Irish Australian

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Irish Australian is the second largest ethnic group in Australia, numbering 1,919,727 or 9.0 percent of respondents in the 2001 Census.

The census recorded 72,050 Ireland-born in Australia — 50,320 born in the south and 21,730 born in north.

According to the Department of Immigration, around 40,000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867 - many for political activity, including those who had participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the 1803 Rising of Robert Emmet and the 1848 skirmishes in the midst of the Famine. Once in Australia, many of these prisoners continued to plan escapes from British military custody — for example, the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion, and continual tension on Norfolk Island in the same year also led to an Irish revolt. Both risings were soon crushed. In these decades, the Irish language was the main language of Irish prisoners, and many Irish were flogged or killed by fellow convicts for speaking what was seen as a conspiratorial tongue [1]. As late as the 1860s, Fenian prisoners were being transported, particularly to Western Australia where the Catalpa rescue of Irish radicals off Rockingham was a memorable episode.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish Australians — particularly but not exclusively Catholics — were treated with suspicion in a sectarian atmosphere. The life story of Ned Kelly is often viewed romantically as the sort of treatment Irish Catholics in Australia could expect: in reality, however, most of the Irish were urban workers who experienced less official discrimination in Australia than they had at home in Ireland, and many Irish Australians — Catholic and Protestant — rose to positions of wealth and power in the colonial hierarchy. Many Irish Protestants, for example, entered the judiciary and politics, while in Ned Kelly's time 80 per cent of the Victorian police were Irish-born, and half of those had served in the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Irish settler in Australia — both voluntary and forced — was crucial to the survival and prosperity of the early colonies both demographically and economically. 300,000 Irish free settlers arrived between 1840 and 1914. By 1871, the Irish were a quarter of all overseas-born.

The number of Ireland-born in Australia peaked in 1891, when the colonial Census accounted for 228,232. A decade later the number of Ireland-born had dropped to 184,035. Dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1922 did not diminish arrivals from Ireland as Irish people were still British subjects. Though this changed after the Second World War, migration from the south of Ireland did not, as those born in Ireland before 1949 remained British subjects eligible for assisted passage. Only during the 1960s did migration from the south of Ireland reduce significantly. By 2002, around one thousand persons born in Ireland — north and south — were migrating permanently to Australia each year.

According to the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs White Paper on Foreign Policy, there were 213,000 Irish citizens in Australia in 1997, nearly three times the number of Irish-born. Most Irish Australians, however, do not have Irish citizenship and define their status in terms of self-perception, affection for Ireland and an attachment to Irish culture — for example, the Irish language.

In December 2001, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs estimated that there were 10,000 Australian citizens resident in the Republic of Ireland. It is not clear what proportion of this number are returned emigrants with Australian citizenship and their Irish Australian children, and what number is simply other Australians in Ireland for business or other reasons — though there are an estimated 130,000 visiting Australians in the country, meaning Ireland is second only to Britain as a destination for Australians travelling overseas.

According to census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004, Irish Australians are, by religion, 46.2% Roman Catholic, 15.3% Anglican, 13.5% other Christian denomination, 3.6% other religions, and 21.5% as "No Religion".

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