‘How do we welcome the stranger, with humanity or anger?’ The forgotten Germans who found refuge in Ireland
In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade. Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes. It focuses on a German couple, Hannah and Peter, who have lost one of their two sons through illness and are trying to make a go of it on farmland on the edge of a small town in Limerick. Their Protestantism and their reluctance to mix with the Irish add to a sense of peril. Peter is driven by another motive. He owes his plot of land to the manor’s (invisible) English squire, Thomas Southwell. The 1st Baron Southwell of Castle Matrix is keen to dilute the locals’ Catholicism and so provides the Germans with cheap rent in return for their obedience.
