Australia

Australia received only about 5 per cent of the emigrants who left Ireland during the 19th century. These, however, made up nearly a quarter of all immigrants during that period. A proportion of Irish arrivals came by transportation, many of them being joined subsequently by wives and children. Of the remainder, a majority received some form of government assistance towards the cost of a long and expensive journey. The largest groups of emigrants came from a group of southmidland counties (Kilkenny, Tipperary, Limerick, Clare) and from south and central Ulster (Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone). Irish immigration peaked during the gold rush of the 1850s and fell off sharply after the 1880s.

Reliance on assisted passage meant that settlement in Australia was determined less by pressures in Ireland than by the needs of the colony: there was, in particular, no great surge of migrants during the Great Famine. Closer official regulation may also help to explain why Irish settlers in Australia were more evenly distributed, both geographically and in terms of occupation and social status, than was initially the case in the United States and elsewhere. In addition their status as the second largest ethnic group (after the English) made them less vulnerable to discrimination.

The legend of the bushranger Ned Kelly (1854–80), along with overemphasis on transportation as a route to Australia, has encouraged a stereotype of outcast rebelliousness. Mid‐19th‐century statistics reveal that Irishmen were indeed over‐represented among convicted criminals, but also within the police force. Most of the Irish born who achieved prominence in the early decades of Australian history were from the Protestant middle and upper classes, like Sir Richard Bourke, governor of New South Wales 1831–8. However, Michael Dwyer, Gavan Duffy, and Daniel Mannix, in their different ways, provided examples of what was to become an increasingly well‐established pattern of pragmatic assimilation. In politics, the Irish of Australia strongly supported home rule for Ireland, but showed less enthusiasm for the separatist republicanism that later displaced it.