I have not had a proper holiday in a number of years, one in which you flake out and let the sound of the tide take away your worries. I landed on the island of Jamaica on Christmas Day. My flatmate and a wonderful friend, Marlene, invited me to spend Christmas with her family. It was magic.

I do not consider myself a worldly traveller but I have hopped around various continents in my time and spent eight years living in America before re-rooting myself back on Irish soil. This leaves me puzzled as to how Jamaica slipped under my radar.

Jamaica is located in the Caribbean Sea south of Cuba and west of Haiti and Dominican Republic. Jamaica is a tropical island 234 km long and 80 km across, making it a little smaller than Ireland with a population of three million. Jamaican Patois is sung in the same manner as English spoken in deep Kerry or Cork.

The anthem is ‘Jamaica, Land We Love’ and their motto is ‘Out of Many, One People’. I believe from meeting many Jamaicans, they are ruled by the heart and not the head. I travelled to Port Antonio (above) for a few days and then on to Negril (below, left and right) with the sun beating down on me and the blue sea washing over me.

Aside from loving the island of Jamaica, a land of luscious green, rolling hills and ‘bokety’ roads (Cavan springs to mind) I loved the Jamaicans. Jamaicans are colourful characters bursting with charm and humour. They have many talents, being great musicians, skilled handcraft workers and they have the gift of the gab.

Many share the same wit as our country lads, the ones we refer to as ‘cute whores’. They seem to do their business with the same ‘glint in the eye’ as our own country men may do.

Though I am no history buff, I could not wait to research the Irish in Jamaica. I felt so at home there and found so many place names relating to Ireland: Sligoville, Athenry, Bangor Ridge, Clonmel, Dublin Castle and many more.

In order to understand the history and background of the Irish in Jamaica, one has to go right back to the year 1655. That was the year Admiral Penn and General Venables, having failed miserably at taking Santo Domingo in Hispaniola and not wanting to return home empty-handed, turned their attention to Jamaica, where the Spanish settlers could put up only a token resistance.

The English quickly captured Santiago De La Vega but they lacked workers to exploit their conquest. Barbados and the Leeward Islands– St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Monserrat– were already under their dominion, and from them the new owners brought manpower to colonize Jamaica. Records show that the vast majority of the first wave was made up of young Irish men and women, mostly servants, bondsmen, or bonded servants.

And how did they reach Barbados? For that, we have to thank Oliver Cromwell, In his own words after the siege of Drogheda, “the officers were knocked on the head, every tenth man of the soldiers killed and the rest shipped to Barbados.” They were then traded to Jamaica as ‘white slaves’. Cromwell instituted a system of forced labour, which would also provide British planters in the Caribbean with a massive influx of white indentured labourers.

Cromwell’s son, Henry, was made Major General in command of the forces in Ireland. It was under his reign that thousands of Irish men and women were shipped to the West Indies.

The Irish prisoners made up for a serious labour shortage caused by the English planter’s lack of access to African slaves. Numbers vary, but reliable estimates put the number of Irish shipped out at between 30,000 to 80,000 people.

In 1775, nineteen-year-old Charles Fitzgerald, naval officer, write to his mother that ‘the jet black ladies of Africa’s burning sands have made me forget the unripened beauties of the North’. A few months later he followed with the news that she could look forward to a ‘copper coloured grandchild’.

Relations between the Irish men and African women were as much a staple of the Caribbean as malaria, yellow fever, rum drinking and turtle soup.

Jamaica is a beautiful island. Many Jamaicans have blue and navy blue eyes. They are by nature nosey, always dying to know where you’re from. I found them chatty and funny, just as if I landed in a bar in Connemara. It was a wonderful experience and Jamaicans obviously retain an inherited Irish culture. I certainly felt at home, now I know why. I was not aware of any Irish influence before I went. I will be back in Jamaica for sure as soon as I can.