Migration and the Making of Ireland by Bryan Fanning (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Migration and the Making of Ireland, Bryan Fanning (Dublin: University College Dublin Press/Preas Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath, 2018), 347 pages. While it is not universally acknowledged, as most people do not want to know, immigration and thus emigration is the big political question of our time. There is a sense in which it was always thus, since we found our way out of eastern Africa some 60 or 80 or more thousand years ago. This study attempts to look at our own tiny little corner of the flow of peoples and, by doing so, wittingly exposes the global nature of our island home. It would be difficult for a study to be more comprehensive, unless it was given a double or more hundred pages. Each paragraph is packed with information, duly footnoted and sourced to its lair in a reputable publication or study. The style is easy, direct and informative, so much so that you would wonder why it is not the regular bedside read of journalists and politicians, who see the question of immigration as a problem and that of emigration to be ignored. Yet, because of the cool and dispassionate exposition of the facts, it is unlikely to raise a storm in Leinster House or in the non-smoking back rooms of journalistic joint-chat. Facts do not an argument make, unless brought into the armoury of some other prejudicial ideology. Yet again, this is a book that is rich in facts. Not facts as just statistics, but as events that were and are embedded in our time and place. It is part history, part sociology and part cultural and political commentary, but so what? The study of life and existence is a happy mish-mash of all our divided disciplines, and to leave any one in the jar that is kept by the door is an act of stupid exclusion. But before these facts, there is the general exposition of the history of emigration and of immigration during our longish history. Following the introduction and a brief chapter masterfully telescoping thousands of years into a few short pages, we are taken on a roll through plantations and transplantations and then the stories of people from different cultures and religions, including the German Palatines, Jews, and Scottish settlers, leading on to the more recent immigrants, particularly Poles, Africans, Muslims from Studies • volume 108 • number 432 498 Winter 2019/20: Book Reviews different countries, our own journeys to America and elsewhere then and now, while not ignoring Latvians, Brazilians, Chinese, Indians, Filipinos and other nationalities, as well as dealing with the travails of refugees and asylum seekers in a measured and plainly readable way. It is difficult to see how anyone could set down in such a clear fashion the tangled story of those first thousands of years as is done in that opening chapter. Although ancient pre-history is the most embedded in the past of all, in recent years it is the most open to modern revision. This is because of the astounding new work being done on the DNA of bones and cadavers as they arise from beneath the bogs, or not. In one sense, it can only be a brave intrepid researcher who will enter this field, as it is always shifting, depending on each new discovery in both swamp and laboratory. On the other hand, it would be difficult to quibble with the direct provisional inclusions set down in this chapter. Later centuries provide their own difficulties, as different and more diffuse evidence arrives in great abundance. Again, this is handled with great sensitivity, analysing mountains of material with only a mouse of space in which to make sense of it. Not often understood is the author’s clear argument that the twelfth and thirteenth century Church was part of the Anglo-Norman cultural and political conquest, an argument which finds its own echo in a later chapter with his statement that ‘The Catholic Church preached a quietist doctrine of accommodation to English culture’; and while this is said in the context of the Irish in Britain, there is some evidence that it had a certain validity in the...