No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas

This is an interesting article.

Unfortunately, it veers close the same kind of mistake that those who claim "We Irish were slaves too!" are making with the headline simply declaring that the Irish "weren't slaves." The first statement falsely equates Irish servitude to African slavery, while the headline of this article asserts there is no connection at all between indentured servitude and slavery, which is also an overstatement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights draws a connection between slavery and indentured servitude here (emphasis mine):


LINK

Clearly, the UDoHR considers servitude one of the "forms" of slavery.

Article I of the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (a UN treaty adopted in 1957) says the following (emphasis mine):

LINK 2

Indentured servitude meets the requirements of a person over which "any" of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised, whereas the slavery black people suffered meets the requirements of "all of the powers" of ownership being exercised. According to this treaty, both are examples of slavery, one much more severe.

The truth is more complicated than either "We Irish were slaves too!" or "The Irish were not slaves" would imply. The article gets into it, but the headline does the article an injustice. What the (Irish in this case) indentured servant suffered was barbaric and, under any modern definition, a form of slavery. 

But that doesn't make it the same kind or degree of slavery that Africans went through and to try to say that Irish people got through it OK and black people should just suck it up is foolish nonsense for a wide variety of reasons.

However, given that we are seeing the rise of many forms of slavery which may not be directly equivalent to African slavery (sex trafficking and forced migrant labor, for example) we get into dangerous territory when we say something isn't slavery merely because it isn't as bad as the African slave trade was.