IN THE wake of Britain's decision in June to compensate nationalist veterans its forces tortured in Kenya in the 1950s, Caribbean states are to seek reparations from former European colonial powers "for native genocide and slavery" in the words of Caricom, the Caribbean's version of the EU. (The elderly ex-Mau Mau fighters won a landmark moral if not financial victory - the settlement was £13.9 million, to be shared among more than 5,000 survivors who suffered brutalities including castration at the hands of British soldiers and colonial police.) Last week the London law firm that represented the Kenyans said it had been approached by Caricom "to consider a legal challenge to seek compensation from three European nations for what they claim is the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade". Ireland is not one of the three 'nations' to be sued - they are Britain, France and The Netherlands, all of which had slave colonies in the Caribbean (just as all continue to administer 'overseas territories' there). But the idea that it could be is not as altogether outlandish as it might at first seem. Ireland has a near 400-year association with the Caribbean, particularly the islands of Barbados and Montserrat but also other islands - St Kitts, Jamaica, Antigua, Nevis, Bermuda. And despite our tendency to see ourselves historically as the underdog rather than the overlord, it hasn't always been a good one. Thousands left Ireland as indentured servants during the 17th century to work on tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, many having been dispossessed of their land as Catholics; tens of thousands more were forcibly transported as slaves after being taken prisoner during and following Cromwell's campaigns. "Concerning young women - although we must use force in taking them, it will be of great advantage to have such number of them as you shall think fit to make use upon this account," Cromwell wrote to his son Henry, himself a military commander in Ireland, in reference to procuring workers for the Commonwealth's colonies in the West Indies. He further mused: "If you should think it fit to send 1,500 or 2,000 young boys of 12 or 14 years of age to the place aforementioned, who knows, but it may be a means to make them Christians?"
So far, so underdog. Last week RTE Radio One ("Do you remember RTE Radio One?" people might well muse in the not-too-distant future) broadcast a documentary about the Irish in Montserrat, an island named by Columbus after the Monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona. Sometimes known as the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean, it has place names including Kinsale and Cork's Hill and a white woman in a green dress holding a harp on its flag.
Nonetheless, programme maker Joe Kearney explored, in a very listenable-to way, why Irish people's tendency to automatically embrace the romantic notion that black Montserratians with blue eyes and names such as Lynch and Sweeney and who celebrate St Patrick's day are our long lost cousins might be a tad naive. After tobacco came sugar, the production of which, it being a much more labour-intensive crop, resulted in an explosion of the African slave trade in the Caribbean. At that stage Irish people owned plantations and even smallholders owned slaves, according to one historian Kearney spoke to. "Were [Irish slave masters] more benign than others?" he asked. Meaning, did they do less raping, whipping, hanging and cutting off of ears than, say, English, French or Dutch slave owners? Funny - all you Irish ask that, he was told. But how could they have been benign? "Slavery is slavery," Professor Sir Howard Fergus said. "Violence was endemic because people wanted to be free and whites wanted to be protected." When you ceased to be fit to work from dawn til sundown, former MP Chedmond Browne told Kearney, "they took you out and drowned you".
So much for arra, musha, sure t'was only ourselves. Even the Paddy's day link is a red herring. On that day Montserratians are in fact remembering the day in 1768 - so chosen because they thought their owners would likely be drunk - when slaves staged a revolt.
It failed; its leader was decapitated and his head hung from a tree. After the Kenya court case, Harvard colonialism-in-Africa historian Caroline Elkins said Britain's admission of its abuses "should correct the view the British empire was more benign than those of other European powers". Arra, musha indeed.