For all its cosmopolitan and imperial pretensions, the great Victorian seaport of Liverpool was often depicted and perceived as ‘Irish’. The self-proclaimed second city of empire, Liverpool was also known as the capital of Ireland in England, in A.M. Sullivan's words, ‘a piece cut off from the old sod itself’. By the early years of the twentieth century, Liverpool's climacteric, the numbers of Irish and Catholics, regarded as synonymous terms at the time, was calculated at up to 200,000: roughly one-third of the population. This sizeable presence notwithstanding, there is as yet no full-scale history of the Liverpool- Irish and their distinctive hyphenated identity. Studies abound of the sufferings and tensions of the Famine influx from Ireland in the late 1840s, offering a short-term ‘crisis’ perspective on such issues as health, housing, welfare, crime and sectarian violence in this main port of entry. There is an urgent need for a longer-term assessment of crisis, continuity and change as the Liverpool-Irish, the most significant ‘minority’ community in pre-multi-cultural Britain, adjusted to what T.P. O'Connor described as their ‘curious middle place’.

The chronological boundaries adopted here are political: from the Act of Union to the supposed ‘final settlement’ between Britain and Eire in the late 1930s, a time-span which highlights the constitutional complexities, confusion and controversy over the status of Irish migrants first within the United Kingdom and then as a ‘free state’ dominion with the British Empire.