Irish Exodus and Arrival
Ireland to Boston
In the 1800s all of Ireland was still under British rule. British oligarchs owned most of the land and the majority of the Irish worked as tenant farmers on this land, with potatoes being their staple crop. They relied so heavily on the potato that when a potato blight caused three successive bad season from 1846-1849 the nation was thrown into famine. While their british landlords simply shifted their investments into poultry and beef, which they could export at profit, the poor Irish were left to starve. The resulting Potato Famine caused a mass exodus of Irish emigrants to the now thriving United States of America who had shed british rule 60 years earlier.
Immigrants made their way to cities across the eastern US, most notably, Boston. These immigrants had little professional skill aside from farming so most had to take low paying factory jobs and the Irish neighborhoods of the city, such as East Boston quickly devolved into slums. The US at the time was still very much a Protestant
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country while the Irish Immigrants were almost entirely Catholic. These religious differences compounded with the socio-economic differences created rampant discrimination against Irish. This discrimination evolved from common use of racial slurs (“micks” and “paddys or bridgets”) and stereotypes of alcoholism (“Don’t get your Irish up”) into full anti-irish mobs.
In addition to discrimination and poverty the terrible conditions in the East end slums led to massive cholera outbreaks. This was the world that the first American Kennedys, Patrick and Bridget Kennedy, immigrated to in 1849. They had five children including Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy, their youngest. P. J. Kennedy was born in 1858 and in the same year was made the only surviving male heir after two successive cholera outbreaks killed his two-year old brother and father. Despite poverty, discrimination, and disease P. J. Kennedy still managed to go on and birth one of the most powerful and lasting dynasties Eastern Massachusetts has ever seen.
