A wee snippet from the Scottish learning and teaching guide.....
Religious divisions and tensions
Their lowly occupational status and their willingness to work for less than the going rate did not endear Irish Catholics to the Scottish working class. Indeed, their religion was a factor which gave rise to discrimination from all sections of Scottish society. Since the Reformation, Scotland had been a Protestant country and Catholicism was largely anathema. Attacks on the Irish became commonplace in newspapers, pulpits and on the streets.
As late as 1923, the Church of Scotland could still publish a pamphlet entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality’. The Irish were seen as drunken, idle, uncivilised and undermining the moral fibre of Scottish society. They were also seen as carriers of disease. Typhus, for example, was known as ‘Irish fever’.
Although the accusations had some force, they had nothing to do with ethnicity and more to do with poverty. The incidence of fever among the Irish was due to their unsanitary housing. It was also because many of the immigrants who arrived fleeing the famine were so weak that their resistance to disease was low. The Irish-born in Dundee constituted 20% of all burials in 1848, whereas seven years earlier they had only constituted 5%
Now for a wee contrast...........??
The same charge could not be levelled at the Protestant Irish. As Catholic Irish immigrants declined in number in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Protestant Irish took up the slack. Most of these new immigrants came from the most Orange counties of the north, such as Armagh. There had been historic links of an economic and religious kind between the west of Scotland and Ulster.
Even the Church of Scotland recognised that in their 1923 attack on the Catholic Irish ‘[no complaint can be made about] the presence of an Orange population in Scotland. They are of the same race as ourselves and of the same Faith, and are readily assimilated to the Scottish race’. Thus, the Protestant Irish faced nothing like the level of discrimination endured by the Catholic Irish.
But it had nothing to do with them or religion, it was all the fault of those Irish catholic basturts who spurned the welcome from the indigenous populace.



. F@nny.
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