The rejection of Gladstone's proposals of home rule for Ireland by all but one of the dailies and by very many of the weeklies reflected long-running, and rarely empathetic, concern about Irish matters alongside a recurring determination to emphasise that Scotland was not like Ireland.

A piece in the Ayr Advertiser in January 1849, which was copied in papers across the country, saw the influx of Irish victims of the famine as having ‘absolutely inundated this country’. They had

It went on to deplore the loss of ‘the most pleasing characteristics of the old Scottish villages’, thanks to the appearance of many of the population and the huge increase in the number of spirit dealers. The solution was ‘to redouble our efforts not to keep Scotland for the Scotch, for that is impossible; but to keep Scotland Scotch – Scotch religion, morality and intelligence’. It was a theme that was repeated again and again.

The Glasgow Herald talked about an invasion of Glasgow by Irish paupers and explained a rise in violent crime as due ‘to the influx of Irish immigrants to which we are now subjected’. The Reformers’ Gazette reported that ‘the feuds and animosities of Ireland are making their appearance in the city’. According to the North British Agriculturalist, the Irish immigrants ‘who crowded into the already overcrowded lanes and closes of all the larger cities of Scotland’ had ‘brought down the Scottish labourer to their own standard in character and comfort’. It recognised that there had been initial gains from cheap labour but, in the long run, that had proved short-sighted and had led ‘to very little else than the banishment of a Christian, and the introduction of a semi-heathen population’.