The concept of “Irish slavery” has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was even invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915.

Their narratives used a broad definition of slavery and had a rhetorical import and purpose; they therefore never mentioned that the “slavery” referred to was actually what was known as indentured servitude - a form of work where a person was forced to work without pay for a certain amount of time in order to repay an indenture or loan.

The same narratives also failed to mention that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to Irish people as they did to Africans and their descendents. 

However, in contemporary times, the claim has begun to appear more regularly online, where its origin as a meme can be traced back to the 1990s.

The earliest “white slavery” proto-meme appeared on the website of a conspiracy theorist and Holocaust-denier called Michael A. Hoffman in 1999. At the time, Hoffman used a misappropriated photograph to ask a question that became the underlying argument used by those who make claims about Irish ‘slavery’: “What about the white slaves?” The same question is the centrepiece of one of the most viral “Irish slaves” memes on the internet, which first went viral in 2016.

But the most influential version of the Irish slaves meme entered mainstream consciousness in 2013, when Glynis Racine, a leader of the conservative Tea Party movement in the US state of New Mexico, attracted controversy on Twitter by sharing a meme about Irish slavery as a “forgotten fact” on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the US. That meme stated: “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the US. When is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching and moaning about how the world owes them a living?”

The false conflation of Irish and African experiences is particularly attractive to people whose views are aligned with far-right politics, because it enables them to deny the legacies of the Transatlantic slave trade, which led to the forced migration and enslavement of millions of people.

The ‘Irish slave’ claim is often deployed to counter arguments about the reality or impact of anti-black racism and to undermine anti-racist protest movements.

Research has shown that whenever the claim is mentioned online, it tends to spike in tandem with major events involving race relations in the United States. It was repeated regularly during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Ferguson unrest in 2014 and wider protests against the killing of unarmed black men by police officers.

It was also heavily instrumentalised by supporters of Donald Trump during his successful run for US president during the 2016 election, and appeared almost ubiquitously whenever there was mention of reparations for slavery or any reference to the history of slavery in the US.

But the claim has also featured on this side of the Atlantic and outside of far-right spaces.

In November 2023, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank published a three-part report on the online disinformation ecosystem in Ireland, which found that the “Irish slaves” meme was regularly shared by Irish users on the far-right social network Gab and among users in Irish groups from the US who identify as Irish-American.

The root of the “Irish slaves” claims is a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot”, which was put together by a presumed non-existent author called ‘John Martin’ on opednews.com in 2008.

The article went unnoticed for a number of years before gaining traction when it was reposted in 2012 on Global Research, a Canadian website which promotes conspiracy theories and so-called “alternative news”.

From there, the claim went viral as millions and millions of people re-shared it to social media and, for a number of years, some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted the idea as a “forgotten” history.

The original article invented an “Irish slave trade”, which was falsely claimed to be in operation from 1625 to 1839 and during which Irish people were incorrectly said to have experienced the horrors of slavery as much as Africans and their descendents did.

The article told readers, baselessly, that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” than and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. To support this claim, it included a racist fabrication that English planters forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men, and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

It also included other false claims, most of which were appropriated from accounts of how African slaves were tortured: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.”

“Irish slaves”, the article further claimed, were “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.”

The article even suggested that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

But the author did not even make this up themselves.

The article entirely plagiarised its ‘facts’ from an ahistorical blog by an Irish-American blogger called “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003. Much of Cavanaugh’s work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

O’Callaghan’s book was celebrated in Ireland when it was published in 2000, but sections of it have since been debunked.

It deliberately conflated racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times and embellished the “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well-known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. O’Callaghan also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and stories about the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

With no noticeable public pushback upon the book’s release, O’Callaghan’s version of events was perceived to be definitive for almost two decades and laid the groundwork for a broader adherence to fantasy and overtly racist memes that followed.

Like other forms of misinformation, the ‘Irish slaves’ myth contains some elements of truth, but distorts them in order to create a false narrative to further an agenda.

Behind the claim, Irish people were legitimately transported to North America in the 17th century by Cromwellian forces through a policy of forced exile and colonial indentured servitude, and they were badly treated when that happened.

The transportation of Irish people to serve a term of indentured servitude in the West Indies took place during and in the wake of the military conquest of Ireland from 1649 to 1659.

But it was not a new policy by the English Parliamentarian government at the time, nor was it unique to Irish people: in the aftermath of the 1648 Battle of Preston, for example, there was an order giving Bristol merchants a licence to transport upwards of 500 Scottish prisoners to the Plantations.

Going back further, a policy for the “disposal” of those “burdensome to the State” was discussed in parliament soon after the English Civil War broke out in 1642.

In an Irish context, sporadic numbers of captured Irish soldiers and Royalist English troops were initially shipped to Barbados after Cromwell’s brutal sieges of Irish towns in 1649. 

These events were seized upon by Irish Catholic leaders at the time, when it was presented as evidence that Cromwellian forces were beginning a particular depopulation of the ‘common’ Irish by sending them into exile and replacing them with English settlers.

In response, Cromwell tried to reassure the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to what were called the ‘Tobacco islands’.

But while the Cromwellian transportation policy in Ireland never approached that feared by the Irish Catholic leaders, it soon widened so it no longer selected people who were captured soldiers or Tory rebels.

The focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653, when it was expanded by the Commonwealth occupation forces to include those destitute in Ireland.

Their destination was the American colonies, where Irish people were sent as indentured servants, and coercion became the policy’s defining characteristic.

The application of the policy in Ireland was a radical and colonial abuse of the English Poor Law of 1601, which was originally passed to provide relief for those unable to work but which also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

Cromwell’s own endorsement of this policy shift could be seen in his letter to Charles Fleetwood, then the Lord Deputy of Ireland, in early 1654, when he petitioned on behalf of Bristol merchants to allow them to transport “Irish tories” and “idle and vagrant persons”.

From 1653 to 1657, so-called “vagrants” were thus specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin.

The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was only rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its repeated abuse by merchants.

This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour, which solely benefited the planter class in the Anglo-American world. We do not know how many people were sent, but a figure in the high thousands is likely.

But ‘Irish slaves’ memes do not contain any of this historical nuance: they imply that far more people were subjected to indentured servitude and penal transportation over a longer period of time than was actually the case.

Those claims distort the unique racial element of Transatlantic slave trade, during which vast multiples of people were transported from Africa over a far longer period of time.

Memes promoting the ‘Irish slaves’ myth are an example of 21st century hate literature that promotes a belief in racial slavery denialism and racial inferiority. 

But the history is clear. Legal and customary distinctions between servitude (which was reserved for Europeans) and slavery (which was reserved for Africans) in the colonies were fundamentally different.

Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, a servant’s legal personhood was recognised.

In contrast, colonial slavery was permanent and always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother and their own children were perpetual slaves, as were their children’s children.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights - not even the right to life.

Although there are rare accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, the opposite provision existed for the enslaved: a slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, slitting of ears and so on. 

Colonial Servitude and Colonial Slavery existed on a spectrum of unfree labour and exploitation, but the two practices were profoundly different and the latter was justified and sustained by racism.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s; in contrast, the Transatlantic slave trade lasted for centuries and was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people.