Many Irish were sold as slaves, and so were many Scots, Welsh and English. But no Irish women were forced to breed with blacks. That is a lie.  Please prove me wrong with sources. Well, here is one guy who seems to concur with the OP. Interesting reading here.      Planters then began to breed Irish women with African men to produce more slaves who had lighter skin and brought a higher price. The practice became so widespread that in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.”  This legislation was not the result of any moral or racial consideration, but rather because the practice was interfering with the profits of the Royal African Company! It is interesting to note that from 1680 to 1688, the Royal African Company sent 249 shiploads of slaves to the Indies and American Colonies, with a cargo of 60,000 Irish and Africans. More than 14,000 died during passage.   http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articl...0030618jfc.htm      For any of you guys interested in classic movies and the topic of Irish/White slavery in the Americas, I recommend you check out  Captain Blood  from 1935 starring Errol Flynn(who is rumored to have been a Fascist sympathizer and a spy for the Nazis in real life;)), the lovely Olivia de Haviland and Basil Rathbone.     It is about an Irish doctor named Peter Blood who is accused of being a rebel and sent over to Jamaica on a slave ship to be sold into slavery. It gives you a good look at what Irish slavery was like in the Caribbean. The whole first half of the movie takes place mostly on the plantation in Jamaica, but during the second half of the film they escape and he(Blood)becomes a notorious Caribbean pirate, hence the title of the film- Captain Blood. It's a great movie, one of my favorites.     Here is another interesting little read on Irish slavery in the West Indies that I dug up on a google search.    http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT     Estimates vary between 80,000 and 130,000 regarding the   amount of Irish sent into slavery in America and the West Indies   during the years of 1651 - 1660: Prendergast says 80,000(17);   Boudin 100,000(18); Emmet 120,000 to 130,000(19); Lingard 60,000   up until 1656(20); and Condon estimates the number of Irish   transported to the British colonies in America from 1651 - 1660   exceeded the total number of their inhabitants at that period, a   fact which ought not to be lost sight of by those who undertake   to estimate the strength of the Celtic element in this   nation...(21)     All writers on the 17th century American colonies are in   agreement that the treatment of white servants or  white slaves in   English colonies was cruel to the extreme, worse than that of   black slaves; that inhuman treatment was the norm, that torture   (and branding FT, fugitive traitor, on the forehead) was the   punishment for attempted escape.  Dunn stated: Servants were   punished by whipping, strung up by the hands and matches lighted   between their fingers, beaten over the head until blood ran,   --all this on the slightest provocation.(30) Ligon, an eyewitness   in Barbados from 1647-1650 said, Truly, I have seen cruelty   there done to servants as I did not think one Christian could   have done to another.(31)    ^ By the way. You can see all of that cruel treatment, including the branding of the FT on an Irishman's forehead because he was caught trying to escape, in the movie I recommended. (Captain Blood).:) From what I've read on the matter, Irish slaves were often treated much worse than Blacks because Blacks actually fetched a higher price at slave markets, an Irish slave wasn't worth as much so they weren't as concerned if they died, they could always get more for a reasonable price.    Something I was reading about White/Irish slavery in the USA.   http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html      Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America's first slaves.   These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were.  This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.    Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.     In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.    Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. Oh, said the worker, the n*gg**s are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.