I was amazed to stumble across this info on the Irish slave trade. I am of Afro-Caribbean descent make me wonder how many people like me have distant Irish ancestors?Clearly the history of the populating of the the Caribbean islands is fascinating and very complex.This area of demographics definitely needs more research.

When my father came to London in the early 1950's he told me that he always got on extremely well with the Irish and found their accents easier to understand than the cockneys.There are definitely similar speech patterns and cadences in Jamaican Patois and the Irish accent.New the Bajan accent is a different matter that has definite similarities with the West country accent which I believe was due to the prisoners who where transported there after the Duke of Monmouth rebellion in 1685 I wonder how much they were sold for? Were any prisoners of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 sold into slavery?

It would be extremely interesting to do some DNA test on a cross section of people of Caribbean descent to see where their ancestors originated.

I have read about Barbary pirates raiding the western fringes of the UK and Ireland for slaves in the 16th and 17th centuries but the scale of the Irish slave trade seems to be a a different magnitude.Why don't more people know about this ?