LIVERPOOL. During a recent visit there, my companion asked a taxi driver the way to the Merseyside Maritime Museum, in the Albert Docks. The man raised his arm to point, changed his mind, and pulled open the door of his car.
"Hop in luv, I'll give you a lift".
This free ride from a taxi driver was a personal first.
"Where are you from, luv?" So my companion was asked, by taxi drivers, barmen, pedestrians on the street, curators in galleries. "Irish!" they'd repeat, upon being answered (the phonetic for an authentic Scouser saying `Irish' is beyond me). "My grandmother was Irish".
We had travelled over to Liverpool to see some of the events bin the Irish Festival, most of which were based in the Irish Centre in Mountpleasant, a former gentleman's eating club a few hundred yards from Liverpool's circular, modern Catholic cathedral.
Irish Emigrants
When the Irish were flooding to Liverpool during the Famine, the great and good of Liverpool were dining in the Mountpleasant club, and the sick and starving were queuing outside the workhouse, then situated on the site of the Catholic cathedral.
Edward Rushton, magistrate described the scene in Liverpool in 1847: "Between the 13th day of January and the 13th day of December 1847 296,231 persons landed in this port from Ireland; of this vast number, about 130,000 emigrated to the United States some 50,000 were passengers on business and the remainder were paupers, half naked, starving... and immediately on landing, becoming supplicants for parochial relief".
Liam Greenslade, formerly of the Institute of Irish Studies University of Liverpool, and one of the main organisers of the Irish Festival, says that in 1841, one seventh of the 286,000 people living in Liverpool were Irish born. By 1851, one quarter of the 376,000 inhabitants were Irish born.
In the Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a permanent exhibition on the central role the Liverpool dock played in emigration from Europe to the United States, between 1830 and the second World War.
European Trails
Lights on maps show you trails coming from Russia, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean countries, all converging on Liverpool and going from there across the Atlantic to America. Eighty per cent of all European emigrants for the US, passed through Liverpool.
Lights converge on Liverpool from Irish ports also.
But enough of Ireland and the Famine and emigration for the moment. What made Liverpool the great port it was, and led to the building of the great mercantile mansions that dot the city's waterfront, was not the Atlantic passage of Europe's poor and hopeful. No. It was the trip across the "Middle Passage" of Africa's least fortunate. On the floor below the permanent exhibition on emigration, in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, is the permanent exhibition on slavery.
All through the 18th century ships sailed from Liverpool loaded with British manufactured goods - beads, mirrors, guns - and dropped anchor off the West Coast of Africa. Here the captains traded the goods, for men, women and children, Africans taken captive by other Africans, before setting off on their packed vessels towards the Americas.
Once landed, in the Caribbean or the Atlantic ports of South America, they sold those slaves who had survived, and with the money bought goods produced by slave labour on the plantations there. Sugar, rum, coffee, mahogany, goods consumed by the merchants back in Liverpool who were growing rich on the profitable, and horrific, triangular trade. Britain abolished slavery in 1807.
Cultural renaissance
The honesty with which Liverpool is facing up to its history is part of a cultural renaissance currently taking place in there. Community arts, celebrations of ethnicity, museums examining different aspects of Liverpool's history, are all part of a movement taking an interest in the past, and facing the future with determination.
In the Blackie Galley, situated in the Renshaw Street area beside Liverpool's Chinatown, reputedly the oldest in Europe, two Dublin artists had an installation as part of the Irish Festival. Called The Black Room, the installation was about the Famine, and it was the first time the Blackie, which deals with Liverpool's "ethnic" groups, had been involved with a specifically Irish project.
Few people there knew about the Famine. The two artists, Felicity Clear and Clea Van Der Grijn, explained to those who came along what had happened in Ireland 150 years ago, and the significance of the Famine to Liverpool. Black people, Chinese, white English, Liverpool Irish, native Irish, all standing around talking about roots, movement, the past. Liverpool seemed the right place to be having such conversation.
Clea Van Der Grijn, by the way, is from Dun Laoghaire.