When lecturing on Irish immigration history, I usually start by asking: in which decade was the first footage of people of colour in Ireland filmed? Some students guess the 1960s. Others reach back to the 30s when the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson performed in Dublin. The answer? The first filmed footage depicting an African diaspora gathering in Ireland is older than the independent Irish state.
The film, a silent black-and-white British Pathé reel, shows members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an early jazz band, at Dublin port in October 1921. The men and women were survivors of a shipwreck. After their safe arrival on another vessel, the band performed for Dublin audiences. In the same month that Dubliners enjoyed the orchestra’s music, Irish republican leaders negotiated national independence with the British government. The footage provides a visual metaphor: Ireland’s history of diversity predates the state itself.
So the Protestants – Church of Ireland, all the littler churches – are to be allowed back then? Not the religious cleansing of the country that did in fact happen after independence?
OK, fair enough.
Except that’s obviously not what Matey means, is it?
Does he think a transient presence a hundred years ago makes some sort of a point or precedent? It does not. It’s irrelevant.
More anti-white BS.
Even if they referred to the impromptu visitors as “N****** Minstrels” as was the custom of the day.
Hilariously desperate. But that’s how the bullshit starts. In a decade there’ll be more black people in the average TV ad break than in the country. Meanwhile the arrival of thousands of RoPers will be rarely depicted….
’The men and women were survivors of a shipwreck. After their safe arrival on another vessel…’
So their original destination wasn’t Ireland?
“More anti-white BS.”
Yeah. This sort of thing really grates on me, because some random group of half a dozen minstrels is not indicative of significant shifts. It’s about propaganda to normalise mass migration. “Look, we’ve always been doing this, life has been fine” which is just a lie. Yes, we had Africans here in the 1950s, but it was groups like a few hundred Somali sailors in Cardiff.
Yes, WB and my Dad was really grateful to them. He was a big Shirley Bassey fan…
Recent footage of anti-immigration demonstrations in Ireland are very heartening. Maybe it’s because they don’t have 2TK, but your average Irish rioter is far freer with his language and fists than our own cowed “far right”. They actually burn down buildings being refurbed for “refugee centres”, and there are impressive signs saying that collaborators risk being shot. I think we need a fact-finding mission to work out how they do it.
Ironic that so many of the examples of early diversity mentioned are Jewish, considering the Irish elites notorious anti-semitism.
“Ireland has always been full of Africans, bigots.” – some gay.
Gunker – which came first, do you wonder?
Gunker: « Ironic that so many of the examples of early diversity mentioned are Jewish »
There’s the story of the Irish Rabbi called Sean Fergusson who was asked how he came to have such an Irish-sounding name.
It was, he said, when I arrived as an immigrant at the docks and was processed from one border official to the next.
The first of these asked me my name but when I told him he replied that that would be far too complicated for the adminsitration and suggested another which I should register with the official two desks along. Of course by the time it was my turn with the second official I had completely forgotten it and muttered “schon vergessen¹ “.
____
1) Fogotten already.
In the Dark Ages there was a people called the Cruithne who lived in the NE of Ireland. Recognising the hard C as equivalent to K or Q, one can translate it straight from Q-Celtic (e.g. Irish Gaelic) to P-Celtic (as in Welsh, Cornish, Breton) where the sound P or B replaces the Q sound.
In other words it’s Britne i.e. Britons. What happened to them? No one knows: presumably genocided, or enslaved, or ethnically cleansed, or assimilated. It does remind you that we live in a wee archipelago wherein the native peoples have repeatedly remixed a bit.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to suggest why Irish historians prefer not to translate it as Britons, preferring Picts. (My own guess is that Picts meant Britons who had not even a veneer of Roman ways. Maybe their guess is different.)
PiP – what’s the difference between Britons and Gaels?
So the Protestants – Church of Ireland, all the littler churches – are to be allowed back then? Not the religious cleansing of the country that did in fact happen after independence?
Amazing how that’s been airbrushed out of Irish history. Along with the running a lot of protestants out at gunpoint. I mentioned the Civil War to one Irish person & got “What civil war?” However, well capable of rattling interminably on about the B&T’s & the GPO.
But then the Welsh. The total duration of a Welsh nation was about 7 years in the C11th. Wales as a “nation” would not exist without the English.
Again, people of where? Is there something about “lefty” brain processes that rots brain function?
A number of ships of the Spanish Armada blown by the winds up the East coast of Britain, round the North of Scotland and on down the West coast of Ireland, were shipwrecked there.
Were the survivors the start of the Spanish diaspora gathering in Ireland and, diversity… something?
BiS – The total duration of a Welsh nation was about 7 years in the C11th.
Nonsense.
Nation =/= a state.
“PiP – what’s the difference between Britons and Gaels?”
As far as anyone knows the main distinction is whether they spoke “Brittonic” – a P-Celtic language, or Gaelic, a Q-Celtic language. The Germans of the Dark Ages called the Britons “Welsh” which meant romanised foreigners – as in Walloons, Vlachs, and some other example I’ve forgotten. There’s no sign that they ever called the Gaels Welsh maybe because they were not Romanised. Ditto Picts, who were, in my guess, just Britons who lived so far north that they’d not even a trace of romanisation.
The first account of the British Isles was from a Greek explorer from Massalia (modern Marseilles) who referred to the archipelago as “Prettanika” whence Roman “Britannia” applied to the big island, whence eventually English (Great) Britain – the (big) land of the Britons – and Brittany (the little land of the Britons).
There’s no trace of any surviving classical writing that refers to either the Britons or the Gaels as Celts (a Greek word by origin) or Gauls (the Latin equivalent). Calling them Celts is a 16th-18th century thing. Their languages are Celtic though. (As far as I can see they are easily the best documented Celtic languages as the continental evidence is based on (a few) inscriptions, plus place names and personal names, plus the language of horses, carts, and a few weapons which were borrowed into Latin from the cis-Alpine Gauls (i.e. Celtic-speakers who lived in N. Italy and had pillaged Rome at one point).
The Gauls in France (trans-Alpine Gauls) claimed not to be a single people, saying they were of different origins but had come to live in much the same style and spoke essentially the same language (which Roman writers said was similar to the language spoken in Britannia). How much weight to put on such folklore God knows – but there’s not much else to go on I suspect.
You could also say that “Britons” lived in Britain but with a contingent who lived in Ireland, and Gaels lived in Ireland with a suspected contingent who lived in the West Highlands. In other words there are historians who suspect that there were Gaels living in Britain before the well-known settlement of Argyll in the fifth century.
In the Dark Ages there were also Gaelic colonies set up by conquest in N Wales, S Wales, probably Cornwall, and possibly N W England. There’s actually a (Welsh) Dark Ages account of how the Britons of what is now England called in troops from the “Old North” – what is now southern Scotland – to expel the Irish from N Wales. If true it suggests that there was quite a bit of organisation that survived after the Roman retreat from Britain, at least for a while.
Warning: I’m no expert and my memory is not the best but that’s the picture I have accumulated over the years. Which means that the picture as presented at primary school wasn’t too bad an approximation.
@BiS “What civil war?”
I call BS on this one. The civil war is still current today and is heavily relevant in Irish politics today (FG and FF were on opposite sides). The 100 year anniversaries were commemorated recently (although rather subdued) compared to the anti-british celebration of the 1916 uprising.
“the Southern Syncopated Orchestra”: well, I had an Irish grandfather and I can sing a passable impression of Louis Armstrong. Does that make me a diverse Irishman?
@Gunker
Maybe today. But I’m recounting a conversation from the 80s. So someone who’d been through Ireland’s 70s education system. That’s a time when the “Troubles” were in spate & an “Irish people always united” view was fashionable. I’m entirely willing to believe the Irish have re-written their history, somewhat. The UK has over prewar anti-Semitism amongst other things.. Germany’s re-writing its on a continuing basis. Hard to keep up.
Also don’t forget that at that time the people who were involved in the Rising & the events that followed, Including the Civil War, were still around.
It’s like here. There’s the history of when Franco was still running Spain. Then a later history which puts the anti-Francoists on the side of the angels. And a current one that’s increasingly more nuanced.
I went through the Brit education of the 60s where history generally stopped before 1900. Really all one knew of WW1, WW2 & after was myth. Don’t suppose they wanted kids enquiring into the myth.
Pip
Thank you for your brief history lesson.
It’s a curious thing that English is a mash up of Germanic and Romance languages (or Danish and French?) with a vanishingly small number of words borrowed from Welsh (or Celtic).
Why do you think this is?
The first filmed footage depicting an African diaspora gathering in Ireland is older than the independent Irish state.
One or 2 immigrants in to a country isn’t a problem as they are forced to integrate or starve and they aren’t seen as competing for local resources and in those days there wasn’t much government money to compete for anyway. They will even be welcomed if only as a bit as a novelty, but they won’t be seen as a threat.
The problem comes when an immigrant community reaches a critical mass that means they don’t really need to integrate and they are aided and abetted by politicians who dismiss complaints as racist. Then they start competing for resources, especially government welfare and that’s when resentment by indigenous populations really takes off.
We see it in other ways. When a few Brits started going to foreign places for stag or hen parties they were generally welcomed as a bit of a novelty and mostly tolerated. Those few would also be a bit more mindful of local cultures and on better behaviour. Then the numbers grow and inhibitions are lost and eventually locals get pissed off and start demanding a clamp down.
See also Germans with towels etc.
Some shipwreck survivors come ashore, some guy comes over and plays a show – and this is ‘evidence’ of Irish diversity?
‘Pict’ comes from the Roman name Picti, meaning “painted people” and it is traditionally thought to refer to the practice of tattooing or body painting.
PiP – fascinating and knowledgeable.
How much weight to put on such folklore God knows
I suspect folklore and myths are generally true, including the origin of the Scots as laid out in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320).
“Why do you think this is?” Dunno. Apart from place names (e.g. names of rivers such as Avon), and a couple of animals (e.g. moggie, brock) I don’t know any counter-examples to your point. The place name Edinburgh seems to be a direct translation into Northumbrian of the Brittonic name; maybe that happened elsewhere too? Very odd, isn’t it? If the Germans killed the men and stole their women you might still expect children to use their mother tongue as well as their father tongue.
Is the same true of French i.e. very little Celtic content? How about German? Is there any trace of the tongue of the cis-Alpine Gauls in Italian or the Ibero-Celts in Spanish?
On the other hand there were Vikings in Ireland who did adopt Gaelic – they are said to be the bods who invaded SW Scotland (Galloway and Carrick) in the 10th century so that Gaelic replaced (presumably) Brittonic there. So that’s an example of speakers of a Germanic language adopting a Celtic language. Are there any others? Dunno.
” Is there any trace of the tongue of the cis-Alpine Gauls in Italian or the Ibero-Celts in Spanish?”
Not exactly relevant, but there’s significant Germanic in Italian from the Lombards. Birra, Tavola, these are beer, table. Spanish and Portuguese use cerveja (cervus in Latin?) and mesa (from, mensa?).
I have a feeling, and it is that feeling only, that Latin was such a wipe out for the older languages that influences upon Latins – who came in after – have a notable effect these days but not the ones before Latin. That’s based upon no evidence other than anecdote.
The Visigoths had a different effect upon Iberian Latin than the Lombards did upon Italian.
This is all hugely complicated by hte fact that until we got national boundaries, post offices, radio stations, national education systems etc there wasn’t, really, a “national” language anywhere in the Romance world. A smeared palette of va\riants around that Latinate core.
I’ve said this before but back a few hundred years I’m sure you could walk (about the right speed, 10 to 15 miles a day sort of speed) from Faro to Sicily and you’ve have hugely, hugely different languages at either end but you’d not greatly note them changing day by day. It would be a few words, some pronunciations, that were different at each daily stop. The same would be true of the Slavic languages from the Wends and Sorbs of Germany through to the Volga.
Which one got nailed down as “the language” – among the Slavs especially, but I can imagine in a lot of pre-literate societies in Africa etc – was the result of which one was first used for the vernacular Bible. I’ve actually read – OK, skimmed – a learned debate on which of the four Slovaks was used and why. And, of course, that’s the one we know as Slovak today. The King James would be very different if they’d used Yorkshire as their base variant of English – and therefore modern English would be.
Hmm. Could be a fun start to a fantsy novel world. The KJ was done in Yorks. Or Mummerset. Then take the language from there.
Thinking about it, I might have expected a Celtic tongue to linger on in somewhere such as a highly defensible Swiss or Austrian valley but I’ve never heard of it. The great Celtic migration to Galatia, in what is now Turkey, must have lost its language to Greek – if it lost it early – or Turkish – if it lost it late. Is there any sign of Celtic words in the Greek spoken by the Greek-speakers driven out of Turkey after WWI? Or in modern Turkish?
As far as I can see nobody has a clue when Celtic arrived in the British Isles if indeed it was an import. There’s a theory that it developed as a traders’ language in the British Isles and neighbouring parts of the Atlantic coasts of the continent, and then spread inland. It’s all a great mystery.
Let’s not forget the Irish taking of slaves, the most famous one being St Patrick
BniC – have you ever seen The Norseman?
Great film, albeit rather nihilistic.
The Vikings were famous slavers too. Europe in general was a shithole before Christianity (so no surprise it’s reverting to a shithole without Christ).
The mean little godlings we used to worship in dark forests were fine with cruelty and suffering. I don’t think they’ve entirely gone away either. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but empathy is closer still.
“your average Irish rioter is far freer with his language and fists than our own cowed “far right”.
Do any of you think that an English version of the IRA (guns, bombs, etc.) could appear?
@dearieme & Tim
Languages tend to get simpler as societies become more sophisticated. So a simpler language will tend to displace a more complicated language.
Take English. OK the version we use here can be quite complicated. But it’s entirely possible to use a far simpler version. The ones that foreigners generally use. And it’s easy to learn. No masculine or feminine nouns, just neuters & they don’t need to be declined. Adjectives don’t have to agree in gender & number. You can get away with conjugating all verbs the same & pluralising all nouns with an “S” at a pinch. So it’s not surprising that English is taking over as the international standard.
From what I know of some of these disappearing or lost languages, they do seem to have had quite complex structures. Old English is much more complex than modern English. So you can see why a simpler language might displace a more complex one. It can be wider spoken.
TomJ – Scots and Irish are like Romulans and Remans. There’s no real difference, in fact I understand our brother Dearieme celebrates St Patrick’s Day in his Glasgow Celtic top.
We English, of course, are more like Captain Kirk.
@John B it’s speculated that those Armadian Spanish were the origin of the Black Irish, those with olive skin and black, curly hair.
Dearieme would celebrate the destruction of everything to do with Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers. Hoodlum outfits, the pair of ’em.
I like this theory of the legendary BiS, that a simpler language would displace or assimilate a more complicated one over time. I never understood why some languages got so complicated in the first place – e.g. the gendered nouns, or the multiple pronunciations of ‘outh’ – ‘southampton’ but ‘southern rail’ which I now pronounce the same to annoy.
But the Japanese were briefly world champions and have different nouns for grass depending if it belonged to your pathetic efforts, was meadow grass, or the emperor himself had mowed it. What’s the evolutionary benefit of having a class stratified language… just don’t get it
BiS
Language tends to get more not less complicated. Slaves from diverse locations and languages speak pidgin to each other. Their children speak creole, inventing grammar to suit.
Even gaelic is an indo-european language according to the experts. All European languages have this prehistoric root, except…
Hungarian, Basque and Finnish. Why and how they survived is a mystery, unless PiP has read another book.
I’ve heard of muscular christianity, but Steve’s fascist, potty-mouthed christianity is a new one on me.
Snag – I’ve heard of muscular christianity, but Steve’s fascist, potty-mouthed christianity is a new one on me.
You should have met Martin Luther, now there was a man who could tell a good scatological joke, when he wasn’t roasting the Jews.
Deus Vult.
Dearieme – Aha! A Hibernian fan, I see.
Dearieme – one of my dearest friends is a Glasgow Rangers fan, and a guid Scottish Protestant.
He saved my life, so I’ve always had a soft spot for his favourite football team.
Hello! Hello!
@ ZT:
Do any of you think that an English version of the IRA (guns, bombs, etc.) could appear?
No.
As someone pointed out on X the other week, the British Establishment has much more experience of managing and crushing dissent – see the swift jailing of English rioters after the Southport murders and the Establishment-approved reaction of the parents of those murdered there and in Nottingham – and the rather ham-handed response to the protests in Ireland.
Language tends to get more not less complicated.
No. They really don’t get more complex. They may acquire more words but the structures get simpler. You look at some languages where nouns have several genders & umpteen declensions. Basque seems horribly complicated. Compare with English with no declensions & all purpose prepositions & articles.
Do any of you think that an English version of the IRA (guns, bombs, etc.) could appear?
There’s no obvious ‘oppressor’ to overthrow (the EU, perhaps, but that’s now history). Much of the violence in Northern Ireland was as much about who controlled smuggling, drugs, prostitution etc, and there’s enough equivalent violence to that in England, even if it’s not funded by US donations.