Gaelic Ireland was kidnapped by Irish pirates, transported to Ireland, and sold as a slave. After the
Fall of the Western Roman Empire destabilised Britain in the early 5th century, Irish raiders kidnapped and enslaved people from across the
Irish Sea up until the 7th century.
Saint Patrick was kidnapped and brought to Ireland around this time. In the
Brehon Laws,
Senchus Mór [Shanahus More] and the
Book of Acaill [Ack'ill], a "daer fuidhir" ("servile inferior") was a name applied to all who did not belong to a clan, whether born in the clan territory or not. This was the lowest of the three classes of the non-free people. This class also was sub-divided into saer and daer, the daer fuidhirs being the class most closely resembling slaves. Even this lowest condition was not utterly hopeless; promotion was possible, and in constant operation. Therefore all families did not remain permanently in this kind of servitude but had the possibility of gradually rising from a lower to a higher degree according to a certain scale of progress, unless they committed some crime which would arrest that progress and cast them down again further. Slaves could be obtained through war, purchase and marriage to outsiders. The inheritability of slavery depends on the precise original relationship, while fuidher have been seen as a transitional status, after three generations serving the same lord, their children fell under the category senchléithe, akin to a semi hereditary serf status, while the law texts also provide details of downward mobility as well.
Viking period From the 9th to the 12th century Viking/Norse-Gael
Dublin in particular was a major slave trading centre which led to an increase in slavery. In 870,
Vikings, most likely led by
Olaf the White and
Ivar the Boneless, besieged and captured the stronghold of
Dumbarton Castle (
Alt Clut), the capital of the
Kingdom of Strathclyde in Scotland, and the next year took most of the site's inhabitants to the Dublin
slave markets. as well as sending Irish slaves as far away as
Iceland, where Gaels formed 40% of the founding population, and
Anatolia. In 875, Irish slaves in Iceland launched Europe's largest
slave rebellion since the end of the Roman Empire, when
Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson's slaves killed him and fled to
Vestmannaeyjar. Almost all recorded
slave raids in this period took place in
Leinster and southeast
Ulster; while there was almost certainly similar activity in the south and west, only one raid from the
Hebrides on the
Aran Islands is recorded. Slavery became more prevalent throughout Ireland in the 11th century as port cities built up by Vikings flourished, with Dublin becoming the biggest slave market in
Western Europe. The 1171 Council of Armagh freed all Englishmen and women who were enslaved in Ireland, where contemporary sources detail that the English sold their children as slaves, as stated in the Decree of the Council of Armagh: "For the English people hitherto throughout the whole of their kingdom to the common injury of their people, had become accustomed to selling their sons and relatives in Ireland, to expose their children for sale as slaves, rather than suffer any need or want.".
Barbary slave trade Baltimore, County Cork, was depopulated in 1631 in the
Sack of Baltimore, a raid by
Barbary pirates from either
Ottoman Algeria or
Salé (
Morocco). Between 100 and 237 people were abducted and sold into the
Barbary slave trade, of whom only two or three ever saw Ireland again. Librarian Liam Hogan has described how Irish merchants profited from the trade, mostly indirectly as
provisioners. In more direct involvement for example, William Ronan worked for the
Royal African Company and rose to become chairman of the committee of merchants at
Cape Coast Castle on the
Gold Coast (modern
Ghana), running one of the world's largest slave markets between 1687 and 1697.
Antoine Walsh, a Frenchman of Irish descent and prominent
Jacobite based in
Nantes, used his wealth generated from the slave trade to finance the
Jacobite rising of 1745.
Benjamin McMahon worked for eighteen years as an overseer on Jamaican plantations, later becoming an abolitionist and writing about his experiences.
Tralee-born Irishman David Tuohy emigrated to
Liverpool and became a captain on
slave ships before settling down in the city to manage his business activities, which included the slave trade.
Felix Doran (1708–1776) was an Irish Catholic, born in Ireland and moved to
Liverpool where he became very wealthy from the slave trade, financing at least 69 slave voyages. Several Caribbean Islands have significant Irish communities descended from
indentured servants deported from Ireland by colonial
British authorities following the 15th & 16th century
Plantations of Ireland, with the like of
Montserrat once hosting large Anglo-Irish owned and run sugar plantations that were dependent on slave labour. Prominent US Civil Rights campaigner
Jesse Jackson acknowledges his descent from
“Scots-Irish” slave owners (i.e. colonial settlers from Britain who arrived in Ireland in the 17th century during the crown’s
Plantation of Ulster) plantation owner, in South Carolina. An Ulster-Scottish slave-owning great-great grandfather of US Senator
Mitch McConnell also came to the US from Ireland. McConnell brought up this family history during the
2020 United States presidential election campaign to liken himself to
Barack Obama. The UCL Legacies of British Slavery database identifies the Irish Slave owners, compensated by the British Government, on abolition of legal slavery, in the British Empire.
Modern day The US
Department of State criticised Ireland in 2018 for "not meeting the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking"; types of
modern slavery and
forced labour include
prostitution,
trawler fishing and domestic service. ==See also==