Ireland's complex financial ties to slavery reparations

While most of the world was focused on the epic defeat of the Republican Party in the US midterm elections, a long-running story was just about able to make itself heard in Britain, thanks to the combined presence of Britain's King Charles and Prime Minster Andy Burnham.

It centres on the campaign for an apology and the payment of reparations for slavery by some members of the Commonwealth, an organisation that brings together many countries that were formerly part of the British empire.

The UK government said that it was open to the idea of making an apology, was increasing the amount of money it puts into some Commonwealth states and would look at ideas such as access to third-level education in Britain for certain Commonwealth citizens - ones from the Caribbean.

But still the calls for reparations continue.

And that could get tricky for Ireland.

At the time of the "Atlantic Trade", Ireland was part of Britain and Irish people profited from the slave trade too.

How do we know this? Because of the way the British government chose to end slavery - not with repression but with a taxpayer-funded buyout.

As it was an official financial operation, there is a paper trail: a database, if you will, of all the people who applied for government compensation and those who got it - the beneficial owners 800,000 slaves in the British colonies.

Like Christopher Owens, of Co Cork, who was paid £1,704, 3s, 11d for 127 slaves that his aunt owned in Antigua - he was her executor.

Mr Owens was a pioneer of steam shipping, with his partner Michael O'Brien building the City of Cork, a wooden paddle steamer, in 1815 - the year that Napoleon was defeated.

A searchable database of the compensation claims, set up by University College London, shows about 30,000 slaves were owned in some form by Irish born or Irish resident individuals, who claimed almost one million pounds in compensation under the scheme.

The UK government paid Irish claimants about £800,000.

Some claims were rejected because people had mortgaged their slaves, borrowing against the value and were effectively looking to be paid twice for the same slaves.

A John Burke of Tuam in Co Galway failed in a £61 claim for two slaves.

The British government spent £20m on the slave compensation package in 1833.

The debt was folded into the same bond issuance that covered the massive Napoleonic War debt, as a share of GDP.

It was by far the most debt the British state has racked up - war spending in Ireland led to the biggest building boom in the country's history prior to the Celtic Tiger years: when the government stopped spending there was a massive recession that started in 1816.

Known as consols, or consolidated bonds, the debt was paid off by the Conservative government in 2015 - the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo.

It was £300m, a drop in the ocean of the British budget, and less than the annual profit of Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency.

It's a prime example of debt management - at the time it was a fortune, when it was paid off it was a trifle.

The slavery compensation fund of £20m is estimated to be worth about £1.6 billion (€1.9 billion) in today's money.

But in an era where a small country like Ireland can spend €2.4bn on a children's hospital, £1.6bn isn’t going to go far as reparations to the descendants of Britain’s Atlantic slave trade.

This is why the UK government is looking at other ways of compensating, such as scholarships, or ways to help reduce the debt burden of Caribbean countries.

The times have changed radically too.

In 1833, Britain was in the driving seat of European colonialism, trading, buying, selling and occasionally invading its way to the biggest empire on the planet.

Bankers and financiers would lend to the government, confident that the government would ensure that the hard work of somebody somewhere would be used to pay off the debt and interest.

Not so today, where the UK has to live off its own economy and the markets are very uneasy at lending an already high debt country much more.

Cutting the debt ratio is at the heart of politics in London these days, not taking on debt to finance anything, even defence, let alone an ill-defined reparations scheme.

Opposition Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has been strident in her opposition to the notion, saying that Mr Burnham’s toying with the idea of a formal apology made Britain look "weak".

As a person of Nigerian heritage, she was able to go where few other Conservative politicians could, asking: "If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?"

If the net is to be spread widely, it may ensnare Ireland, helped by the paper trail contained in the UCL database.

Currently, the Government's financial connection to slavery is rather modest, amounting to a few million euro spent by the State and its agencies to promote an annual festival that draws global attention to Ireland's slaveholding past.

St Patrick was, of course, kidnapped by Irish raiders from his family settlement in Britain and sold into slavery.

In ancient Gaelic society, slave owning was a normal part of life, as it was pretty much everywhere.

The tradition of the Irish enslaving each other for money ran on into the Viking era, when bloody foreigners took over the trade.

Dublin became one of the biggest - some say the biggest - slave market in western Europe by about the 10th century.

Thralls - the old Norse word for slaves - were kidnapped in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and sold all over the place to anyone who paid.

Iceland was heavily populated by Irish slaves - some estimates say up to 40% of the population at one time - with women being in particularly high demand.

The Normans put an end to the Viking/Irish slave trade, but the business never entirely went away.

In 1630, the village of Baltimore in Co Cork was raided by African slavers - Barbary pirates who took 230 captives to be sold in the market of Algeria.

Eventually, two or three are reputed to have made it back to Ireland.

The Cromwellian era saw the large-scale transport of Irish prisoners of war to Barbados, to work in plantations, followed by other indentured servants.

Irish people made money by transporting these people to the Americas on behalf of the protectorate and the business interests that financed the government.

The high death rate among whites on the plantations, due to the tropical climate, led to the idea of using African slaves instead and so the Atlantic trade was born.

Liverpool and Bristol grew rich on the trade, as did London.

But Co Cork also saw a number of slave expeditions leave the city for west Africa and on to the Caribbean.

Irish merchants prospered from provisioning expeditions.

Irish sailors crewed and captained slave ships.

Some of them did very well from the trade in humans.

As did a bigger group who were not directly involved.

By the 18th century, slave owning had become a bit like the tech boom, driven by shareholding in companies that separated the owners from the ghastly business of whips and shackles.

Just as you don't need to know how artificial intelligence works to make money from owning shares in an AI company, you could live in 18th century Cork or Galway and own slaves in the Caribbean that you never saw through the medium of shares in a slave-owning company, like the Royal Africa Company, or smaller ones that were formed to finance transporting expeditions, bringing human cargo from west African ports to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and east coast American ports, notably Charleston, South Carolina, where close to half of all the slaves imported to the United States were landed.

Charleston grew wealthy on the Atlantic trade, including its Irish residents.

The city’s impressive Hibernian Hall is a short stroll from the main slave market, now a museum.

The hall played host to an ill-fated Democratic Party National Convention in 1860, at which the Democrats, divided over the issue of slavery, failed to agree a single candidate to stand against Abraham Lincoln of the newly founded - and anti-slavery - Republican Party.

The first shots of the US Civil War were fired at Fort Sumpter, which guards the approaches to Charleston harbour.

The city hosts one of the biggest and oldest St Patrick's Day celebrations in the US.

An Irish Government minster often attends.

In the US too, the reparations debate is in full swing, but in the usual American way, it's all about the US.

Reparations are taken to mean an internal transfer of wealth from someone - probably the federal taxpayer - to someone else, notably the descendants of slaves transported from Africa.

The issue has been swept into the wider "culture wars" that have wracked the US in recent decades, complicating an already fraught picture.

In 1833, Britain’s parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape colony in South Africa.

The slave trade had been abolished in 1807: ships owned by British or Irish individuals or companies were forbidden to trade in slaves.

But it took another 26 years to effect the emancipation of the enslaved.

As part of the negotiated settlement, parliament granted £20m in compensation to former slave owners to be paid by British taxpayers.

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission, set up to manage the distribution of the £20m, provide a more or less complete census of slave ownership in the British Empire in 1833.

Like Galway merchant Thomas Hynes, whose executors got £2,928 in compensation from the British taxpayer for his holding of 150 slaves in Jamaica.

But how do you apportion reparation payments - both to the descendants of slaves transported from Africa, and from the descendants of the people who made money from transporting and working those Africans in the Caribbean and American colonies?

Even if you can trace the line to the present day - itself a herculean task - disaggregating intergenerational wealth is no simple matter.

Take the case of Simeon Henry Hardy Junior, with homes in Cobh and No 15 Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin.

He was paid compensation of £269 for 13 slaves, but that is only part of the story.

His father, a merchant and ship owner from Cork, went to Martinique in 1796, married a woman called Mary O’Brien, the daughter of a business partner, and returned to Cork in 1810.

Two years later his younger brother went to Barbados and set up in business, trading Irish goods for Caribbean sugar, possibly the most valuable commodity of the time thanks to the rise of tea and coffee drinking.

Sugar was produced by slave labour.

They diversified their money into the hot new technology of the mid 19th century - the railroads.

According to the UCL database, Simeon Hardy Jr invested in the following Irish rail projects:

He also moved the family merchanting business to London, where it ultimately failed and was liquidated over a 27-year period, that ended in 1902.

How do you get compensation from that? if you go for a taxpayer-funded solution, which taxpayers do you chose: British, Irish or a combination? And how would you share the liability between states? Especially ones with a tangled history like these islands.

Take the case of John Kelly, with an address at Newtown House in Abbeyknockmoy, Co Galway.

His family owned the house for three generations in the 19th century.

It was listed for sale in the Irish Independent in 2017 for €1.25m.

The UCL database tells us that, in his will, Mr Kelly - who also lived in Greencastle, Jamaica - left £4000 in trust, to be laid out on land 'and that only' in Ireland, Scotland or the counties of York or Middlesex, for the benefit of his natural child Mary Kelly by Sarah Edwards Innis [or Innes] a free woman of colour of St Thomas-in-the-East.

He appointed, as guardians to Mary Kelly, Hugh O'Connor of Dublin, his cousin Thomas Reddington of Galway and his brother James Kelly of Gower Street.

The database said: "He left £1400 to Sarah Edwards Innes and £1000 each to his niece and nephew, Mary Taaffe and Christopher Kelly Taaffe, the children of his sister Mary, widow of Patrick Taaffe of Roscommon.

"His residuary heir was his brother James Kelly."

James Kelly, also of Newtown House in Co Galway, had been paid more than £6,000 in the compensation scheme for 316 slaves held on two plantations in Jamaica.

It seems to have been the centre of a family dispute later, with Mr Kelly leaving his son the Jamaica estate and £3,000, but only if he accepted it as full settlement of his claim for the full £6,000 compensation for the slaves.

But John Kelly may have hit the jackpot with an investment in a company in London - the West India Dock company, which developed the first modern, purpose built dock in London.

It was specifically set up to handle the trade in sugar, coffee, rum and timber from the West Indies - products that relied on slaves to produce but which were powering about a quarter of British trade at the time.

These docks - once the biggest in the world - were eventually rendered obsolete by container shipping in the 1960s and 70s, and closed in 1980.

But the land and water that formed those docks have been transformed again - into Canary Wharf, the skyscraper-laden new financial district of London.

Irish builder Ballymore has been active in developing a number of residential towers there, continuing the Irish link to this land.

David Olusoga, a British historian who specialises in this topic, said reparations are justified because of the wealth that accrued to Britain because of the Atlantic slave trade, such as the examples above.

And because reparations have already been paid to the former slave owners.

He estimates the current value of the compensation package for the slave owners at about £16bn.

As a share of GDP, the £20m from 1833 was about 5% - which puts its value in today's vastly bigger economy somewhere north of £100bn.

Its a big sum and it assumes parity cash between the slavers and the enslaved is sufficient.

Leave aside the question of how it might be spent by the recipients and look at how the cost might be spread.

In particular think about if, or how, or to what extent Ireland may be on the hook for some of this.

Yes there were downsides to being part of the British empire and later the United Kingdom.

But there were also financial upsides for at least some Irish as well, including directly and indirectly from the slave trade.

And it left its mark.

It is notable that Dublin’s boomtown years in the 18th century, when it was one of the ten biggest cities in Europe, coincide with the height of the Atlantic slave trade and the profits from sugar and tobacco plantations in the Americas.

Are we on the hook? Should we be thinking of paying up? What about looking for compensation from Algeria or Norway for the Irish slaves they took? What about those POWs and the indentured shipped off to the Americas?

Who owes what for slavery - or do we draw a line on the past, and look to other sorts of development models that can help the Caribbean states in particular, and which are affordable - not just to Britain, but to Spain and the Netherlands also.

And which Ireland too might make some modest contribution to, or are we exempt by virtue of having been a British colony?

But then again, so were the 13 colonies that formed the United States of America.

Complicated.

The next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting is in two years time.

Expect this reparations story to resurface again around that time.

It's head-wrenchingly complex stuff.

No wonder it was overtaken in the daily news agenda here by the US elections and Russel Brand’s rape conviction.

They end with clear outcomes.