Wearing the Green: a History of Nationalist Demonstrations among the Diaspora in Scotland

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was significant Irish-oriented cultural and political activity among the immigrant Irish Catholic community in west-central Scotland. Along with a plethora of Catholic religious and social bodies, Irish organisations were vibrant wherever large numbers of the Irish diaspora in Scotland settled: an estimated 100 000 in the years during and after the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, and even more in the latter nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries.¹ By the first decade of the 1900s, the Gaelic League had seventeen branches in the Glasgow district and over the course of the following years, numerous other branches in and around Lanarkshire, Paisley, Ayrshire, Dumbarton and several other areas of west-central Scotland.² This expansion of League activities was also significant in relation to the evolution of gaelic athletic clubs, the first one, Red Hugh O Neill’s, being founded in the east end of Glasgow in 1897. Almost one hundred such clubs have been founded during the course of the twentieth century.³