160,000 Irish unlawfully convicted by Britain and sent to Australia from 1791 to 1867

160,000 Irish unlawfully convicted by Britain and sent to Australia from 1791 to 1867 

The British Government now plans to repeat that unjust policy to transport asylum seekers and refugees to Africa. 

As they did it before to the Irish. 

From 1791 to 1867 a period of 76 years the British convicted and transported a staggering 160,000 Irish men and women as slave labor to populate Australia. While Britain convicted the Irish for stealing a loaf of bread the British stole a whole continent from the aboriginal people. That was no small crime. They stole Ireland and ruled it for 700 years without mercy or justice. Today the legacy is a divided nation. It appears racism continues today in Australia as in Britain. 

The British conquered Ireland and occupied the Island nation for 700 years. Despite many uprisings against the occupying British forces, the Irish did not succeed until 1922 when Independence from England was won after a bloody insurrection and fight for freedom.

In 1922, after the Irish War of Independence most of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom to become the independent Irish Free State but under the Anglo-Irish Treaty the six northeastern counties, known as Northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom, creating the partition of Ireland.

The penal system in the 18^th century was cruel, arbitrary, unjust, and inhuman. The British “Transported” many Irish, men and women convicted, without much evidence for petty misdemeanors or non-serious crimes. They were taken away from their friends and family, wives and children, and sent into servitude in Faraway Australia on the other side of the world for life without any chance of return. This is what Britain is doing to asylum seekers and refugees at present, sending them to Rwanda in Africa.

This was at the request of the British colonial rulers in Australia where there was an acute shortage of manpower and women for marriage by the colonials. The Irish were given a long sentence to years of labor without pay, like slavery in Australia a newly conquered continent, where the Aboriginal indigenous people were denied rights.

The Irish were also without rights and they served a sentence working for a British land owner, they had to be obedient without fault or mistakes otherwise they would get another sentence to a number of years more in servitude without pay. 

In 1786 the Irish Parliament, following the lead of the English Parliament, passed a law providing for ‘the more expeditious and effectual transportation of felons … to some of His Majesty’s plantations or settlements in America, or to some other place or places not in Europe’.

The first convict transport to sail directly from Ireland to Sydney was the Queen, which in 1791 carried 148 convicts to Sydney. Between 1791 and 1867 about 40,000 Irish convicts were sent to the eastern Australian colonies. Roughly a quarter of them were women. The bulk of those transported had been convicted of larceny. Less common offenses were a forgery, embezzlement, fraud, highway robbery, assault, housebreaking, and arson. About 600 of the transported convicts were political prisoners. The largest group arrived in New South Wales in 1798-1806, following the United Irishmen uprisings against British rule.

Many were given penal transportation for seven years, fourteen years, or even life, despite the crimes that they had committed being generally low-grade like petty theft and taking a loaf of bread for their starving children. By far the most common crime that led to transportation was petty theft or larceny493 convict ships sailed to Australia. While it’s difficult to generalize, given that a staggering 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia in total, certain offenses appeared more frequently than others among our convict forebears. Here are 10 common crimes that entailed the sentence of transportation larceny could include pick-pocketing, receiving stolen goods, cutting false coins, stealing clothes from washing lines, stealing from a dwelling (as it was sometimes known) carrying the death penalty associated with major upheavals such as the potato famine. Remarkably, stealing a sheep carried the death penalty. Soldiers could be transported for desertion, insubordination, and mutiny.

It’s estimated that roughly 20% of female convicts in total were prostitutes (and only 13% of Irish female convicts). The exact number is difficult to determine, as the term was widely applied to women who were in de facto (or ‘cohabitating’) relationships. At roughly 4,000 in total, political protestors make up a small, yet important, category among the convict population.

The number of convicts transported for crimes of violence was fewer than 5%.  Transportation was often a punishment given to people found guilty of theft – 80 percent of transported convicts were guilty of theft. Most were repeat offenders. Transportation was also a punishment given to protesters. Some of the Luddites, Rebecca Rioters, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported

Biographical / Historical

The leaders of the brief Young Ireland uprising of 1848 were convicted and sent to Van Diemen’s Land. In 1867 62 Fenians (members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood) were convicted of treason-felony and mutinous conduct and were transported to Western Australia. They sailed on the Hougoumont, the last convict transport to come to Australia.

The Irish Government was headed by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who was based in Dublin Castle, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, who was a member of the British Cabinet. Although the Irish Parliament was abolished by the Acts of Union in 1800, the administration of government in Ireland did not change greatly after 1800. The Chief Secretary’s Office, which was headed by an under-secretary, dealt with the clerks of courts throughout Ireland and organized the transport of convicts to port towns, their confinement while they were awaiting transportation, and the chartering of convict transports. It also corresponded with the Home Office in London on general matters relating to transportation. Petitions from convicts, their families, and friends were usually addressed o the Lord Lieutenant and the correspondence was handled by the Convict Department within the Chief Secretary’s Office. The name of the office was changed to the Government Prisons Office in 1850.

Most of the early records of Irish transportation were held in the Public Record Office of Ireland and were destroyed when the Four Courts in Dublin were bombarded in 1922. Other records which survived were held in the State Paper Office in Dublin Castle. The State Paper Office and the Public Record Office merged to form the National Archives of Ireland in 1988. In 1991 it moved to its current address, Bishop Street, Dublin DO8 DF85.

Reference: Rena Lohan. Sources in the National Archives for research into the transportation of Irish convicts to Australia (1791-1853), Journal of the Irish Society for Archives, spring 1996.