Bishop John Ireland Emigration Scheme from Connemara to Minnesota.

While the Great Famine had a major impact on Connemara, in the decades that followed the population increased and the region retained many pre-famine features: early marriages, the subdivision of holdings and a heavy reliance on the potato as the main food source.  Between 1851 and 1871 the population of the Clifden Poor Law union increased by 4 per cent, while 69 per cent of the farms were under fifteen acres, regarded by most contemporaries as uneconomical.  In 1881 the parish of Carna had a population of 5,270 and 879 acres were under potatoes which meant each family existed on one acre for their food source.  Most families lived on a knife edge and supplemented their incomes through the manufacture of kelp and fishing.  In the 1860s and 1870s the potato crop failed on a number of occasions and relief had to be provided to feed the people.  The crisis of 1879-81, regarded as ‘The Forgotten Famine’, when the potato crop failed completely and earnings from the manufacture of kelp declined, brought the crisis to a head and intervention from the international community and the work of local clergymen such as Fr Patrick Greally of Carna and Dean Patrick McManus of Clifden saved the people.  By the Spring of 1880 over 80 per cent of the population of Connemara were being kept alive by relief provided by the Mansion House Relief Committee and the Duchess of Marlborough Relief Committee.  The severity of the crisis led to calls for long-term permanent solutions to the perennial crises that affected the Connemara region.  The Liverpool Irish Relief Committee was one of the first agencies to react to the famine crisis in Connemara and Fr James Nugent and Hugh L. Smyth were sent to the west of Ireland to report on the distress.  They spent twelve days visiting twenty-two locations in Galway and Mayo, consulting with local relief committee officials, clergymen, policemen, landlords, gentry, tenants and anyone who would inform them about the levels of distress in their areas.  They concluded that the distress was extreme in the more isolated areas where people were surviving on two meals a day, and, in some cases, one meal a day.  While calling for the provision of relief they also stated, ‘The foundation of any improvement in the condition of such a population lies in emigration, which would benefit those who left the country and those who remained …’.  Nugent was deeply involved with the Irish emigrant community in Liverpool and was a regular visitor to Connemara over the previous twenty years witnessing at first hand the position of the people.  He acknowledged that a dependency was developing among the poor of the region because of the regular crop failures.  He returned to Connemara with £7,760 that had been collected by the Liverpool Relief Committee for Distribution among the local relief committees and also wrote to Bishop John Ireland of St Paul, Minnesota and Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha, Nebraska, who were encouraging Catholic colonization to the newly opened prairie lands of the mid west, asking each to settle fifty families on their settlement programmes.  While O’Connor refused to bring destitute settlers to the region, John Ireland reluctantly agreed.  Nugent hoped the emigration would introduce a chain migration process from Connemara, with the emigrants providing the passage fares for friends and relations to join them in the future.  He also hoped that when the emigrants were established they would repay the cost of their travel.

Nugent’s proposal was controversial being opposed by the Land League, Parnell and the Home Rule Party, and even in Liverpool the Irish community was divided over the scheme.  However, Nugent was not deterred and held a number of fund raising meetings in the city.  The proposal had general support in Connemara because of the espousal of local clergymen, in particular Fr Greally, and the fact the Catholic clergy in Minnesota were involved strengthened Nugent’s position.  Funding was eventually procured from the Liverpool Relief Committee, the Duchess of Marlborough Relief Committee and the New York Herald Relief Fund.  Demand for places in Connemara was greater than the number of places available, and eventually 309 emigrants were selected by the local clergy and arrived in Galway on 11 June accompanied by their parish priests.  Fr Richard of Carna accompanied ten families, Fr Michael Millet of Killeen (Carraroe) had thirteen families and Fr John Stephens of Aughagower (Co. Mayo) had five families.  Prior to their departure on the SS Austrian they attended mass at the Pro-Cathedral of St Nicholas and were addressed by Nugent and Fr Dooley who urged them not to forget their country and to continue to speak the Irish language.  As most were Irish speakers with little or no English, this created its own difficulties in Minnesota as they were surrounded by English-speaking neighbours.

The voyage to Boston took days where they were met by Dillon O’Brien, Secretary of the Catholic Colonization Society of Minnesota, and they left for Chicago where the railway company provided free passage.  Bishop Ireland found employment in St Paul for ninety young men and women and it was hoped their wages would support their families over the coming winter.  A fund was established in St Paul by John Ireland towards helping the emigrants which averaged $200 per family and used to build a house, purchase livestock and agricultural equipment.  Each family was given a 160 acre farm at Graceville, Big Stone County in north-west Minnesota and assigned a host family to help with the transition.  Bishop Ireland promised to provide for them for the first year until they saved their first harvest.

Within weeks the families encountered difficulties: their neighbours resented the assistance they were given, there were allegations that the Connemara settlers were not prepared to provide for themselves, instead of working their farms they hired themselves out as labourers on neighbouring farms.  The emigrants also encountered the most severe winter weather that Minnesota had encountered in a generation and the Connemaras had not prepared their homes for this.  The emigrants were used to a close knit community bonds in Connemara and found it difficult cope with the isolation, living miles from their closest neighbours.  Life on the prairie was not a success and within a year Bishop Ireland was forced to bring most of the families back to St Paul where they settled in Drayton Bruff, more commonly known as the Connemara Patch.  Many of their descendents did prosper including John J. McDonagh, Mayor of St Paul between 1940 and 1948.  The Connemara settlers were brought from an extreme situation in the west of Ireland to a totally alien world in the mid west.  The emigrants themselves could not be blamed for their failure in Graceville, but rather it was never going to succeed given their background in Connemara.

Further Reading:

Bridget Connelly, Forgetting Ireland: Uncovering a Family’s Secret History

Borealis Books, St Paul, Minnesota, 2003).

Gerard Moran, “’In search of the promised land’: the Connemara colonization scheme to Minnesota, 1880” in Eire/Ireland, 31:3 & 4 (Fall and Winter, 1996).