In Thrall To Sweetness

The Vikings. Sure, they might have been tough, but today they’re often just soft targets wearing silly helmets.

Look at slavery. These Norsemen (“North men”) are often credited with bringing the trade to Ireland but while it’s true that the capture and sale of “thralls” as they were known became widespread during the heyday of warriors like Olaf the White and Ivar the Boneless in the 9th century, helping the expansion of Norse-Gaels in Dublin, the native Irish were no strangers to the practice.

Indeed the greatest shamrocker of us all, St Patrick himself was taken captive in Wales at 16 by homegrown Dál Riata pirates, probably in the 6th century.

Shortly after the arrival of Strongbow and his Norman knights on our shores the Council of Armagh in 1171 freed all English men and women enslaved here, these Viking descendants putting an end to an organised trade which had established our capital as the largest market for human flesh in Europe.

In the centuries that followed Ireland’s ports were officially frozen out of the highly lucrative “triangular trade” underpinning African slavery to the Caribbean through a series of Navigation Acts over two centuries that enriched Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow at the expense of Dublin, Cork and Waterford. Ships filled with trade goods set sail for West Africa, where they were swapped for slaves, who were packed head-to-toe and taken to the West Indies (or Southern US ports) to be sold at auction, while merchant ships were then loaded up again with cotton, sugar and rum, before returning to Britain.
However Irishmen were still closely involved, making vast fortunes along the way.

“Dublin’s connections to the broader slave economy can be more clearly delineated, and they are more profound than we once thought,” explains Dr Ciaran O’Neill, Ussher Assistant Professor in History at TCD in the Sir John T Gilbert Commemorative Lecture in 2021.
“Irish traders were sanguine about which flag they traded under, and were often to be found operating under the protection of the French or Spanish empire.”

The establishment of the Bank of Ireland in 1783 opened new opportunities for many wealthy merchants in Ireland, particularly the La Touches, Huguenots who fled religious persecution in their native France, making a fortune in cloth manufacturing, and famously developing the area around St Stephen’s Green.
They were also keen enslavers.

Records show the two members of the La Touche family in receipt of close to £7,000 (€1.1 million today) in compensation for their 385 slaves in Jamaica following repeal in the 1830s, something largely overlooked in 2020 with the purchase of La Touche House at the IFSC for €84.3m, and theirs is but one chapter in the story of Irish support for and opposition to slavery.

The trade, when it came down to it was a simple matter of pounds, shillings and pence but behind much of it lay our sweet tooth and insatiable desire for a nice cuppa.

Just as the market for cocaine today leads to exploitation, murder and even enslavement the craving for cheap sugar, extracted from cane in a labour-intensive process on plantations in the Caribbean was a driving force behind the business.

The setup costs for such plantations so far from Britain were enormous and as the website of the Museum of Liverpool notes, on the island of St Kitts slavery and sugar guaranteed success.

“Sugar was a source of huge wealth that could quickly repay the initial outlay. In 1770 sugar, rum and molasses formed 92% of St Kitts’s exports and much of the island was devoted to the growth of cane.”

Sugar cane grew best in the wet, from June to November and ripened up in January to May. Planters staggered cultivation, and 30 enslaved Africans could plant two acres a day using hoes, with the ripe sugar cane cut by hand with machetes about 15 months later, loaded onto carts, and taken to the mills where slaves, many of them highly skilled, worked night and day there and in nearby boiling houses to process the crop while still fresh.

The resulting sugar looked nothing like the refined crystalline powder we’re familiar with today. During the Georgian era it was presented in a conical lump, wrapped in brown paper, and the housekeepers and housewives of Dublin typically purchased it in slices cut from this “sugar loaf” or in smaller, three-pound cones, using metal tongs to crack off small pieces to add to beverages or use in baking.

Coffee also played its part in slavery and remained a feature of life in Brazil, the leading source of the beans, even after the US Civil War. Originating in the East African territories of Ethiopia and Yemen coffee reached Europe in the 17th century, and coffeehouses – nicknamed “penny universities” for the wealth of knowledge patrons soak up for the price of a cuppa – became centres of business and intellectual debate, playing a key role in establishing the London Stock Exchange, insurers Lloyds of London, and the East India Company not to mention the Boston Tea Party and other key moments in the American Revolution.

Coffeehouses were equally popular around Ireland, and the Liberties was home to a number of the best Dublin had to offer, with newspapers and books made available for patrons to keep abreast of current events. Bookseller and newspaper publisher Richard Pue established Dick’s in the late 17th century in Carberry House on Dublin’s Skinner Row, then the narrowest point in the streets of Dublin before being widened and renamed Christchurch Place as we know it today.

Religion also played a part. Coffee, hot chocolate, and of course tea soon found favour in the homes of wealthy Protestant supporters of temperance as a substitute for beer during a time when drinking water filled with pollutants and bacteria was risky. Such products, invariably sweetened with sugar, were very expensive, which is why we still keep tea in metal caddies, a reminder of the original iron strongboxes with locks only accessible by the butler with a special key.

It’s estimated that at least 46,000 people in the UK owned slaves and inevitably some of these men, women and even children were found in Ireland, as newspapers from the time remind us.
“A black Servant Maid has eloped from her Mistress on Thursday the 11th,” announced The Dublin Journal dated 13-16 March, 1762. “We hope no Person will employ her as she is the Slave and Property of Mrs. Heyliger.”

“A Neat beautiful black Negro Girl, just brought from Carolina, aged 11 or 12 years, who understands and speaks good English; very fit to wait on a lady, to be disposed of…”
The Dublin Mercury, 11-13 Aug, 1768.
The capital’s newspapers carried several such reports, as did journals published in Belfast, and Cork.

In her book Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865 historian and Nini Rodgers says the Irish played a pivotal role in the trade.
“From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the Irish could be found at every level of white society in the Caribbean,” Rodgers reveals.

Among prominent supporters of such exploitation were Dubliners like the first governor of Carolina, James Moore, and his namesake James J Wright, who hailed from the Liberties.
A convert to Catholicism, Wright was born in Skinner’s Row in Christchurch and lived in the capital until the age of 14. “Don Santiago” as the coffee planter became known in Cuba, was heavily involved in the trade, directly shipping slaves on his ships Ana Maria and La Fanny.

Similarly the Delap family, prominent in both Donegal and Dublin, held vast sugar plantations in Antigua run at every level by Irishmen, helping Francis Delap to become one of the largest planters on that Caribbean island by the 1760s.

Many enslavers were religious, including some devout clergymen, who occasionally agonised over the morality of their brutal trade. If the negro had a soul treating them in this way was a mortal sin leading to hell, so it was reasoned they couldn’t have a soul because pious Christian merchants, who prospered by the will of God, surely couldn’t be damned. Moral contortionism is apparently not new.

Ireland features prominently in University College London’s British Slave Ownership database which lists 400 individuals with close connections to both this island and that economy during the 1830s. And that’s just the British records.

Dr Ciaran O’Neill points out in his 2021 lecture that Irish enslavers also are found in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish empires, and of course in the antebellum American South, a society built on impeccable good manners and the ruthless exploitation of the black man for profit.

O’Neill gives us examples like Dublin’s Anthony Patrick Walsh who held 38 slaves in Louisiana, and Edward Sparrow, born in the capital in 1810 to Samuel Sparrow, an Anglican member of the United Irishmen. By the outbreak of the US Civil War the Dubliner was one of the richest men in his newly-adopted country, worth an astonishing $1.2m, an 1860 record listing no less than 392 people he had enslaved to produce cotton on his estate. It’s telling that in the America of the 1930s Margaret Mitchell’s County Meath-born character Gerald O’Hara, (father to Scarlett in Gone With The Wind), a man whose fortune was built on gambling and slavery, would have been easily recognisable to readers and moviegoers alike.

Brothers Valentine and Malachy O’Connor, both prominent merchants in the mid-1700s, were closely involved with the Bank of Ireland, the Catholic Committee and the Catholic Convention as well of course as Caribbean slavery. The Dictionary of Irish Biography mentions that Valentine – a founder member of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce – held “ownership of two-thirds of a sugar estate, Mount William, and its slaves, buildings etc.” on the island of St Vincent.

In the Liberties too the links were clear. The powerful Byrne family held close ties to the trade through their involvement in a sugar refinery at Mullinahack (where the Oliver Bond Street flats sit today); Edward Byrne, sugar refiner, baker and distiller was said to have paid the highest tax bill in Ireland in the 1790s. Edward is listed along with John Byrne as an owner of the Sugar Loaf in Mullinahack in a census from 1780, but the links to slavery’s chains did not affect whatsoever social status then. Indeed a direct descendent, the French-born John Count O’Byrne married Eleanor Von Hubner, daughter of the Austrian Ambassador to France and Rome, in 1864.

One newspaper report from 1778 lists two dozen sugar refiners or bakers in Dublin, all of which were only one step removed from slavery. Some, such as the Nairac, Maziere, and Sweetman families had traded for generations and the Liberties seems to have been a centre for this industry since along with the Byrnes the Maquays operated on Thomas Street, while Thomas Nowlan ran a sugar refinery on Francis Street. The appropriately-named Sweetmans, though largely forgotten today were also prominent brewers and through marriage various relations held significant estates and slaves in the Caribbean, while the family later sold their brewing site to Guinness who soon developed it into the Iveagh Markets.

Ironically the area adjacent to Mullinahack, Wormwood Gate was home to Richard Robert Madden a celebrated 19th-century doctor, writer, historian of the United Irishmen and abolitionist who played an active role in trying to impose anti-slavery rules in Jamaica on behalf of the British government.

By the early 1790s, led by the Quakers, respectable society began to grow increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of slavery, and the moral questions it raised in a society which was largely devoutly Christian.

James Field Stanfield, born in Dublin in about 1749 and educated in France for the Roman Catholic priesthood instead signed on as an ordinary sailor on board merchant vessels and soon saw the horrors of slavery first-hand on a trip to the West Indies in 1776. Stanfield later highlighted these injustices as a writer and actor in Britain, and such efforts coincided with calls for reform from other enlightened people.

Sugar was targetted by so-called “anti-saccharites” who organised boycotts of the product, their campaign estimated to have influenced the buying habits of up to 400,000 consumers. In response by 1792 entrepreneurs in London started offering more expensive “free labour” options to the public and by the early 1800s glass basins boasting the contents were East India Sugar “not made by slaves” which could be displayed publicly in customers’ dining rooms, were being sold.

Though the East India Company was far from vitruous people were certainly in little doubt about the realities behind products sitting on their sideboards even then, and newspapers in Dublin carried lists of shops stocking the alternative.

“A Family that uses 5lb of Sugar a Week will, by using East India instead of West India, for 21 Months, prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of one Fellow Creature!” proclaimed one advertisement from that time.

In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act finally outlawed the practice in most British colonies. More than 800,000 Africans in the Caribbean and South Africa, as well as a small number in Canada were freed while the government reimbursed thousands of slave owners, Irish names prominent among them.

In August 1845, Frederick Douglass, a celebrated intellectual who had escaped slavery in the United States, and having taught himself to read and write, produced a best-selling autobiography, arrived in Dublin where Quaker Richard Webb, an abolitionist and publisher introduced him to Daniel O’Connell, as committed to black emancipation as he was to Irish freedom. The two men became close friends, speaking at public events against slavery throughout a city which Douglass disturbingly found “almost literally alive with beggars, displaying the greatest wretchedness – mere stumps of men, without feet, without legs, without hands, without arms…pressing their way through the muddy streets…casting sad looks to the right and left, in the hope of catching the eye of a passing stranger.”

Is slavery in the past? Unfortunately not.

As recently as 2024 a report by Ireland’s Chartered Accountants noted that human trafficking is the fastest-growing form of international crime and the third largest criminal industry after drugs and arms trafficking, quoting an International Labour Organization report from last year which put global profits from modern slavery at approximately $236 billion annually.

In 2017 11 members of the extended Rooney family in Lincolnshire, all of whom have close links to Ireland, were convicted under modern slavery legislation, and later ordered to pay more than £1m under the UK’s Proceeds of Crime Act to vulnerable men kept as virtual slaves for years while doing tarmacking and other construction work. Fed on scraps, and living in inhumane conditions the Rooneys told their captives that if they tried to escape they would be killed and buried in a nearby field. Commentators noted that the men, who were stick-thin, had worked on driveways outside people’s homes for years without any questions being asked by clients about their very poor physical condition.
Once the price was right morality, it seems, was paused yet again.

The trafficking of people into Ireland and the UK for sexual exploitation, to work without pay, and even to harvest their organs for sale, is also on the rise according to reports from the Law Society and other organisations such as the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit in the Department of Justice and Equality at St Stephen’s Green over recent times.

Unfortunately, almost 200 years after slavery was abolished the scourge, and the battle against it, continues to make headlines into the present day.