Irish community celebrates its independence

July 11 is celebrated annually in the Town of Cobh in County Cork, Ireland, as the day the bloody Brits finally went home in 1938. This year marks the 81st anniversary of the flying of the green, white and orange Irish tri-colour flag over Fort Mitchel on Spike Island in Cork Harbour.

Although the Anglo-Irish Treaty of Dec. 6, 1922, provided for the establishment of the “Irish Free State,” the fine print of the agreement granting separation from British governance came with a few strings attached. Dagnabbit; wouldn’t you know it?

One was the provision that Great Britain would retain sovereignty over three strategically important Irish forts – at Spike Island and Castletownbere on the southern coast and Lough Swilly on the northern coast.

Accordingly, the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy continued to hold down the fort at Spike Island, ensuring the island remained under British sovereignty until the fort was formally ceded to Ireland on July 11, 1938. The Union Jack flag was respectfully lowered that day when the British sailors vacated the facility.

Hence, the locals insist that County Cork’s true “Independence Day” is July 11.

The Spike Island fortress is star-shaped and occupies 24 acres. For most of its life, the fort was a prison and known as “Ireland’s Alcatraz.” It housed as many as 2,300 inmates at a time. The facility was closed in 2004 and was reinvented as a tourism destination in 2016.

The Irish word Cobh is pronounced “Cove,” and this compact community of less than 13,000 residents has had enormous historical significance on the world stage. Its harbor on Ireland’s southern coast is considered to be the world’s second largest natural harbor, with access to the Celtic Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

Amid Ireland’s Great Famine (1845-52), Great Britain’s Queen Victoria traveled to Ireland in 1849, and was “warmly received” by the Irish people. She was welcomed among banners that read: “Hail Victoria, Ireland’s hope and England’s glory.”

In tribute to the Queen’s visit to Cobh, town leaders changed the name of the place to Queenstown in 1849. (It remained so until the early 1920s and the formation of the Irish Free State, when the community returned to being named Cobh.)

Several major events occurred during the Queenstown era. During the famine years, Queenstown became the single most important port of emigration. Millions of impoverished Irish citizens boarded vessels in search of a new life in the United States.

The most famous of those Irish emigrants was Annie Moore. She was 17 years old when she boarded a steamship departing Queenstown on Dec. 20, 1891. With her were younger brothers, Phillip and Anthony.

(Their parents had come to America nearly four years earlier, found jobs and saved the money to purchase tickets for the children to come, thereby reuniting the family in New York City.)

On New Year’s Eve in 1891, the vessel from Queenstown arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor in close proximity to the Statue of Liberty. However, the ship came in too late for its 148 passengers to be processed that night.

This wound up being a lucky turn of events for the 148, for they would be welcomed to the New World with all the pomp and circumstance New York City had to offer as the first immigrants to pass through the newly built immigration station on Ellis Island on Jan. 1, 1892.

At 10:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, “the gangplank was lowered amidst the cheers of the crowd and clanging of bells, and Annie Moore had the historic honor of being the first immigrant to be processed at Ellis Island,” wrote journalist Gina Dimuro.

Why Annie? Christopher Klein, writing for History.com, part of A&E Networks, speculated that “an English-speaking, ‘rosy-cheeked’ Irish lass would be a good poster child for immigration at a time when Irish immigrants had already risen to the heights of American political and cultural life.”

“Over the course of the next 62 years, more than 12 million immigrants would follow in the teenager’s footsteps through Ellis Island, and it’s estimated that 40% of Americans can trace their origins back to the immigration station in New York Harbor,” Klein wrote.

The Ellis Island immigration station closed its doors in 1954, and today the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, under the care of the National Parks Service.

Queenstown, Ireland, would return as a newspaper “dateline” again and again. We’ll go there in future columns.