The Irish in the West of Scotland, 1797-1848

The prevailing historical view of the Catholic Irish in the first half of nineteenth-century Scotland is that they were despised by native workers because of their religion and because most were employed as strike-breakers or low-wage labour. As a result of this hostility, the Catholic immigrants were viewed as a separate isolated community, concerned mainly with Irish and Catholic issues and unable or unwilling to participate in trade unions, strikes and radical reform movements. The Protestant