, outfit and passage to Plymouth being provided by the Boards of Guardians while the full cost of shipping was paid from colonial funds. Most subsequent assistance was contingent on the nomination of emigrants by colonial sponsors, creating a form of subsidized chain migration which the Irish exploited far more methodically than did the English, Welsh or Scots.

Irish movement to Canada and sometimes southern Africa was accelerated by the promise of land grants, though seldom by direct payment of transportation costs. Despite recurrent demands for systematic colonization of Canadian or other wastelands by the ‘surplus’ population of rural Ireland, the vast cost of Peter Robinson’s pilot scheme of 1823—25 discouraged further experiments. With support from Wilmot Horton in the Colonial Office, Robinson had shipped 2,300 people in family groups from a dozen densely populated and restive Munster estates to Upper Canada (Ontario), at a cost of no less than £20 per ^capita. Subsequent official assistance to north America was largely restricted to supplements, worth about £5, which enabled some 45,000 paupers to leave Ireland (mostly for Canada) between 1849 and 1906. Local Boards of Guardians again provided outfit and transportation within the British Isles for paupers whose passages had been funded by previous settlers. The bulk of Irish emigrants to Canada received no official subsidy, many proceeding to the United States after taking cut-price passages to Québec or New Brunswick. This applied particularly in 1847, when nearly 100,000 passengers, many already emaciated and feverish, were shipped to Québec from Irish ports and Liverpool (often at the expense of their landlords). About a sixth of them died aboard or shortly after arrival, prompting understandable Irish aversion to vessels bound for Canada, and eventually generating more rigorous regulation of passenger shipping. The reduced flow from post-Famine Ireland to Canada was once again dominated by Ulster Protestants, already a tight-knit and powerful element of rural society in Ontario. Whereas state subsidies and therefore quality controls shaped Irish colonization of the more distant dominions, the drift to Canada was fitful and mainly governed by private decisions.

Despite colonial objections to the shovelling out and dumping of Irish paupers and papists, often at colonial expense, only Ireland proved capable of supplying the required blend of agricultural workers and domestic I servants. Ireland’s greatest comparative advantage as a source of colonists was the absence of any effective restraint upon female emigration. The dearth of non-agricultural employment in Ireland pushed out men and women with roughly equal force, while the Famine emergency had overwhelmed parental resistance to exposing young girls to the moral and physical perils of transoceanic travel. Whereas men vastly outnumbered women in British emigration, the sexes were evenly balanced in movement from Ireland after the 1840s. Though young unmarried women were usually offered preferential assistance to the woman-starved Australasian colonies, the official agencies had great difficulty in enticing English or Scottish girls with the prospect of domestic service and marriage in rude colonial surroundings. Only the lrish fulfilled Wakefield’s requirement for a successful colonization: ‘an equal emigration of the sexes’.³⁵ By about 1870, Australia (like Britain and probably the United States) had an almost equal number of Irish-born men and women. Whereas the majority of Irish emigrants to Canada were Protestants, the proportion was less than a quarter in Australia despite energetic official attempts to encourage settlement by Ulster Protestants. New Zealand had a larger component of northern Protestants, exemplified by the Tyrone Orangemen and their families who colonized Kati-Kati or ‘New Ulster’ in 1875, under the leadership of George Vesey Stewart. Initially concentrated in the menial sectors of service and labour, Irish settlers in Australasia and Canada rapidly colonized a broad range of occupations such as farming, mining, shopkeeping, policing, and the civil service. By contrast with the American Irish, they showed no marked propensity to cluster in urban enclaves or indeed to settle in cities.³⁶ As ‘human capital’, Irish voluntary colonists proved no less sound an investment than their convict brethren.

Irish colonization of the Empire had the further effect of stimulating a substantial reverse migration. Admittedly, only about 8,000 natives of the British possessions and the Indian Empire (in roughly equal numbers) were enumerated in the Irish census for 1901. Yet between 1895 and 1913, some 18,400 Irish nationals ‘immigrated’ to the United Kingdom from British North America, 11,300 from Australasia. and 14,900 from British South Africa.³⁷ Though some of these were doubtless tourists or business travellers rather than returning emigrants, their colonial experience brought the realities of the Empire closer to many Irish homes. Their presence reinforced the already extensive coverage of Imperial affairs and conditions of life in the Irish provincial press, popular novels, and (above all) personal letters from emigrant friends and relatives.³⁸ Migration in both directions, mainly voluntary and often undertaken with enthusiasm, gradually entangled the Irish with all the nationalities of the Empire. If most of Ireland eventually wriggled out of the Imperial embrace, many of its people did not.

Ireland’s influence on the Empire cannot be precisely assessed, since the impact of particular Irish men and women was only partly and dubiously attributable to their ethnicity. Journalistic attempts to chronicle the achievements and ‘contribution’ of the expatriate Irish were commonplace in the later nineteenth century, serving to defend Irish and often Catholic prestige against British and colonial sniping.³⁹ In addition₁, there were many Imperial echoes or imitations of Irish models, which profoundly influenced colonial legislation in fields which cannot be discussed today, such as education and land tenure. Ireland’s importance as a colonial model was enhanced by its own ambiguous status as a ‘colonial’ element within the United Kingdom, which generated many exportable experiments in social and political control. Moreover, Irish techniques of resistance to British authority were occasionally appropriated by colonial nationalist movements. Though to some extent reciprocal, the balance of trade in colonial structures and techniques was overwhelmingly favourable to Ireland.

Colonial administrators were besotted with the Irish Constabulary, an armed force under semi-military discipline but civilian control which occupied ‘barracks’ throughout Ireland (outside Dublin). The successful management by mainly Protestant officers of 12,000 ‘native’ constables of humble origin, mostly Catholics, heartened Imperialists everywhere. In order to restrict fraternisation and entanglement with local interests, constables were regularly relocated and marriages discouraged. Initially a paramilitary force alienated from a lawless population, the Irish Constabulary gradually secured a more comfortable social niche, despite the intimidating effect of its uniforms and weaponry. It remained responsible for the suppression of occasional riots and rebellions, sometimes in combination with military detachments acting ‘in aid of the civil power’. It used to be generally accepted that the Irish Constabulary was the model for almost all colonial police forces, during what Jeffries termed the ‘second phase’ of militarisation (following initial improvisation and preceding the creation of civilian forces). Jeffries identified direct Irish influences in the nomenclature, training and paramilitary functions of forces ranging from Ceylon and India to the West Indies and Palestine. After 1907, all cadets for colonial forces were trained at the Irish depôt in Phoenix Park, Dublin. These influences were reinforced by the numerous former officers and members of the Irish Constabulary who became colonial policemen, and also by the legion of Irish-inspired Indian officers who helped establish forces elsewhere.⁴⁰ Though Jeffries confined his account of the ‘Irish model’ to the policing of colonies with large native populations, other studies have detected Irish influence in the centralised forces serving the Australasian and Canadian colonies41 Despite recent demonstrations that the diversity of colonial policing defies reduction to a single model, that the London Metropolitan Police was also imitated, and that many aspects of Irish practice were ignored, the strength of Irish influence in Imperial policing remains incontestable.⁴² The Irish case had shown the Empire that a relatively small and dispersed armed force could subdue a large and recalcitrant population over a long period.

The broader political consequences of Irish colonization, expressed through the actions and attitudes of countless settlers and their descendants, defy easy encapsulation. To many British and Protestant colonists, Irish Catholics seemed a potentially subversive and disloyal underclass, always inclined to reapply their Irish grievances to colonial agitation. Such apprehensions were strongest among Ulster Protestant settlers, who used the international fraternal network of the Loyal Orange Institution to proclaim their own loyalty and defend the colonies against papist aggression. In South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the Orange lodges were rapidly assimilated into conservative politics, the sons of Ulster soon being outnumbered by local activists exploiting the efficiency and popular appeal of Ireland’s most sophisticated fraternity. Among the leading Orangemen of New South Wales in the 1870s, for example, less than a third were natives of Ireland.⁴³ The Canadian Orange Institution was particularly influential in conservatism, drawing prestige from its prominent role in resisting the feeble Fenian ‘invasions’ of Canada in 1870 and 1871. Irish emigrants were also active in the development of colonial Freemasonry, forming networks of lodges with warrants from the Grand Lodge of Ireland rather than England or Scotland. The ‘loyal institutions’ provided a superb vehicle for Irish Protestant settlers sloughing off the unwanted connotations of ‘Paddy’ and ‘Mick’, stereotypes applied indiscriminately to Irish emigrants of all origins.

Irish fraternal expertise was also exhibited by Catholic emigrants, who protected their collective economic and social interests through friendly societies such as the 1-libernian Benefit Associations in Australasia, and the related Ancient Order of [libernians in north America. Though not primarily political in function, the Hibernian divisions helped mobilise lay Catholics as a social and potentially a political force. Irish nationalist organisations supporting Repeal and Home Rule received essential moral and financial support from equivalent colonial networks, drawing upon Australian Catholics as well as Irish emigrants. Yet colonial support for Fenianism and other movements favouring ‘physical force’ was minuscule, by comparison with response in the United States. The former Young Irelander Thomas D’Arcy McGee, three years before his assassination in Ottawa in 1868, described Fenianism as ‘the worst obstacle, the Devil has ever invented for the Irish, an irreligious revolutionary society in which patriotism takes the garb of indifferentism, or hostility to religion’.⁴⁴ In Sydney, the demented Irishman who almost murdered the Duke of Edinburgh in March 1868 evidently acted without accomplices, despite the ingenious attempts of Conservative politicians to fabricate an Irish-Australian conspiracy.⁴⁵ The ‘Catholic’ (otherwise ‘Irish’) vote became a major factor in mainstream colonial politics, being generally aligned as in Britain with parties favouring liberal reform, and subsequently with parties representing the interests of trades unions. Labor Party candidates in prewar New South Wales were disproportionately successful in constituencies with large Catholic components, although Catholics did not predominate in the federal Labor Party until the 1930s.46 Careful to avoid challenging the legitimacy of the Imperial affiliation, Irish colonists and their Catholic descendants nevertheless made a distinctive contribution to the terms of democratic debate.

The Imperial influence of Irish institutions extended to the churches, which provided a surplus of highly trained spiritual managers for deployment throughout the Empire. This was most evident in the proliferation of Catholic priests ordained in Ireland, and in the rapid colonial extension of Irish-based religious orders providing educational and medical services. Irish Catholicism, though thoroughly ‘Romanized’ by the 1850s, was often at loggerheads with the established networks of French or English priests who had typically initiated diocesan organisation in the colonies. Though Irish emigrants were at first their ceniral concern, the army of Irish priests and nuns rapidly extended their ministrations to the conversion of aboriginal peoples, the reclamation of godless colonials, and the care of Catholic emigrants from Britain and Europe as well as Ireland. Often ignored in studies of missionary expansion, the Catholic clerical diaspora was scarcely distingishable in its aims and ideology from its Protestant counterpart.47 In every colony, the Catholic church worked assiduously to overcome its baneful Irish reputation and to affirm its Imperial patriotism. Though never ceasing to bemoan past Irish wrongs, the Irish-trained clergy conveyed little hint of alienation from British rule when indulgently applied through the mediation of representative government.

Colonial Protestantism also had unmistakably Irish elements, though these were easily assimilated with the dominant English and Scottish strains. Trinity College, Dublin, was a major source of Anglican missionaries in India and elsewhere, producing doctors who could hold their ‘own at tennis with the best in Bengal’. One such muscular Irish Christian would enlighten the heathen by ‘getting the patients to squat down on the ground at the daily dispensary, and giving them a fifteen or twenty minutes’ talk before the medicine was dispensed’.⁴⁸ Irish Protestants were also prominent in the Canadian and Australasian clergy, whether Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian. Among Presbyterian ministers recruited in the various eastern Australian colonies between 1823 and 1900, the Irish-born proportion ranged between a ninth and a quarter.⁴⁹ The imprint of Ireland may thus be detected in virtually every colonial institution, ranging from schools and police forces to land law, fraternities, political parties, and the churches. Likewise, the imprint of Britain may be found in every Irish institution, signifying the ambiguity of Ireland’s location in the Empire. Through the exercise of imagination, the nineteenth-century Irish might elect to play the parts of colonials (whether deferential or resentful), metropolitans, or colonizers. To be ‘Irish’ was, among other things, to face that unsettling choice.

Reform Movement 2004

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