Ireland and Slavery: Framing Irish Complicity in the Slave Trade

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In the article that follows I want to turn to a related question, and one that has drawn attention as controversy over the ‘Irish slaves’ myth has raged on social media: Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. On 12 June the Irish Times published an article penned by Ronan McGreevy under the headline ‘Many Irish were implicated in the slave trade and the legacy lives on’ [since altered: the online version is now headed ‘Links to slave trade evident across Ireland’]. McGreevy’s piece reiterates some of the same points made in a similar article that appeared in the (London) Sunday Times several years earlier, quoting independent historian Liam Hogan and citing the database compiled by researchers at the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London. Some of this has since made its way into social media, including a post by Hogan himself on Medium and a widely-shared blog from Waterford entitled “Tainted by the Stain of Original Sin: Irish Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade”.

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