Naomi O’Leary:
Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
Naomi O’Leary:
Have you ever heard about Irish people being slaves in history?
Naomi O’Leary:
Not about them being slaves over in the States or anything like that?
Voxpop:
I don’t know. I think I’ve heard something about it. Is it not like whenever they went over in the famine? Wasn’t that it? Or maybe, don’t know. I can’t be certain.
Naomi O’Leary:
What about you?
Voxpop:
No, I don’t anything about it. Sorry.
Naomi O’Leary:
Have you seen these things going around Irish slaves?
Voxpop:
Irish slaves?
Voxpop:
Irish slaves.
Voxpop:
What kind of slaves?
Naomi O’Leary:
Did you ever hear about Irish people being slaves?
Voxpop:
About Irish people being slaves? Not really, no.
Naomi O’Leary:
What about you?
Voxpop:
No, not, no.
Naomi O’Leary:
Any idea what I’m talking about?
Voxpop:
It’s got something to do with some sort of sex or something like that.
Voxpop:
Sex slaves or…
Naomi O’Leary:
Have you ever heard of any talk that the Irish people were slaves, like in history back in the day?
Voxpop:
No.
Voxpop:
Not really, no.
Voxpop:
No, no. Not really, no.
Tim McInerney:
You might have been wondering what all that was about.
Naomi O’Leary:
Those were actually the voices of people who I interviewed on the streets of Dublin about the idea of Irish slaves. Is this a myth that you’ve heard about before, Tim?
Tim McInerney:
You know, it is a myth I heard about before. I came across it awhile back in research. But it’s all pretty recent as far as I can see.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So it’s a quite a recent phenomenon but it’s really growing. It’s a constant online and it’s more of a thing in the United States we should say than in Ireland. You heard how baffled people were there but even in Ireland as well there’s some of it and it just won’t die because the truth just can’t keep up with it. So this episode, we’re gonna do our part to set the record straight on this. So let’s just consider the context for the moment. I think you’ll agree that it’s not that often that the proceedings of the Irish Upper House of Parliament get much attention, even in Ireland I would say.
Tim McInerney:
In the Seanad. Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.
Naomi O’Leary:
You know in the wake of Donald Trump’s election one clip went viral around the world. And this was Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, who’s the senator in the centre-left Labour Party.
Tim McInerney:
Oh, right. I know the one you’re talking about. This is where he denounces Trump. He calls him a fascist, doesn’t he?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, yeah.
Tim McInerney:
And he urges Irish politicians not to kowtow to him. I’ve actually seen YouTube clips of that where they’ve had it’s like a backing track of stirring Celtic music.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, which is kind of bizarre. But anyway, the clip was everywhere for a while, just went completely viral and it was kind of, you know, pretty gutsy on Ó Ríordáin’s part because not that many people had openly denounced the new president. There was very much a wait and see attitude and of course, the U.S. is hugely important in economic terms for Ireland. So, politicians generally didn’t want to rush to condemn Trump. But let’s hear a bit of that clip.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin:
Can the government not understand what’s happening? We are at an ugly international crossroads. What’s happening in Britain is appalling. What’s happening across Europe, it’s appalling. It has echoes from the 1930s. And America, the most powerful country in the world, has just elected a fascist and the best we can come out with is from a government spokesperson is “Well, we have to talk about foreign direct investments. We have become conscious of our American investments in Ireland.” There are 50,000 Irish people illegal in America who I’m quite sure are fearful of their futures. When are we going to have the moral courage to speak in terms other than economy all the time and to realize what is happening?
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s what spread across timelines on Facebook and other social media like wildfire. And it actually garnered a lot of interest, which inspired Ó Ríordáin to set up a campaign group called Irish Stand.
Tim McInerney:
Oh okay, so what’s that?
Naomi O’Leary:
So basically it holds events in solidarity with the kind of people Trump has targeted. So basically immigrants. So it gathers together speakers on this who are, you know, from Mexican communities, Irish communities, Muslim people. And it raises money for organizations like the ACLU, which is the American Civil Liberties Union. Ó Ríordáin told me he was disturbed basically at the prevalence of Irish surnames in the Trump administration. So he felt it was time to remind Irish America, particularly people who were drawn to right-wing ideologies of their roots as immigrants.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin:
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is my name. So I’m a senator in the Irish Parliament. When you really start hearing a leader of a country or a candidate in the country deliberately targeting a vulnerable group as to be the reason for all ills the country, I think it strikes a chord with Irish people. When Kennedy ran for the presidency, he had to deal with the issue of his Catholicism in 1960. And there was that there was quite a lot of anti-Catholic feeling in the States at that time. So we should be well used to what it’s like. Anybody who was willing to use the Irish American experience as some kind of white European Christian success story is completely missing the point because when Syrians are dying in the coffin ships in the Mediterranean, the Irish know from experience what that’s like. And when famine happens somewhere in the developing world, we know exactly what that’s like. And when people are fleeing sectarian conflict, we know exactly what that’s like. So I think the Irish have a responsibility to tell that story. It’s important for us to remind America of the Irish story and that it has echoes of what’s happening now. As what is said now that Mexicans; what is said now about Muslims or what’s said now about Syrians. It’s exactly what was once said about the Irish and that’s our moral responsibility.
Naomi O’Leary:
Has anyone come up to you when you were over in the States, or have you ever encountered someone saying the Irish were slaves, too? And therefore, these other people, like black people, just need to get over it.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin:
There’s a little bit of that narrative, mostly on social media. I don’t think it has any historical, I mean, if you’re trying to equate the Irish experience with the African-American experience, I think you’re completely and utterly wrong. I think there’s a motivation behind that in order to diminish the experience of African-Americans. I don’t think the two things like that can be correlated in any way whatsoever.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s really interesting, right? Because in terms of kind of how can we say like ethnic cachet, the political significance of Irish heritage in the U.S. has kind of transformed?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, this is really interesting, isn’t it? So like, you know, it’s not that long ago that Irish Catholics in particular were very much looked down upon in the U.S. I suppose that’s partly because of a hangover from 19th century, anti-Catholic sentiment. But of course, it was also associated with the fact that Irish Catholics were very much connected in people’s minds with mass immigration from Ireland into America, which, of course, went on throughout the 20th century.
Naomi O’Leary:
I mean, this was still an issue when JFK was elected president, right. It was a big deal.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, that’s a really good example. Like the fact that JFK wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you know, broke some kind of watershed, I suppose. And part of the huge affection that Irish people had and have, I suppose for JFK was largely due to the fact that his election in a way kind of smashed a global image of the Irish Catholics as a kind of underclass.
Naomi O’Leary:
Unfortunately, this history has kind of mutated in this new era of race relations in the U.S. so that Irish identity is being used to undermine and vilify black civil rights movements.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And this kind of engineered conflict is really sad and it’s really cynical, especially today. And when you when you consider that both the Irish and African-Americans have been on the short end of the racial stick, as it were, you know, to put it mildly Irish identity, lest we forget, it was until relatively recently classed in racist pseudoscience as a firmly inferior biological subgroup of human beings.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, can you just go into that a bit more? Because I know that this is something that you study.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, sure. I mean, we can basically look at anthropology from before the Second World War and we’ll find something like this. I mean, if you ask me the discourse of race is a way to kind of translate social inequality into a language of biology to try and make social inequalities seem real and natural. And you can see this because, you know, the language of race changes with every single social situation to try and make powerful people look like they are naturally powerful. So if you look up anthropological descriptions of the Irish from before the Second World War, which I urge you to do, it won’t take you very long to find some pretty jaw-dropping, racist diatribe about the Irish. And remember, this was all presented as a science, you know, so like, of course, just like most racial discourse from this time that it all fits in with the contemporary social prejudices that went along with it. So, for example, I was looking at a British children’s encyclopaedia actually from the 1920s a little while back, which, you know, it pretty much explained that the Irish War of Independence:- Why did that happen, Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, there was a treaty. It was a bit complicated, to be honest.
Tim McInerney:
Wrong! Wrong. no, no. Zero marks. It was because people in the west and the south of the island of Ireland were an inferior race to those in the north and the east.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh! I see.
Tim McInerney:
Yes. The evil Mr De Valera who came over from America like choraled these subhumans basically together and used them for his own political gain. And that’s how they presented the Irish War of Independence. And that was in the 1920s.
Naomi O’Leary:
What the hell? That’s so bizarre. Okay, that’s crazy.
Tim McInerney:
But Naomi, this is all turned on its head then, right?
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. So, yeah, this is the fascinating thing. Like Irish is:- Irishness:-is now being used, quite ironically, as a marker of whiteness by far-right groups. I mean, we are quite pale to be fair. But there’s a one particular meme going around which is completely responsible and probably most guilty in relation to this agenda and it promotes the idea through false history and of course, the Irish slaves meme.
Tim McInerney:
Indeed. That’s exactly it. So maybe you can like walk us through what exactly this is.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So the Irish saved meme, you may have seen it, like if you have any interest in Irish history at all, you may have been targeted or you may come up in a timeline for you. So it’s a meme essentially or a series of memes and it might be an email that arrives in your inbox or it might be something that you see on Facebook like a blog post or something that. Usually it looks like thisThere’ll be a photograph and there’ll be a claim like the forgotten Irish slaves or, you know, the Irish slaves too. And the popularity of these claims boomed just at the same time that the Black Lives Matter movement got going and kind of came to prominence after a series of prominent shootings by police. So they were protesting the ability, basically of police to shoot black people with impunity.
Tim McInerney:
This seems to be self-contradictory. So it’s like how does creating a false history of slavery in a people’s past somehow empower those people?
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so here’s how it works. It presents these facts which are false or extremely twisted, but we’ll get to them in more detail in a minute. But the way it works is its secondary meaning really, which is basically this insinuation that, you know, white Irish people went through this terrible time and you don’t see them complaining. And Irish people get manage to get so far in the U.S. and you black people didn’t. Therefore, your claims about racist discrimination holding you back are rubbish. And, you know, we’re like the living proof of that.
Tim McInerney:
It’s a little bit self-contradictory considering that they are literally complaining, but right. I mean. Okay. So this has an appeal to like this white audience, because it’s flattering to them. It tells them that they got to the position where they are because of their inherent virtues and strengths and not because the system was rigged in their favour. And I suppose that’s a pretty standard conservative fairy tale, right?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it’s comforting. Like it also absolves you, like you don’t need to worry about this unpleasant topic of racism and confront the fact that your idea of the U.S. might need to be interrogated and you might even be complicit in discrimination, like you’re absolved.
Tim McInerney:
Of course. I see.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So is this comforting slant on history that’s massively appealing and it spreads like wildfire online. There’s a whole industry of t-shirts and things that you can buy that say the, “Irish were the original slaves” and things like that.
Tim McInerney:
No, I didn’t know. No way.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, seriously. And yeah, it also plays into this sort of police vs. black people dichotomy. So, you know, in a backlash against Black Lives Matter, people began to say Blue Lives Matter, so it means police lives. Of course, there’s a long history of Irish immigrants going into the police force in the U.S., which includes, by the way, some of my own family. Shout out to my New York cousins.
Tim McInerney:
Shout out!
Naomi O’Leary:
But yeah, anyway, I mentioned these T-shirts. Some of them incorporate various aspects of Irish symbology, like shamrocks, that kind of thing. And they kind of adopt Irish identity as like a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, oddly. And with this whole mess led to the creation of one T-shirt, which is so bad, we just can’t avoid mentioning it. And it kind of went viral. Tim, someone made a T-shirt where they translated the phrase Blue Lives Matter into Irish.
Tim McInerney:
Oh, I think I can see where this is going.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So it was a massive fail on a few levels. So whoever it was obviously used something like Google Translate or some translation software. So it came out on the T-shirt “Gorm Chónaí Ábhar”
Tim McInerney:
Ah, right. Ok. Oh, that’s wrong on so many levels.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it’s so garbled like you really have to actually unpick it. So basically for lives, you know, he’s used, it’s come out as the word “Chónaí”, which is, “Chónaí” is the way you say that you live somewhereTáim i mo chónaí i mBaile Átha Cliath. And then he’s used the word “Ábhar” for matter, which is, it’s a noun like matter like a substance, you know. So it’s not a verb. But the crowning glory of the whole thing is that he’s used the word “Gorm”. Ok, so that actually is the correct word for blue, but not in the way he thinks it is.
Tim McInerney:
This is such bad luck for him.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it is. Do you want to explain that one, Tim?
Tim McInerney:
Sure. Okay. Well, Irish is probably the only language in the world where the term for black people actually is literally blue people.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s kind of weird, actually, now that you think about it.
Tim McInerney:
It definitely is weird. It’s probably because the adjective black, which is “dubh”, is usually used for people with black hair, you know. And it’s also possibly I’ve heard it suggested that “fear dubh” or “black man” was used in the past as a euphemism for the devil, so you couldn’t use that term. So people used “blue man” instead.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. So basically this T-shirt is just the most tremendous self-own because if anything, if anything they’ve written Black Lives Matter.
Tim McInerney:
Maybe those t-shirts will catch on.
Naomi O’Leary:
I don’t know. But anyway, getting back to the Irish slaves myth, like all good rumours, they’ve kind of succeeded by making vague allusions to things that actually did happen. And then they just co-opt them into this fictional history. It’s like fan fiction version of history.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly. And this is where it gets really dangerous. You know, and where people can be seriously misled. There’s something I really want to say off the bat, actually, as an 18th century historian, is that in Western history, we haven’t even begun to brush the surface of the Transatlantic slave trade. You know, and the effect it continues to have on the planet today, like not many of us realize quite how downplayed this is in history books in the West, not just in the USA, but in Europe as well. Like the slave trade, most of us will have encountered the slave trade in school, let’s say, as this kind of sideshow horror. You know, like it’s this kind of side chapter, if it’s even in the book.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. But like in reality, this is the engine that was powering 18th century Europe. You know, like to put it in maybe relative terms. The slave trade was to the 18th century, what the industrial revolution was to the 19th century. You know it like this trade in human beings is what made Europeans rich. It’s what established the sort of power imbalance that we still have today, especially between Africa and the West. And you know, no western country really wants to look this in the eye.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s something that you kind of see in a bit in literature as well. Right.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Sure. Literature is a good way of exploring it actually because we can kind of get it below the surface. You know, like there’s this fascinating moment in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey where the main character she mentions slavery, you know, in the drawing room while everyone’s sitting around and everyone gets really quiet and they don’t reply to her and she’s, you know, she’s this young girl so she keeps asking them, like, why aren’t you replying? You know, what’s up? Why aren’t you telling me about this? Because, of course, the truth was and the readers knew, all of the readers knew, that all these beautiful mansions and lawns and tea sets and the sugar, especially that they were using in the tea, and all these parties and balls and the like, they were all being paid for through this literal trade in human flesh.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. That would totally, you know, spoil the whole mood of the tea party, I suppose.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Right. You know, like, exactly. You know, you don’t want your lovely, beautiful building to be to be marred by thinking about who or who paid for it. And the history books, especially national curricula, really don’t like putting it this way. Like, when is the last time you saw, you know, a beautiful stately home from the 18th century being presented first and foremost as the work of slaves? You know, for example, one thing that really annoys me is when schoolbooks stress that – and this happens all the time – that slavery was already happening in Africa before the European traders came. And you can hear the sound of people washing their hands you know when they write that down. And like, yeah, that’s true, right? But those situations are just incomparable. Like the European traders dealt slaves on an industrial scale. You know, those slave ports were like slave-processing factories. They were being, these people, were being packed up and ships exactly like merchandise, like in their millions, like in the same spaces as merchandise was kept and in the same quantities, like nothing like this had ever happened in history before. The very idea of race, as we know today and all the violence and misery that continues to characterise racial division is inextricable from the slave trade. You know, like “biological race” was used to justify the trade in Africans, just like, you know, for instance, it was used in a totally different context in the 20s to vilify Irish rebels. You know, it’s a way to justify social prejudice. So when people like these Irish slave advocates are suggesting that African-Americans are somehow like milking the history of slavery, that really infuriates me. You know, because we are far from milking. We haven’t even begun to address the history of slavery.
Tim McInerney:
So, yeah, sorry.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, can I just say “Bravo”, like that was that was an amazing rant.
Tim McInerney:
Be wary years of pent up frustration, Naomi, but rant over. Right. So let’s get to the root of this.
Naomi O’Leary:
Alright.
Tim McInerney:
Where did the myth of Irish slaves begin? I asked two academics who researched this history of the Irish in the Caribbean to find out their assessment of the whole thing. The execution bhíos súil an cheidir costas buinte na chuine ag an ndeanach. Transport transplant, mo mheabhair ar Bhéarla. Shoot him, kill him, strip him, tear him. A tory, hack him, hang him. Rebel, a rogue, a thief, a priest, a papist. That’s from a mid 17th century poem written by an Irish bard named Éamonn an Dúna. He’s speaking about the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland, an invasion so bloody that it reduced the population of the country by over a quarter in the space of only a few years. By the time an Dúna wrote this in about 1658 English forces had seized over three quarters of the land in Ireland, banishing native Irish landowners to a native reservation on the western side of the river Shannon. To hell, he told them, or to Connacht. an Dúna’s poem, as you might have noticed, is unusual in the way it uses Irish and English together. In many ways, it’s been seen as a symbol of the violent entry of the English language into Ireland at this time. He uses English words only for the acts of violence and horror brought, along with the language itself, by Cromwell’s army. And you might have noticed, too, that here we catch a glimpse of those other exiles of Cromwell’s Irish campaign. “Transport transplant, mo mheabhair ar Bhéarla” Transplant transport, that’s what I remember of English. He’s talking here of the thousands of Irish prisoners who were forcibly transported to the Caribbean at this time.
Tim McInerney:
Here’s Matthew Reilly. He’s the author of the forthcoming book entitled Archaeology below the CliffRace, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society.
Matthew Reilly:
My name is Matthew Reilly and I’m an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York. I’m a historical archaeologist focusing on race and labour in Barbados and the Atlantic world. I think we need to think of Ireland and the Caribbean as being part of the same imperial design. So many have argued that Ireland was the experimentation ground for English colonialism. By the time Cromwell came to power, he likely viewed transporting the Irish as a means of killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. Clear Ireland or the Catholic masses to make room for England planters and then provide English plantations in the Caribbean with much needed labour as many planters to the labour-intensive sugar industry. I actually went to Barbados pursuing a dissertation project specifically looking to see if I could find archaeological evidence of those earliest Irish indentured servants or prisoners that were sent to the isle in the 17th century. And in fact, what I ended up finding was a much bigger project dealing with the red legs, or the poor whites as their pejoratively referred to.
Tim McInerney:
The red legs. This small community of only a few hundred people is one of the most intriguing clues to the history of the Irish in the Caribbean. Sporting names such as Fitzgerald and Murphy, and often with the red hair and freckles to boot, the red legs community in Barbados and nearby islands are largely descended from these 17th century Irish transports, as well as other Irish settlers who came later. Strikingly, it even sounds as if they have maintained an Irish lilt in the way they speak, blended with the more recognizable, though frankly not dissimilar accent of Barbados. Sporadically over the last few decades, the Irish media has picked up on this forgotten diaspora. But in the last few years, interest in the red legs seems to have picked up in earnest. In particular, the 2001 publication of Sean O’Callaghan’s book To Hell or BarbadosThe ethnic cleansing of Ireland lent a new dimension to this popular history. Some 50,000 Irish, claimed O’Callaghan, had been transported to Barbados at the mercy of what he calls the Irish white slave trade. The book was followed up by a number of quite dubious articles on the Internet. One of the most influential published by a man called John Martin on globalresearch.ca in 2008. It was called The Irish Slave TradeThe Forgotten White Slaves. Martin’s article claims that some 300,000 Irish were sold as slaves to sugar planters in the Caribbean. And again, he cites the number of 50,000 slaves being sent to Barbados. Numbers like this immediately set off alarm bells in historians brains because not only was there no accurate way to count masses of people like this, in the 17th century say, but chroniclers exaggerated numbers for political gain all the time during this era. But there’s another problem with these figures. Let’s take the example of 50,000 sent to Barbados. Here’s Matthew Reilly again.
Matthew Reilly:
The numbers just don’t add up. It’s estimated that the population of Barbados was only forty five thousand individuals, including 20,000 enslaved Africans, so that number right there, if 50,000 were true that more than double the population of the island. So, again, this isn’t to say that a large number of Irish prisoners weren’t captured and brutally sent to the Americas. But we still need to be careful with the evidence that’s carelessly thrown around.
Tim McInerney:
Evidence, carelessly thrown around, indeed. But of course, it is the careless use of the word slave in articles and books like this that has caused the most damage. However brutal and horrific these transportations were, those Irish prisoners were simply not slaves. They were indentured servants. It sounds, I know, like a pedantic distinction, but it’s anything but:- in fact it means everything. This is the difference between humanity and property.
Matthew Reilly:
So one of the easiest ways to see this distinction visible on the record is to look at early Barbadian laws where there are distinctions made between Negroes slaves, referring to enslaved Africans that are coming from coastal and central Africa, and then Christian servants that are coming from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, for instance. We also see in terms of the ownership, so to speak, of these individuals on plantations. So Irish servants are listed as being bought and sold but it’s not their bodies, it’s their time of servitude. For enslaved Africans this is never the case. So this might be a very subtle difference, but it’s a tremendous distinction that is a lot of impact in terms of how slavery and servitude were socially and legally experienced in a setting like Barbados. In general, a contract would be between three and seven years where you laboured in exchange for food, shelter, clothing and passage across the Atlantic. At the end of your period of indenture, you were said to get ten acres of land or you were compensated in the form of sugar or cotton or tobacco. Now, of course, many of the servants that are sent over come without a contract coming against their will. But in a place like Barbados, upon arrival to the island, it was legally stipulated that they would be given a contract. So they are always held to a very different legal standard than enslaved Africans.
Tim McInerney:
There’s certainly no denying that indentured servitude was horrific in the Caribbean. In many cases, servants were treated even worse than slaves during their years of service because the masses were trying to get as much out of them before they had to set them free. There was also the strong possibility that many of these contracts were never honoured, and anyway, many freed servants would have had no choice but to go back to work on the plantation anyway. But slavery is something completely different. Being a slave means being a piece of property. Your owner owns your body. Think about that for a moment. Your fingers and your toes, your eyes, your belly, your tongue. None of it is your own. And essentially the slave owner can do whatever they want with you. As a slave, you would be counted, valued and merchandise in the same books and ledgers as livestock, like cows and sheep. You would be kept just healthy enough to work to your maximum potential. And like cows and sheep, there would probably come a time when you would be bred to make new slaves. From the moment a slave conceived a child, the owner owned that child, too. And he would sell it just like he would sell a suckling calf. The slaves who arrived in the cargo holds of filthy and pestilent trader ships were not prisoners of war like the indentured servants, they were a mass commodity powering an entire global economy. Those same ships would take the sugar and rum produced by the slaves back to Europe. There was no contract involved with slavery. Such an idea would imply that they had some kind of inherent freedom to run to. For them, servitude was hereditary. There was no escape. It was wound into the very concept of their existence. Early modern slavery in Europe and the Americas is one of the most significant and incomprehensible examples of mass dehumanization in the history of our species. This is the distinction that is being lost when slave and indentured servant are used interchangeably. It’s not a minor one, I think we can agree on that. But it seems indentured servant just doesn’t have the same sensational ring to it. In 2009, the Irish language TV station Teilifís na Gaeilge aired a documentary by Moondance Production Companies called The red legsThe Irish Sugar Slaves. In it, the narrator explains the difference between slaves and indentured servants, but decides that since so many servants were contracted for life, that they were essentially the same thing. One interesting aspect of the documentary, however, was that the red legs themselves, who were interviewed very much identified with the idea that they were descended from a population of Irish slaves. I asked Matthew Reilly about this.
Matthew Reilly:
I’m familiar with the documentaries and unfortunately what I did see and many of those cases were very kind of leading questions on the part of the production crews. So I don’t necessarily think they were deceiving or misleading the people that were being interviewed, but I think there is far more to it than that. So there isn’t one homogenous way in which the red legs identify themselves historically. In my experience, many of these individuals are keenly aware of their history. Some have certainly been influenced by media outlets who are quick to identify them as the descendants of Irish slaves. But I think that most would find that to be too simple of an explanation.
Tim McInerney:
Another fallout, of course, from this false history of an Irish slave trade is the real history of indentured servants, which has at best been thrown into discredit and at worst been smothered by all this historical hot air. Here’s Kate Brennan, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto and author of the forthcoming article Exploring the Irish Slave MythThe Grafted Tongue, English and Comparisons of the Caribbean and Ireland.
Kate Brennan:
What’s really disheartening about it is the fact that this fetishization, and you know trying to describe what happened to many Irish people in the Caribbean, to fetishize it as slavery when that’s not true. Not in the least. That actually, I think, has the counter effect of not actually getting their stories out there. There were plenty of Irish, especially in the 17th century, the majority of those Irish, they were forcibly transported. They were prisoners. They were orphans. They were widows, convicts. And all of that gets lost.
Tim McInerney:
This whole history, Kate told me, has laboured under quite a few falsehoods, in fact. Remember those Irish accents that seem so striking among the red leg population? Well, according to phoneticians, linguistically, there was actually no proof that these accents are related to those of Ireland. This, Kate told me, shouldn’t even be surprising to us because of course in the 17th century most of those transplanted Irish did not speak English at all. The Hiberno-English spoken today had simply not been invented yet.
Kate Brennan:
In addition to this white slavery myth, oftentimes in casual observations of cultural similarities, especially in publications like the Irish Times, they will note things like, “Wow, all these Caribbean people have Irish surnames.” And you also find that people will make the jump to say they even speak with Irish accent. And so I did quite a bit of research into that question. Linguists throughout a few decades have tried exploring it and the short answer to that question is no, we don’t have the evidence to attest that pronunciation similarities between Irish accent and Caribbean accents are indeed valid, right. What we can know is that lone words actually do exist. So “geansaí”, you’re familiar with that, they use that in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean. They also in the Caribbean use the word “bainne clábair” to talk about a sour milk, and you might know that as “bainne clábair.” The indentured servants, most of them came from Munster, right, and in the 17th century, most of them would have been Irish speakers. They may have never even heard English in their lifetimes until they were thrown on a boat and taken across the ocean.
Tim McInerney:
History books then have been lazy, and documentaries have erred towards the sensational rather than the true. But why is this all gaining such traction now? Both Kate and Matthew noted direct connections with the renewed popularity of this myth and the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years.
Matthew Reilly:
We can’t discount a backlash to critical studies of slavery and racism that have been growing in the past few decades. The realities of the African slave trade are becoming more publicly visible, and it’s becoming harder and harder for people to discount the connections between slavery and contemporary racial injustice and inequity. So clinging to this notion of white or Irish slavery is a way to deny the realities of the African slave trade, but in terms of how this is connected to the racial movements and white supremacy, I think there’s a link between this myth and the rise in popularity of say, for instance, medieval studies among white supremacists. So these movements, they fabricate certain histories that feed their narratives and ideologies. So for medieval studies, for instance, it’s the creation of this mythic, pure, white Europe that never actually existed at this time. In the case of white slavery, it’s basically saying our ancestors were slaves first and we just got over it because we’re the better race. When push comes to shove, the evidence just doesn’t support these narratives or ideologies. I think it very much is a backlash to the heightened importance of the slave trade in academic circles and more publicly and we’re seeing that certainly in calls to tear down Confederate monuments in the United States. So it’s very much a “whitelash” for lack of a better term.
Kate Brennan:
There has been a rise in the number of pieces of propaganda using the Irish slave man, does feel certainly more recent. I can’t think of anything before, like the year 2000 maybe. And I’m thinking that perhaps it’s even within the last five years. I first noticed it myself, or it came to my attention and the attention of other scholars and researchers, back around the time of the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a way for white supremacist to try and co-opt the discourse of history, right, without actually learning historical methods. So they are creating this narrative that not only empowers them, it’s certainly not convincing people of colour, you know, but they, that’s not who they’re trying to convince. They’re trying to grow their ranks and so they really only need to convince a white audience.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so you can see how the common lack of understanding of what a slave actually means plays into this myth in quite an important way.
Tim McInerney:
Right. So, yeah, exactly. The crux of this myth is that it needs people to believe that an indentured servant and a slave are essentially the same thing. I spoke to Azie Dungey about this whole topic. So Azie is an actress and a screenwriter. And she’s someone who got an unusually vivid insight into the reality of both what slavery was like and also how it continues to shape the U.S. of today. This is how she got that right. She worked in Mount Vernon. That’s the plantation in Virginia, which was owned by George Washington, the first U.S. president. It’s now open as like a historical sites that visitors can go to and it’s one of those places where they have people dressed up as real historical characters who existed in the time. And they act as like guides to people who come visit. So visitors can come up and they can ask those actors questions and the characters will, they’ll respond in character and they’ll explain like who they are and all about the world at the time. So Azie got a job playing a slave and she spent a lot of time, first of all, in the archives of the plantation. So she was studying the historical resources available and she was piecing together the world that the slaves lived in in the time. And then during her days, she became Caroline Branham. So Caroline Branham was a real historical person. She was a house slave, a seamstress and she was the personal maid of Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington. The first president is quite a revered figure for many people in American history. And Azie find out that people visiting his estate, they often did not like to be confronted with the historical reality that he was a slave owner, so the person that they would often confront with their discomfort was Azie herself, the embodiment of this history. And, you know, she got lots of questions, including such as, “What about the Irish? Weren’t they slaves, too?
Tim McInerney:
Oh man.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So, let’s hear from Azie. Did you find that some visitors were very uncomfortable with being confronted with you as a kind of a representation of the history of slavery in the U.S.?
Azie Dungey:
Definitely. And sometimes they just went into denial. I mean, I had arguments with people about whether or not George Washington had slaves. And they’re at a museum, basically, and there are slave quarters and there are the individual histories of individual slaves that worked there written up all around the estate. And I’m standing there clearly not by my own will, but because I work there. But they still argued with me about the fact that they didn’t think he had slaves. I found there were different ways to sort of not deal with it, which I think comes out of being uncomfortable, and one of those ways was to kind of lash out or to do something to make me uncomfortable, like a man who came up to me and he grabbed my arm and he swung me around and he was like, “Let me see where you’re branded!”
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh God.
Azie Dungey:
And it took me a second to understand what he meant because this is a weird thing to say. And I was like, oh, he means like where, sometimes slave companies or people that shipped and sold slaves would brand with a hot iron their company logo on the slaves that they were going to sell. And then sometimes if you are a runaway, you got branded with an “R” so that if you ever tried to run away again, you know, someone would stop you and say, oh, you’ve done this before and they would put you in jail. I mean, there’s all different reasons why a slave might have been branded. All I know is that, you know, I pulled my arm away from him and I said, I haven’t been branded. And he said, “Well, you got a good up here. Because we’re from South Carolina.” He was there was his wife. And they’re both saying, like, “You’ve got a good in South Carolina, they branded them down there.” And they were laughing and then I just sort of walked away. And again, I am not sure sometimes whether it was just born out of their discomfort and they needed to do something to take control of the situation so that it didn’t take control of them or if they wanted to just demean me or if they genuinely thought that was funny and they thought they were sharing a joke with me. But either way, again, like I’m not human to them if they think that they can grab me and turn me around and talk about my body as if, you know, I’m not saying. You know, sometimes I had to also remember that whenever somebody is in a costume in a place, people do kind of act silly. And they don’t, you know, I mean, they feel like they can tease and play with you a little more than usual. I would see that with my white co-workers, of course. But for me, it was more there was more sometimes anger behind what they did or there was more belittling. There seemed to be more emotion tied to it. And I definitely got worse experiences than they did, you know. So, you know, things like that, you know, people have different ways of dealing with discomfort.
Naomi O’Leary:
I think you’re being quite generous.
Azie Dungey:
Yeah, I am. I mean, you know, some people are just, like my mom says, “some people are just jerks”. Yeah, and that’s true.
Naomi O’Leary:
Did this whole experience start to lead into the present in a way or change the way that you saw the United States of the current day?
Azie Dungey:
Yeah, it bled into the present I think psychologically for me personally in a way that was difficult because I became very anxious, an anxious because every day I didn’t know what I was going to have to deal with that day. And I think those anxieties kind of snuck up on me. But then also I started to see things going on in the news differently.
Naomi O’Leary:
How so?
Azie Dungey:
Well, I was there during Obama’s second term and there was still all this talk about his birth certificate. And I remember thinking I’d been reading a lot about freed men and how their citizenship was always, even though they were free, The United States didn’t have to consider them citizens. And it was sort of like a state by state thing and it changed all the time because the laws would change all the time. And so there was there’s always been this feeling that we’re here but we’re not we’re not really supposed to be here or we’re not really as complete a citizen as other people. And so even if you were free, you had to always have your free papers with you and you had always, any white person could stop you on the street and they could ask to see your free papers, so you had to be carrying around basically a certificate saying, “I’m not a slave. I am a free person and a free citizen. I cannot be jailed for just walking around”, like I can’t, like all these things. You had to carry something to prove that you were just as much a citizen as a white person. And I felt like it was similar, like they continually, even after being shown proof, but continually wanting to see proof that he deserved being an American and holding that office. You know, black people are still considered suspicious just because we exist in a coloured body in a space that we, that someone could perceive that we don’t belong or they don’t wanna. I felt like I was sort of living in both worlds and that that was teaching me a lot about how we got where we are but it was also very, kind of, depressing because it felt like we were caught in a cycle that we haven’t even, we still haven’t figured out how to break out of.
Naomi O’Leary:
And did you have people challenge you with the idea that Irish people were slaves?
Azie Dungey:
Right now, and where we are in America with race, it’s coming up so much.
Naomi O’Leary:
Can you explain how it comes up and how it’s used?
Azie Dungey:
Anytime there’s an article about slavery or reparations or, you know, racism, there are people that bring up the Irish. It’s a way of deflecting from the issue of slavery because it challenges the idea that slavery was race-based because basically people today think that African-Americans use slavery as an excuse for our present condition. They don’t understand that the history of slavery didn’t stop in the 1860s after the Civil War. That they’ll continue to be many types of oppression that mimics slavery up until the civil rights movement and even beyond. And so when we say, you know, that our situation, our economic situation today has to do with slavery, it’s not just slavery. It’s the years after slavery. But even so, you know, they want to downplay what slavery actually did to black Americans and how it affects the black community today by saying, well, the Irish were slaves and we’re fine now, so you don’t have an excuse because if Irish people could go and deal with it and move on, then why can’t black people?
Naomi O’Leary:
And of course, this isn’t true to begin with.
Azie Dungey:
It’s not true to begin with, and it’s sad to me because, honestly, I’ve always been very interested in the parallels between black history and Irish history. I’ve always been very fascinated about how Irish people in British publications, when they would do those, like those political cartoons back in the day, like they were also portrayed as animals and as monkeys and gorillas in the same way that Africans were. Like I’ve actually found a lot of places where there are some significant overlap, but I don’t even want to talk about that anymore because it goes where it becomes this other politicalized idea that kind of undermines the truth. This is a, I mean, it’s insulting, but it’s also I think it’s insulting to the real history of the Irish people because it’s such a rich and interesting history on its own, why would you have to try to prove it the same as African Americans? I don’t understand that.
Naomi O’Leary:
Does this play in somehow to the kind of reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement because of in policing in the United States has kind of a long tradition of Irish people going into it?
Azie Dungey:
Well, that’s interesting that you mention that, because there’s also this question of, well, what did a lot of Irish free people do because they weren’t going to become as rich as, you know, these English planters who had these big families who came from England and had been here since 1600s, 1700s and now had all this wealth. So the opportunities open to them in a society that is really dependent, the economic base was slavery, you know what is one of the things that someone in that class could do? And one of the things was to be a slave catcher. And that was actually pretty much the first type of policing in America was these militias, well, first it was individuals because you could get a lot of money, but then as we went into the 1800s it became militias of people that were either employed by the rich white people to find their slaves or who just went around looking for runaways.
Naomi O’Leary:
This was something that Irish people or people with the class of you know not quite rich white settlers, but something below, this was something that they could go into.
Azie Dungey:
They went into, yeah certainly. I mean, and overseers, too. I mean, overseers, there were a lot of Irish overseers, which would be the people actually on the plantation actually doing the, you know, overseeing the labour and enforcing mostly by, you know, threats and violent actions, enforcing this labour of people that didn’t really want to be doing it because obviously, they weren’t getting any benefit from it.
Naomi O’Leary:
The two communities weren’t always in conflict, I suppose. There’s also these examples, yeah.
Azie Dungey:
No, no, they’re not. No, I think I think there was a concerted effort to make sure that they were in conflict, because if you look at Bacon’s rebellion, for example, that was like a huge, huge rebellion that was white servants and black servants fighting against the powers that be in Virginia. And that was the big, that was the first big rebellion. Well, they knew after that they were like, wait a minute, we’ve got to find a way that we don’t, these people don’t see themselves as allies or they’re going to be able to, they’re more of them than us, you know. There’s actually been a lot of good overlap and ally ship in many ways, I think that that’s something that we should study more about.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely, fascinating.
Azie Dungey:
And talk more about too. So if you ever need anybody to come to Ireland and do that. I’d love to!
Naomi O’Leary:
Do you feel we’re into a more tense chapter of this long story under President Trump?
Azie Dungey:
You know, it’s hard to say because he was elected. That means that the intensity was already there because his message was pretty clearly anti- everything but white. So the meat of the country, the middle, the South, you know, they voted him in, which means that this is already going on. I think actually most of this happened during Obama’s presidency. One because for some people that was sort of crossing a line that made them sort of step back and re-evaluate their racism and decide that they were actually more racist than they realized and that they were justified in that. And then for other people, those people used Obama to sort of recruit more racism, because with this camera phone situation, black people started to feel like they could prove it more and they could be more active and out there about, you know, with the Black Lives Matter movement, all that because we’ve had video evidence now. And that it happened to coincide with Obama being president. But people saw this as one thing. They saw it as like Obama is President and now black people are taking the street. They’re trying to undermine cops and they’re changing the order of society. And it’s because he has led them to this. And there are all these crazy conspiracies about him. I have friends who come from very reasonable, educated families whose parents were telling them that Obama had a secret black army that was literally going to at some point be brought out and I don’t know. I think there’s this fear, that I think one there’s a really, really, I don’t know, like deep down fear that black people will just somehow try to seek revenge for everything at once. It just, it scared people. They didn’t understand it. There’s not enough education about race, race relations, the history of race and so they were very vulnerable. And I think that those people became the people that voted for Trump and are the people that are now very secure in their belief about white supremacy. And it’s not just white supremacy, just at least their belief that black people are less intelligent, more violent, and that we’re a problem. And I had somebody on the Internet after my This American Life, after that essay I did, he wrote me and he said, “I don’t understand. If it’s so bad here, why do you guys want to be here? If you, you’ve always had it bad here, we’ve got nothing and it seems like it’s apparently not getting better for you.” I mean, he’s being very facetious, but he was like, why don’t you want your own:- because now they’re all about, they don’t wanna kill us; they want their own country; they want to separate us:- so why wouldn’t you want that? And I said very plainly, I was like, because my family’s been here since the 1600s and we fought in every war. We’ve held office. We’ve built schools. We’ve contributed to the wealth of this country and I want to be here because this is my country, too. And I have just as much of a right to it as you do and you don’t get to say, well, if don’t like it here, go somewhere else after we’ve created, you know, the wealth that has created this country. I mean, now you’re just like ok now get out. It’s wrong. You know, it’s wrong and he was just like, okay, I understand that. I was like, well, I guess we agree now. It’s like you’ve never thought of that, you know?
Naomi O’Leary:
So this whole topic was actually first suggested to us by a listener, Traci White, who is a journalist and photographer originally from North Carolina but who now lives in the Netherlands. She got in touch with me to ask whether we might consider doing an episode about the Irish slaves meme after she noticed it a lot coming up on social media. After we chatted about it, I asked Tracy to do her own little investigation for this episode to find out what was the appeal of this myth? And how receptive were people to being corrected about it?
Traci White:
I’m a journalist and I come from the southern state of North Carolina. And that particular combination means that the stories in my Facebook feed are often pretty much irreconcilable. I’m equally likely to come across a post from a reporter sharing their latest investigative work as I am to see a blog with an incredulous all caps headline about government overreach which the mainstream media is deliberately ignoring. That dichotomy between facts-based and facts-free content was in full effect a couple of years ago when several pieces began making the rounds of my social media feed about the untold history of Irish slaves in the Americas. One such post came from one of my cousins, Greg. He posted a status update criticizing Kanye West for saying that white people don’t know what it’s like to be descended from slaves since the Irish were slaves to. Although Greg and I didn’t see each other very much as kids because we grew up in different states, we get along really well as adults and it surprised me to see that he had posted something like this. So I reached out to him about it at the time and he told me that he was having second thoughts after noticing the kind of people who were liking it and heartily approving of it.
Greg:
When I saw people like latching onto the comment, the types of people:- and I think you know what I mean by the types of people, the people who post regularly stuff that I find to be wrong or just inappropriate:- when they started latching onto the comment, I was like, okay, so this is probably not a good thing. So then I start looking into it and reading about it. And I just can’t get over the fact that there’s in that argument about Irish being slaves, there is this inherent subtext of because of their white European-ism they were able to “pull up their bootstraps”, get to work and work themselves out of the situation. And I think that that is what is implied by the people that state that.
Traci White:
That was what had bothered me about the stories when I first read them, too. And Greg was certainly not the only family member or friend who discussed the topic on Facebook. A handful of other relatives and friends of Irish-descent shared links to the stories, too, but I honestly don’t think that anyone who posted it was doing so in order to make any sort of explicitly hateful point. Or at least that wasn’t their intention. What is it that you think prompts people to try to share this? Do you think it comes more from like a sort of innocent, optimistic sort of place? Or that more people have kind of a political agenda if they post it?
Greg:
It feels like a way of people absolving themselves from having to work in order to make our country a place of equal footing for all races. Kind of like, well, we suffered and we got through it So you need to do it too. The same people that say that the Irish were slaves of the same people that say, well, I wasn’t your slave master. Yeah, it may have been my great great great great grandfather, but it was your great great grandfather who was a slave. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t you. But I don’t think that you can take centuries of like subjugation and marginalizing and tell somebody now dig out of that hole overnight. Like, that’s just silly. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Traci White:
It doesn’t make sense to me either, especially because I am one of those people whose ancestors owned enslaved people. Now that I recite for the record, but knowing this fact makes me feel even more strongly obligated to excavate my own biography as a Southerner and think about what sorts of invisible benefits have helped me get where I am in life. It doesn’t get much more privileged in America than being a descendant of a person who owned other human beings. Mine and Greg’s Irish ancestors didn’t own slaves, nor were they themselves slaves, and describing anyone who’s descended from immigrants who came from Ireland in the 19th century during the Great Hunger is enjoying privilege may seem far-fetched, but at least they had a more honest shot at prosperity than the children of chattel slavery.
Greg:
I mean, as being of Irish descent, if I had been coming to America in the 1840s, when my ancestors came life would have been hard and it would have sucked. But since then, I’ve had a century and a half of, you know, my family being allowed to have jobs. My family being allowed to save money. My family being allowed a voice in public office and voting. My parents and great grandparents and so on and so forth, being able to pass on these things to the next generation, which eventually got to me, and these are all things that people who currently in America are being marginalized do not have those luxuries.
Traci White:
And there is unquestionably plenty for marginalized people in America to be worried about at the moment. Police brutality. Travel bans. Raids by immigration enforcement. The wavering legal status of children brought to America illegally. The list sadly goes on. And although it may seem counterintuitive at a time like this, one thing that I do admire about America is that we at least acknowledge these faults in a relatively open way, even if we’re not doing nearly enough to actually make amends for them.
Greg:
We don’t have any problem airing our dirty laundry and, but the problem I have, though, is when people stand in their front yard and air their dirty laundry proudly like hey man, that’s gross. Stop doing that!
Traci White:
It’s dirty laundry. Go to wash it!
Greg:
And apologize for it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, what I find really interesting about this meme is it’s so aggressively indifferent to truth, like it would be totally possible to make quite a sophisticated, like revisionist history that, you know, uses real facts to kind of paint Irish people as super oppressed and so on. Because, of course, they were.
Tim McInerney:
Mm, sure.
Naomi O’Leary:
And maybe like a clever sophist could then imply that it gives modern day descendants of Irish people in the United States some sort of moral pass to avoid confronting the continuing oppression of black people in the U.S. But I mean, that person would be wrong, but it would be possible for an intellectually dishonest person to make an argument like that. But the weird thing is that these means that they don’t even have a glancing relation to the truth.
Tim McInerney:
No, these are really, these are really hamfisted. This seems like you say, they use photographs that are of an entirely unrelated to historical moments, like photographs from the 1950s sometimes you see on the memes. And like the figures they use, of course, are complete inventions, like we said earlier. You know, there’s one you showed me that was a decree issued by King James II in 1625 but he wasn’t even born yet so you know that that decree doesn’t exist. You know, things like that.
Naomi O’Leary:
You know it kind of strikes me that maybe we’re even missing the point by correcting them, like kind of using the wrong register. It’s sort of like fact- checking someone’s hallucinogenic ravings about like the meaning of the universe. Like it’s sort of like the truth isn’t the point with these memes. They’re almost they’re almost more like art.
Tim McInerney:
Oh, God. That’s a shocking indictment of the modern-day relationship with truth. But, yeah. Okay, like, how do, you know that is the question, how do we respond to these memes?
Naomi O’Leary:
I wish we had the answer to this. I do think it’s a major challenge of our time, but I mean, maybe better stories, I would say? Like that there are good stories to be told. Like partly the really annoying aggravating thing about this is like, there is no need to invent terrible episodes in Irish history. Like, you know, there are plenty that you could pick from if you wanted. Like there’s really no need to invent bullshit ones to undermine black people.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. I know like one of the reasons why those indentured servants have been forgotten about in history is that it’s just another tragedy in a train of horrific tragedies that have beset the Irish home and abroad. But it’s also, of course, really important to remember, as Kate Brennan and Matthew Riley discuss with me, that Irish people were also complicit in the slavery that was happening in the Caribbean at that time. You know, a lot of those Irish in the Caribbean weren’t indentured servants, they were planters themselves. And not all the Irish were Irish Catholics either. There was a lot of Anglo-Irish and Northern Irish Presbyterians who were there as well. So, you know, like this is not a simple issue. It’s a really good idea with all this to check out the work of the historian Liam Hogan. You know, he’s like kind of at the forefront of battling this meme and the prolificacy of bogus articles on this theme. He’s been really tirelessly working away, and he’s compiled a ton of online resources, which are really, really good.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And he’s a great guy to follow on Twitter. So, if you are on Twitter, he’s @Limerick1914. That’s also his Medium handle. And he’s basically painstakingly tried to highlight the truth of it and also that Irish people were slave owners as well. Tim, you know one particularly unpleasant aspect to this is this ridiculous element of competitiveness. Like it’s a competition for whose ancestors were the most perfect victims of history.
Tim McInerney:
I think they’re gonna be studying us, Naomi, in 50 years’ time about our relationship with victimhood. Yeah, it’s totally ridiculous, obviously.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. If there’s one thing I would urge people is like not to be seduced by history that you find flattering to you or that makes you feel good or justified somehow. Like it’s much more interesting to find out the truth. The real messy stuff is far more fascinating.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. And that touches on loads of topics that will cover in future episodes, in particular the relationship between Irish people and the Empire because, of course, not only were Irish people victims of Empire, they also participated quite a bit in it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, I can’t wait to get into that one.
Tim McInerney:
Okay, well, we better halt up there, Naomi. That’s all we have time for today, guys.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes. And do remember to like the podcast. Share it. Rate it. Subscribe online. Tell a friend, because you know, this is how we can grow.
Tim McInerney:
And remember, if you would like to sponsor us, there is a link on our website where you can drop us a few quid if you feel like it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, that would be awesome, seriously would help with my phone bill, actually, after talking to Azie over in America.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly. Right. Okay, so join us next time, guys. Bye, bye.
Naomi O’Leary:
Thanks so much for being with us.