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MARY O'ROURKE

Some weeks ago, Insider wrote an article championing the positives of life in Ireland today, and while he thinks it is correct to have an optimistic outlook on life in general, perhaps sometimes we can let optimism cloud certain material realities.

Homelessness and housing charity Galway Simon Community launched its 2020 Annual Report revealing that the organisation supported 646 local households last year, a total of 1,216 individuals, through their Homelessness Prevention and Housing Services.

One of the reasons for the success of Mr Tuke’s Fund, which sponsored emigrants to America and Canada in the 1880s, was that as far as possible Tuke personally interviewed those wishing to go. He insisted that only families with at least one member capable of hard, physical work could participate. Proper clothes and money were provided to start their new life, and arrangements made in advance where they would stay and find work.

The 309 Connemara emigrants, selected by their local clergy as suitable for a new life in America, arrived at Boston June 14 1880, 11 days after departure from Galway Bay on the SS Austrian, an Allen Line ship. The settling of ‘The Connemaras’, as they became known, was a new venture prompted by a Liverpool priest, Fr Patrick Nugent renowned for his ‘philantropic and truly patriotic exertions to alleviate the social conditions of his fellow countrymen in England’; and Archbishop John Ireland, of St Paul, Minnesota, who was already settling thousands of Irish Catholics who were trapped in the ghettoes of New York and elsewhere, on rich prairie lands.

Imagine if Iran, the Peoples’ Republic of China, and Russia suddenly announced a military pact to counter Boris Johnson which would involve the building of 12 nuclear submarines, with the contract for building said submarines being awarded to the smallest of the three, Iran.

Although assisted emigration was frowned upon by some bishops and by the Land League leaders Michael Davitt and Charles S Parnell, there were some assisted schemes that were carefully planned, and in many cases worked well. The schemes that worked best were those which helped Irish families to avoid settlement in the great eastern cities of America where large numbers were caught in huge, stinking slums where it could take a generation or two to escape from.

In the 1860s, 20 years after Charles Dickens expressed his disgust at the living conditions in the vastly over-crowded tenements of New York’s ‘Five Points’, in Lr East Side, the situation simply got worse.

When Charles Dickens first visited the United States in January 1842, the popularity of his books was such that he was mobbed by adoring crowds, feted and dined as the major celebrity that he undoubtedly was, and was guest of honour at a famous Valentine’s Ball in New York attended by 3,000 of the city’s great and good.