Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society - Essay Example The arrival of the large mass of Irish immigrants belonging to lower social classes and carrying no educational values, but only the desire to survive, made it difficult for both sides to coexist and found the basis of a new society. The immigrants brought with them the religious and ideological conflict between Catholics and Protestants and supplemented in this way a problem that haunted British history from early times. As Tom Devine discusses in his paper there is a major crisis that started with the first wave of immigrants who came from area belonging to what is nowadays the Republic of Ireland and who were mostly Catholics. In such conditions, generated by what should be interpreted as the fled from famine and not immigration per se, the identity of the Irish immigrants transformed itself in a very spectacular way. Their values that were founded on religious beliefs represented an impediment in the process of assimilation that was supposed to take place between the Scottish society and its values and the newly arrived. The differences between the Irish and the Scottish are not to be analyzed only in terms of religion, but also from a social perspective; the nineteenth century meant for Scotland industrialization, new means of work and production that were not present in the rural Ireland. Lack of systematization of work generated not only the difficulties related to food in Ireland, but it triggered problems such unemployment and lack of education and working skills. After the first wave of immigrants, in the years following 1800, the Irish who came to Scotland carried with them a different aspect of Irish identity and, as Tom Devine points out, the interaction with the Scots was starting to open new paths, and the relationship between the two waves of immigration unveiled the fact that there were significant differences of mentality between them and that in the first decades there has been an agrarian improvement in Ireland and that Protestants developed a different intellect and thus were able to cope better with the new social environment. Comparing the two movements, the first one, the Catholics, were driven to Scotland by famine, these people who formed in Ireland a crafting society changed their lives in a significant way, leaving behind their rural homelands and throwing them in the middle of a society that they could not cope with because they lacked industrial skills. However, their identity was not shattered immediately because of the pride they took as Catholics, without realizing that to be an Irish immigrant is not all about expressing a religious statement. The stubbornness and will to survive shaped both English and Irish identities and the experience generated even by these uneducated and ill people imposed new values in the British history. Nevertheless, their desire to permanently reinforce their beliefs and also to create the necessary institutions devoted to its practice helped them surpass their minimal organizational status and rise in time to that of the more evolved Scottish society. The Protestant Irish belonging to the second wave provided a change for the Scottish society and Irish