Irish In Britain Research Articles

‘Irish fever’ in Britain during the Great Famine: immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ’47’

AbstractDuring the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ’47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focusing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western port of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain's Irish population faced in the 1850s.

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

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...

‘Unhappy and Wretched Creatures’: Charity, Poor Relief and Pauper Removal in Britain and Ireland during the Great Famine

Abstract During the Great Famine (1845–51) hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees fled to Britain, escaping the hunger and disease afflicting their homeland. Many made new lives there, but others were subsequently shipped back to Ireland by poor law authorities under the laws of Settlement and Removal. This article explores the coping strategies of the Famine Irish in Britain, and the responses of poor law authorities to the inflow of refugees with a particular focus on their use of removal. We argue that British poor law unions in areas heavily affected by the refugee crisis adopted rigorous removal policies, and that the non-settled Irish were consequently deeply reluctant to apply for poor relief, doing so only when alternative sources of support were unavailable. Thus, the true scale of Irish hardship was hidden from the official record. The article also explores, for the first time, the experiences of those sent back to Ireland, a country suffering from the devastating effects of Famine. The combination of heavy Irish immigration to Britain and large-scale removals back to Ireland created distrust between the authorities at British and Irish port towns, as both sides felt aggrieved by the inflow of destitute Irish arriving on their shores. At the centre of all this were the Irish poor themselves. Uncertainty, dislocation and hardship were often their experience, and we argue that this endured long after the Famine had ended; that the events of the late 1840s, indeed, created a new reality for the Irish in Britain.

The Knutsford Hotel

The events following the Easter Rising in 1916, the executions in Dublin and incarceration of the volunteers in Frongoch have been examined and published on multiple occasions. What remains missing are studies of the experience of prisoners in British gaols as they waited for the British Government to decide what to do with them. The most important studies of their prison experience have been completed by William Murphy and Seán McConville. Knutsford was a military prison and unlike the more relaxed regimes of civilian prisons where photographs of notable prisoners including Michael Collins were taken no such records for Knutsford exist. The words and memories of the remaining volunteers remain largely unpublished other than in one or two fleeting sentences. Although the cohort sent to Knutsford did not contain any of the leaders of the Easter Rising significant figures were incarcerated there, including William X. O’Brien, Richard Mulcahy, Oscar Traynor and W.J Brennan-Whitmore. The Witness Statements, letters and poems of those who endured their imprisonment at Knutsford reveal an intimate story of abuse, stress and support of the Irish in Britain, in what, with gallows humour, they called the Knutsford Hotel.

Seamus O’Fawkes and other characters

On 8 March 1973, the violence of Belfast spread to the streets of London as the IRA launched their bombing campaign in England. This article examines the cartoon coverage of IRA bomb attacks on English cities published in the British press during the early 1970s. By investigating political cartoons from leading national newspapers, this article sheds new light on reactions to the violence and explores how this affected the lived experiences of the Irish in Britain. It highlights how newspapers used symbols of Britishness and WWII iconography to (re)construct an imagined British community in the face of the IRA threat. The cartoons also indicate a more ambiguous image of the Irish in Britain, one of both harbourers and victims of terrorists. This focus on pictorial representations reveals the complexity of press attitudes towards IRA bombings as the humour inherent in cartoons enables them to allude to ideas journalists could not.

Transforming research into art: the making and staging of My English Tongue, My Irish Heart, a research-based drama about the Irish in Britain

This article explores the use of research-based theatre as an alternative mode of research representation and audience engagement in the field of Irish migration studies. Although theatre-based methods of research inquiry and presentation have attracted growing academic interest in recent decades, there are few examples of research-based projects that originate in literary or historical research, and fewer still that have resulted in full-scale theatrical productions. My English Tongue, My Irish Heart is one such work, a play that purposefully seeks to expand the public reach of research outward from universities into the communities that were originally studied. The first part of the article outlines the play’s origins and development; the second explores the chief conceptual and artistic challenges that arose during its creation; and the third presents a critical evaluation of the play’s reception, drawing on audience feedback data collected during its month-long tour of Ireland and the UK in May 2015.

The Irish abroad: Better questions through a better source, the Canadian census

A considerable body of writing on the Irish abroad now exists and it is possible from this literature to identify certain patterns of inquiry. For the most part the British studies of the Irish abroad are confined to actual emigrants and little attention is devoted to the issue of acculturation of second and third generation Irish in Britain. It is apparent, also, that many of these studies treat only the Catholic Irish. In the Canadian context, however, it is possible, using religious and ethnic census data, to identify the relative fortunes of Catholic and Protestant Irish emigrants in both the first and successive generations. A method of analysis is described and it is suggested that, employing alternative sources, a similar approach might be feasible for studies of the Irish in countries other than Canada.

Place, belonging and second generation return migration from Britain to Ireland

The enduring connections between the children of migrants and their parental homelands suggest that the parental home place/s frequently remain meaningful and significant to next generations. This paper aims to explore the concept of belonging in the context of second generation return migration. It is based on research with a small group of the children of the Irish in Britain who, as adults, chose to move to Ireland; a return to a perceived home. The term ‘belonging’ captures the desire for some sort of attachment (Probyn, 1996). In the case of second generation returnees it is the desire for an attachment to place, the feeling or expectation that ‘I belong here’ (Antonsich, 2010). A qualitative methodology was used in order to explore the relationship these migrants have with Ireland and places in it and the results show how three experiences of ‘belongingness’ emerged. The first is the belief, that this is undoubtedly the place that the person belongs, in spite of what others may think or say. The second is a sense of not belonging, a feeling of displacement. The third is a reflexive sense of belonging; an acceptance of the benefits of a loosening of ties to place with evidence for maximising the benefits of dual belongings.

Place, belonging and second generation return migration from Britain to Ireland

The enduring connections between the children of migrants and their parental homelands suggest that the parental home place/s frequently remain meaningful and significant to next generations. This paper aims to explore the concept of belonging in the context of second generation return migration. It is based on research with a small group of the children of the Irish in Britain who, as adults, chose to move to Ireland; a return to a perceived home. The term ‘belonging’ captures the desire for some sort of attachment (Probyn, 1996). In the case of second generation returnees it is the desire for an attachment to place, the feeling or expectation that ‘I belong here’ (Antonsich, 2010). A qualitative methodology was used in order to explore the relationship these migrants have with Ireland and places in it and the results show how three experiences of ‘belongingness’ emerged. The first is the belief, that this is undoubtedly the place that the person belongs, in spite of what others may think or say. The second is a sense of not belonging, a feeling of displacement. The third is a reflexive sense of belonging; an acceptance of the benefits of a loosening of ties to place with evidence for maximising the benefits of dual belongings.

Citizens of Nowhere: longing, belonging and exile among Irish Protestant writers in Britain, c.1830–1970

Since the 1970s, the literature on the history of the worldwide Irish diaspora has become increasingly sophisticated, with scholars employing a range of innovative techniques to capture aspects of the migratory experience. Many challenges remain, however, in charting the multifaceted experiences of the Irish in Britain. This article makes the case for a cultural study of Irish Protestants in Britain. It examines the contours of the Irish Protestant migratory mind-set, focusing on the writings of a number of creative émigrés, temporary and permanent, such as W.B. Yeats, Denis Ireland, Nesca Robb, and John Hewitt. Of particular relevance are articulations of longing, belonging and exile, which shaped the literary perspective of these writers, and complicated their relationships with Ireland and Britain. Attitudes regarding emigration within Protestant Ireland are also probed to tease out cross-channel ideals and fears.

Theorising the “suspect community”: counterterrorism, security practices and the public imagination

This article considers Hillyard’s first application of the term “suspect community” to the Irish in Britain in the era of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and its more recent application to Muslims in the global war on terror. A review of the application of the term “suspect community” and research in the field points to the problems associated with constructing an entire population and to problems of misidentification. Ethnographic and other evidence illustrate the stigmatisation, alienation and violence that results from its deployment. Given these difficulties and Greer’s objections to the use of the term “suspect community”, a redefinition of the concept of “suspect community” is proposed, borrowing from Anderson’s concept of the imagined community. The “suspect community” is not merely the product of legal and security apparatuses, but the product of a larger cultural apparatus or “imaginary”. It is redefined as “a community created in and by the securitised imagination and enacted in a processes of ‘othering’ through a range of security practices of counter-terrorism”. The “suspect community” is not an embodied community, but an imagined one, whose boundaries are permeable and shifting and in the eye of the beholder. Its operations are distinct from Islamophobia or anti-Irish racism, yet racism, Islamophobia and other forms of subordination may well be implicated in the process of “othering” the suspect. The effect of being “suspect” on the performance of identity and citizenship is indicated in the conclusion.

Reply to “‘Oh This Division of Allegiance!’ Being Both Irish and British?”

The author responds to Elizabeth Malcolm ‘s critique to the book The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001. Harte reflects upon the process of making an anthology and points out the challenging aspects of his research considering the constitutive complexity of autobiographical works when they are taken as historical sources. Keywords: the Irish in Britain; autobiography; memoir

Realism and the Irish Immigrant: Documentary, Fiction, and Postwar Irish Labor

Irish realism of the 1960s has often been interpreted as a continuation and rejuvenation of the tradition of Irish naturalism, particularly in its concern to undermine the perceived romanticism of revivalist myths in postindependence Ireland. While Irish realist social critique was indeed an important strand of 1960s fiction, especially in the work of John McGahern, this essay argues that it was cross-fertilized by other realist narrative modes, including British documentary writing of the 1950s and 1960s. The Irish New Wave, however, differs in important respects from its British counterpart. Irish fiction registers the ambiguous class position of the Irish in Britain, and narrative strategies common to working-class realist texts, such as the delineation of the relationship between place and community and the representation of social mobility, proved inadequate for articulating lives lived within the Irish community in Britain. Focusing on the figure of the male laborer as represented in contemporary sociological texts and in the work of Donall Mac Amhlaigh and Tom Murphy, the essay examines the development of contrasting narratives of class and community informed both by traditional Irish discourses of emigration and by newly emergent documentary realism.

Adomnán, plague and the Easter controversy

AbstractAdomnán's description (Vita Columbae II.46) of how the intercession of St. Columba preserved the Picts and the Irish in Britain alone among the peoples of western Europe against two great epidemics of bubonic plague is a coded defence of their use of the traditional Irish 84-year Easter table against the Dionysian Easter table as used throughout the rest of western Europe. His implication is that God sent the plagues to punish those who used the Dionysian table. Hence Adomnán still adhered to the 84-year table by the time that he composed the Vita Columbae c. 697. It probably took a third epidemic 700–c. 702 to persuade Adomnán that his interpretation of the earlier epidemics was incorrect, so that Bede (HE V.15) is correct to date his conversion to the Dionysian table to a third visit to Northumbria c. 702.

New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland. Edited by Martin J. Mitchel. Pp ix, 254. Edinburgh: John Donald. 2008. £20 paperback. - The literature of the Irish in Britain: autobiography and memoir. Edited by Liam Harte. Pp xl, 301. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. £58 hardback; £18.99 paperback.

New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland. Edited by Martin J. Mitchel. Pp ix, 254. Edinburgh: John Donald. 2008. £20 paperback. - The literature of the Irish in Britain: autobiography and memoir. Edited by Liam Harte. Pp xl, 301. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. £58 hardback; £18.99 paperback. - Volume 37 Issue 147

Why didn't Kevin Keegan play for Ireland? Contrasting narratives of the Irish in Britain

This article considers a range of contrasting narratives about the Irish in Britain that are sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory. These narratives reflect the complexity of the Irish immigrant experience itself, from integration to alienation, and help to explain the persistence of cultural stereotypes. The contradictory nature of this experience also helps to understand the ways in which the Irish have contributed to wider popular culture in Britain, especially in the case of the second-generation Irish who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s.

On the edge: the Irish in Britain as a troubled and troubling presence in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale

Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdale's have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic and anachronistically maintaining outmoded religious beliefs incompatible with the material interests of the working class. By contrast, McGovern has frequently used his ‘Irish’ characters to engage critically with his own ‘Liverpool Irish’ Catholicism and as the focal point for his distinctively moral vision of British society.

Routes Irish: ‘Irishness’, ‘authenticity’ and the working class in the films of Ken Loach

Although the filmmaker Ken Loach possesses a reputation for dealing with Irish politics and history in his films and television plays, his portrait of the Irish in Britain has been much less commented upon. This article indicates how a discourse of ‘Irishness’ is threaded through his work set in England and Scotland and how this involves appealing to Irish-Catholic elements of working-class experience as a means of reinforcing the sense of ‘authenticity’ and working-class disadvantage that is the hallmark of his work. At the same time, it also involves invoking the working-class camaraderie and, in some cases, political resistance that is prompted by social and economic inequality. In this respect, Loach's films may be seen to rely on relatively familiar images of the Irish – variants of the ‘slum Irish’ and the ‘fighting Irish’ – while simultaneously complicating conventional understandings of the ‘British’ working class.

Census Ethnic Categories and Second-Generation Identities: A Study of the Irish in England and Wales

This article focuses on the second-generation Irish in Britain, and presents findings of the relationship between particular social characteristics and predictions of the likelihood of second-generation Irish selecting ‘White Irish’ or ‘White British’ in the 2001 Census in England and Wales. Using a combination of new quantitative data and earlier (unpublished) qualitative evidence, it analyses the complexity underlying the public claiming of a British or Irish identity in the Census and argues that it is not possible to predict that individuals with the closest attachments to Ireland will necessarily select the ‘White Irish’ category nor that those who select ‘White British’ inevitably have weaker ties. The ONS Longitudinal Survey data presented here reveal that age, gender, marital status, educational qualifications, upward social mobility and number of Irish-born parents are significant social characteristics increasing the likelihood of particular selections of census category. The article discusses the form of the ethnic question and its impact on response patterns, proposed revisions for the 2011 Census, and the usefulness or otherwise of census categories as a lens for examining second-generation identification.

Reviews: History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence., a Companion to Bede, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England, Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, the Ends of Life:

Reviews: History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence., a Companion to Bede, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England, Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, the Ends of Life: