Although attention has been given to social, moral and health problems faced by Irish migrants who settled permanently in Britain during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, little work has focused on these subjects for the Irish seasonal migratory workers, especially those employed in agriculture. Even though these seasonal migrants were employed for a few months or for much of the year from sowing time to the completion of harvest, they were also subject to them. However, not all of the groups' seasonal workers were affected in the same way or to the same extent. Some were regarded to be more susceptible than others due to such factors as character of the migration, group organisation, sex and age of the migrants, work patterns and work conditions. Of them, Achill workers, the ‘tattie howkers’ or ‘tatie hokers’, a group of some 2,000 workers that migrated annually from Mayo, Donegal and Galway to harvest the potato crop in south-western and central Scotland, was regarded to be the most vulnerable. Unlike other migratory groups, who comprised only male workers, the Achill workers comprised both males and females, with the latter sex forming some seventy per cent of the work force in the first decades of the twentieth century. But they also comprised a large number of young workers, teenagers from fourteen or sixteen years of age and young adults; a few were of an older age group. © 1999, Maney Publishing.

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