L'Irlanda dei Caraibi

Bermuda was England's third successful overseas territory to be established (as an extension of the second, Virginia)[citation needed], and is the oldest remaining. Settlement, which began accidentally in 1609, was primarily by English indentured servants, but there were four minority groups by the end of the 17th century. These were Native American slaves, free and enslaved blacks, Irish prisoners-of-war (POW), and ethnically-cleansed civilians, sold into slavery for seven years, and smaller numbers of Scottish POWs. The Irish and Scots slaves were the result of Oliver Cromwell's invasions of their countries in the 1650s, in order to force his protectorship upon them. In Ireland, this had been preceded by a native uprising against the Anglo-Irish settler state, and Cromwell's response was the large-scale ethnic cleansing of parts of Ireland, and the repopulation of those areas with new settlers from England and Scotland. The Irish proved to be troublesome slaves, in Bermuda. Following the uncovering of a plot between Irish and black slaves to overthrow the colony, a ban was placed on the importation of any further Irish. Over the following century, the Irish and Scots, who were ostracised by the white-Anglo majority, combined with Bermuda's blacks and Native Americans (and some part of its white-Anglo majority) to create a single demographic group, which, in the spirit of racial polarisation, is known as black. With the large scale emigration, primarily of white-Anglo Bermudians, during that time, blacks were left with a slight majority. The Irish (and other non-African) roots of Bermuda's black population are rarely mentioned, today. The area with the strongest awareness of both its Irish and Native American origins is Saint David's Island, at the east of the archipelago. The western-most island is Ireland Island. The origin of this name is uncertain. Popular myth in Bermuda attributes it to the large number of Irish convicts who laboured there in the 19th century, during the building of the dockyard (these included the nationalist politician John Mitchel). This explanation is patently false as many records show the island bore that name two centuries before. Although there is little surviving evidence of Irish culture, elderly islanders, who can remember when marine turtles were hunted in Bermuda, described the method of capyure as being the laying of a net to one side of the reptile, and the throwing of a cilig (a length of rope with one end knotted round a stone) into the water on the opposite side. Hearing the splash of the cilig, the turtle moves away from it, into the net. The word cilig appears to be meaningless in English, but in some dialects of Gaelic is used as an adjective meaning "easily deceived". Characteristics of older Bermudian accents, such as the pronunciation of the letter 'd' as 'dj', as in Bermudjin (Bermudian), may also indicate an Irish origin. Later Irish immigrants have continued to contribute to Bermuda's makeup, with names like Crockwell (Ó Creachmhaoil) , and O'Connor now being thought of, locally, as Bermudian names.
The history of the Irish community of Barbados and other British-settled Caribbean islands is similar in many respects, including the circumstances of its originating from an indentured servant class deported there by Cromwell. Over time, the Irish community there dwindled as they intermarried with the growing black population; the white descendants, known as redlegs, emigrated or died off and now form a tiny percentage of the population.