March 17, 2021
Irish-Maori meld forged in shared colonial history
People of Māori-Irish descent will be celebrating St Patrick’s Day today – and there are more of them than you may think.
Historian Vincent O’Malley says Irish have been settling in Aotearoa since the first convicts skipped from Australia in the early 1800s.
While the company settlements like Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin tried to exclude Irish Catholics, they later relented to bring in servants and labourers – and then the gold rushes of the 1860s opened the floodgates.
So too did the New Zealand Wars, with up to two third of the rank and file in the Imperial regiments being Irish, and many taking their discharge in this country and then marrying Maori women from the tribes they had been fighting.
He says there were cultural similarities, and also political links drawn between Aotearoa and the Emerald Isle.
"A lot of Māori leaders were drawing parallels between their own experiences and those of the Irish, and so they were looking at what was happening in Ireland in the 19th century and the history of that country, calling for home rule in exactly the same way Irish politicians were at the time. There were actually some connections between Irish nationalist leaders and Maori groups as well," Dr O'Malley says.
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