Emigration /
Migration
The Famine is one of the great turning points of Irish history, not
least in Donegal. While the condition of the ordinary people of Donegal did improve after
the devastation of the Famine, it remained harsh. Despite religious emancipation and
decades of elementary education through the National Schools their lives, as documented in
the writings of people such as Patrick MacGill, ‘the Navvy Poet’ from Glenties,
Micí Mac Gabhainn, author of Rotha Mór an tsaoil known in English as The Hard road to
the Klondyke, and Aodh Ó Domhnaill, source of Scéal Hiúdaí Sheáinín were marked by
poverty and want.
Anne O'Dowd in her authoritative account "Seasonal migration to
the Lagan and Scotland" in Donegal: history & society / edited by William Nolan,
Liam Ronayne, Mairead Dunlevy. Dublin: Geography Publications, 1995 defines migration as
it occured in Donegal as 'the history of the temporary worker moving away from home in
order that he could afford to continue living there'.
The usual pattern was for young men and women to travel first to the
better land in the east of Donegal - the Lagan - or Tyrone, working as farm labourers or
as domestic servants. A key feature of this social phenomenon was the Hiring Fair. Hiring
fairs had taken place in England since at least the middle of the 14th century, and seem
to have been introduced to Ulster soon after the Plantation. The Hiring Fairs of
Letterkenny and Strabane were among the best known. Gaelic speaking children as young as 8
or 9 would line up in the Market Square in Letterkenny with farmers from the east of the
county poking them to test their strength and general health, and speaking about them in a
language most did not understand. A price would be agreed with their mothers and the
children would not see home for 6 months or more.
When they were older they then migrated to Scotland to work on farms
there, as far north as Aberdeen but more usually in the West of Scotland and the Lothians.
They usually lived in communal housing, the so called bothies, sending any spare cash home
to feed their families. They would return home when the season's work was done.
Increasingly, however, as in the case of MacGill, they stayed on to work in the thriving
industries of Clydeside, the engine of the British Empire, in navvying, shipbuilding and
in the other factories.
MacGill never forgot the conditions which first forced him to leave
Glenties: the locally powerful well-connected traders (known as gaimbíní or gombeen-men)
whose greed and vindictiveness kept small farmers and labourers in hock inspired much of
his writing, most notably Children of the Dead End: the autobiography of a Navvy,
published in 1914. The Rat Pit, a companion piece to that book which came out in the
following year, dealt with the life and harsh existence of Irish migrant labourers in the
West of Scotland. Anyone interested in the human story of migration and emigration should
read these books along with Micí Mac Gabhainn's Rotha Mór an tsaoil [The Hard road to
the Klondyke] and Aodh Ó Domhnaill's Scéal Hiúdaí Sheáinín.
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