A third of Famine emigrants were primarily Irish-speaking

Evidence

As many as a third of all Famine emigrants—a half-million people—were Irish speakers. Some of these may have known some English as well, since Britain pursued a ruthless policy of imposing the English language in Ireland, although port officials in the 1840s occasionally remarked on the inability of entire shiploads of emigrants to speak English, and missionaries and politicians both stressed the importance of knowing Gaelic if they were to reach Irish-Americans. In 1847 in Philadelphia St. Philip’s Catholic Church celebrated mass in Gaelic. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 141

Categorization

• CANDY: A Philadelphia church celebrating mass in Gaelic in 1847 is a vivid, tweetable detail of a non-English-speaking immigrant mass.
• XREF: connects to: Pre-Famine Irish emigration was neither uniformly poor nor uniformly English-speaking — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 138