Priests, Publicans and the Irish Poor: Ethnic Enterprise and Migrant Networks in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

Part of the outreach mission of one of the earliest Catholic parishes in Irish Liverpool, the St Patrick's Society developed into one of the largest collecting societies in Victorian Britain, offering burial benefit to tens of thousands of poor Irish migrants beyond the reach of organised labour or industrial insurance. Growth soon led to scandal and litigation, revealing a number of fault lines within the migrant community. Catholic clergy withdrew in protest as publicans and other 'Micks on the make' came to the fore, secular ethnic culture brokers who accentuated the 'Irishness' of the Society, running it as a machine which looked less to the respectability (or religion) of the members than to their assurance of an adequately funded 'wake'. It was this 'Irish' image, as much as the alleged financial irregularities, which brought the Society into disrepute (and ruin), a judgement yet to be challenged by historians. The study examines this mutualist network and explains the rise and fall of an important, but until this point, unexamined feature of the communal life of the Irish neighbourhoods of Liverpool.