Irish In Britain Research Articles

The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (review)

Reviewed by: The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 José Lanters (bio) Liam Harte, ed. The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xl + 301 pp. ISBN 978-1403949875, £55 / $US75. Liam Harte recounts in the introduction to this fascinating anthology that his own father, like his father before him, worked for many seasons in Britain as a “July barber,” departing every summer from his native County Mayo to work as a migratory harvester in northern England. Harte himself left Ireland to further his education in Britain, and now teaches at the University of Man-chester. The editor of a previous collection of essays about the Irish autobiographical tradition (Modern Irish Autobiography, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Harte has here put together an anthology of sixty-three excerpts from life writings by authors of Irish birth or background who lived and worked in Britain between the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the present day, ranging from unskilled laborers and domestic servants to canonical authors like W. B. Yeats and John B. Keane. The collection represents considerable research since many of the texts are out of print, difficult to access, or exist only in manuscript. As the author states in his theoretically informed introduction, the anthology cannot claim to be definitive or comprehensive about the experience of being Irish in Britain, as much material may have been lost, and the majority of emigrants did not have the inclination, ability, or opportunity to express their thoughts on paper. Harte sees the fact that certain categories of emigrants are under-represented in the collection—especially women, and particularly nurses and domestic servants—as silent evidence of the material impediments created by such occupations, which often claimed all of the person’s waking hours, as opposed to the types of labor performed by men. Harte’s stated purpose is to make visible, through these firsthand accounts, what is often rendered absent about the experience of emigration. He aims to give nuance to generalizations that Irish writers tended to focus on nostalgic memories of the land they had left behind rather than on their lived experience in their new environment; and to dispel the myth that “the [End Page 866] Irish in Britain” were a homogeneous group in a homogeneous place. Rather, their experiences varied widely, depending on gender, geography—London, northern England, Scotland, Wales—religion, education, occupation, social class, and political outlook, although stories of bad housing, poor nutrition, and hard drinking are much in evidence. Among these tales of hardship, Walter Hampson’s account of his 1870s childhood as an assistant chimney sweep or “climbing boy” (a practice that had been made illegal in 1840) stands out as a particularly harrowing example. Francis Fahy, on the other hand, writes of a thriving and civilized culture of Irish revivalism in 1890s Southwark, where he organized language classes and lectures on Irish literary topics by such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, Katharine Tynan, and Justin MacCarthy—whose lecture was attended by Oscar Wilde, another Irish expatriot then at the height of his fame. Nevertheless, all the writers in the collection shared the experience of displacement, even if their responses to that condition varied, and many reflect on the psychology of leaving and returning, and the anguish and camaraderie felt among the often reluctant emigrants they encountered on boats and trains. Aware of the friction between seeing these texts as “reflecting” lived history, and seeing all knowledge of the past as being discursively mediated, Harte sets out to read the texts as both social history and cultural products. If Yeats’s self-portrait as an unhappy, dislocated Victorian child in Hammersmith is to be read as “a complex amalgam of memory and imagination, forged by an inveterate self-mythologiser” (80), the same is true, to some degree at least, of all self-constructions in this anthology. Harte’s introductions to each excerpt provide background, context, and insight, and manage to be both complex and concise. The passages chosen in each case register or reflect upon aspects of the experience of being Irish in Britain; we therefore frequently see the authors in situations where...

‘Dying Irish’: eulogising the Irish in Scotland in Glasgow Observer obituaries

The Glasgow Observer newspaper, founded in 1885 by and for the Irish community in Scotland regularly published both lengthy and brief funereal and elegiac obituaries of the Irish in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They marshal an impressive, emotive and oftentimes contradictory body of evidence and anecdote of immigrant lives of the kind utilised, and as often passed over, by historians of the Irish in Britain. They contain, however, a unique perspective on the march of a migrant people bespoke of their experiences and, perhaps more importantly, the perception of their experiences in passage, in the host society and ultimately in death. Moreover, the changing sense of Victorian sensibilities over the solemnity, purpose and ritual of death into the Edwardian era finds a moot reflection in the key staples of Irish immigrant obsequies with their stress on thrift, endeavour, piety, charity and gratitude. This article explores Glasgow Observer obituaries from the 1880s to the 1920s to see what they say about the immigrants, their lives, work and culture, the Scots, migration itself, the wider relations between Britain and Ireland, and the place where Irish and British attitudes to death meet in this period. It does so by drawing upon recent sociological perspectives on obituaries and their relationship with the formation and articulation of collective memory.

A Conundrum of Irish Diasporic Identity: Mutative Ethnicity1

This comparative study of the experience of the Irish in Britain and the United States draws upon a wealth of contemporary literature in order to stress the instability of the content of Irish ethnicity, its increasing looseness of association with Ireland and its tendency to ‘mutate’ in content over space and time, perhaps most strikingly according to the various political and social benefits which favoured its preservation from one locale to another. The essay argues that ‘mutative ethnicity’ and ‘adaptative ethnicity’ therefore become the terms which best explain the history of the Diaspora and cast light on Irish belief and behaviour. It shows that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish also had to change it. Thus the identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain is, like Irish identity elsewhere, a somewhat complicated and shifting concept, moving and developing in a jostling for cultural, social and political space in which the British and Irish changed one another.

The Irish in Britain, 1800–1914. By Donald M. MacRaild. Pp viii, 96. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press. 2006. €9. (Studies in Irish Economic and Social History, 9.)

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Curious Streets

The psychological journey of migration is far longer than the geographical one.1 At the peak of his career in the mid-1980s, Desmond Hogan was being compared to Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro2 a...

Transnationalism, Networks and Emigration from Post-War Ireland

Transnationalism is one of the widely-used concepts in the study of contemporary migrations. This article assesses the value of a transnational approach to the study of post-war Irish migration, when over a million people left Ireland, the vast majority travelling to Great Britain. The principal conclusion is that informal personal networks transcended the borders of the nation state and the Irish in Britain existed in a transnational social space which spanned the Irish Sea and included fellow-migrants, and family and friends living at home.

Making the grand figure: lives and possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770

This pioneering study of the material culture of Stuart and Hanoverian Ireland reveals unsuspected richness and diversity of lifestyle, habitat, and mentality. Like its highly praised predecessor, A New Anatomy of Ireland, it abounds with quirky people and vivid scenes and is a striking reappraisal of Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy. The book ranges from the governing elite of Dublin Castle to Dublin itself, to provincial towns and the countryside beyond, and even to the Irish in Britain and Europe. Toby Barnard describes varied buildings, gardens, pictures, and belongings, showing how possessions highlighted and widened divisions between rich and poor, women and men, Irish Catholics and Protestant settlers. The book allows Ireland for the first time to be integrated into discussions of the pleasures and pains of consumerism.

The Irish Theme in the Writings of Bill Naughton

The student interested in cultural assimilation, hybridity, and naturalization, in masculinity, authorship, and identity, in what happened to the Irish in Britain in the twentieth century, will turn at some point to the Mayo-born, Lancashire writer Bill Naughton (1910-1992), author of a classic children's story collection The Goalkeeper's Revenge and Other Stories (1961), of Alfie (1965), the film which helped define 1960s London, and of a series of autobiographies largely centering on his Irish childhood and upbringing in Bolton. It has been the historic role of Irish writers from Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Oscar Wilde, from Elizabeth Bowen to William Trevor, to give the English back to themselves in a gallery of portraits. Naughton is part of this tradition, but, unlike these other writers, his subject is the English working class, which he writes about from within, with both sympathy and knowledge. It can be readily conceded that his work is not at the forefront of modern English or Irish writing, but it does deserve to be better known and appreciated. Here in this discursive essay, with an eye on his Irish background, I move back and forth across his writing to reflect on his contribution not so to much the cultural greening of Britain as to the mass observation of the English and of the Irish in Britain.

The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union

C of “race” are flexible and constructed, by no means solely determined by genetics, biology, or skin color. “Races” are thus constructs of the human intellect, and these acts of construction, or racialization, are subjects for legitimate academic interrogation. Racism certainly cannot be reduced to chromatism or prejudice based on skin color, and the recovery of processes of racialization is a research program of relevance to, and of increasing popularity within, the field of Irish studies. Some researchers, however, have gone further and emphasized the fact and power of circumlocutions adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized in spite of their lacking clear signifiers of racial otherness. For certain scholars, the inferior position of the Irish in Britain within racial hierarchies explains their long-continued invisibility or lowly status, among other features of BritishIrish history. These scholars often imply that it is either accurate or politically productive to draw substantive connections between the positions of the Irish and those of racialized nonwhite groups during phases of colonialism. After surveying some examples of this literature, this article will suggest serious historical and critical flaws in some common and often politically potent recent interpretations. First, there are those political teleologies that imply that to emphasize or exaggerate historical and contemporary verisimilitudes between the Irish and racialized nonwhite groups is to advance a politically progressive agenda. These can be faulted on both historical and theoretical grounds, in that they trivialize or misinterpret the plight of nonwhite victims of imperialism or subjugation, iron-

Patterns of alcohol consumption and problems among the Irish in London: A preliminary comparison of pub drinkers in London and Dublin

Alcohol-related morbidity and mortality rates among the Irish in England and Wales are higher than bothother ethnic minorities and the general population. Higher consumption per episode of drinking is responsiblefor higher overall mean consumption levels among the Irish. Patterns of consumption and problems amongthe Irish were investigated in two samples recruited in pubs in London and Dublin. Mean weekly alcohol consumptionwas found to be higher – by approximately 50% – in the London sample with more high-risk drinkinga result of more frequent drinking patterns. Hazardous drinking was strongly normative among youngIrish people in both London and Dublin. The distinct Irish style of drinking – greater quantities per episode– and the English pattern of more frequent drinking combine to produce elevated risk among the Irish inLondon. Irish drinking patterns in general, and the alcohol-related needs of the young Irish in Britain in particular,require further study to better understand the nature of risk and to prevent harm.

Sectarianism at work: Accounts of employment discrimination against Irish Catholics in Scotland

This article examines accounts of discrimination in employment against Irish Catholics in Glasgow from both majority and minority ethnic and ­religious perspectives. It reveals evidence of continuing experience of sectarian discrimination in work. Of particular note is the existence of discriminatory practice affecting Catholic (Irish-descended) attempts to move up the social scale. This evidence disputes the thoroughness of analyses which ignore discrimination experience as relevant to the current social-class position of Glasgow's Irish Catholic community. The analysis presented here also questions the practice of excluding 'white' ethnic groups from most studies of ethnicity in Britain and considers whether sectarianism or racism might most aptly describe experiences marked out by religious belonging but clearly denoting ethnic origin. As part of a wider study of prolonged and continuing health disadvantage among the Irish in Britain, it is suggested that discrimination is one component in any explanation of the health of the Irish or Irish Catholic minority, whose minority experience is usually overlooked by researchers of ethnicity.

Emigration and the Irish abroad: recent writings

There has been a remarkable revival of interest in the Irish abroad within the past ten years. In part this is attributable to the new confidence experienced by the Irish at home with the economic success of the ‘tiger economy’ and the decline of ‘migration by necessity’. Equally the Irish abroad, especially in the United States, have risen to the top of the immigrant pile and have achieved prosperity and assurance of their position in their adopted homelands. This itself has led to a reduction in some of the inhibitions that have held back serious attention to the history of the immigrants and to a recognition of their place in the sun. Public awareness has been further stimulated by changing patterns of immigration and by the development of new attitudes towards immigrants in the host societies, now including Ireland itself. Such changes have created a need to give meaning to the term ‘plural society’ and to challenge the racism that has characteristically followed in the wake of increased numbers of immigrants.These seven books are representative of a large number that have begun to address the topic in the last few years from an historical point of view. For the most part they relate to the Irish in Britain but use the focus on the immigrants to open up issues about the history of Ireland and Britain and the role of each in an emerging global system. For example, one of them is a comparative account of the Irish in Liverpool and Philadelphia which allows consideration of some of the broader questions regarding the treatment of the Irish immigrant in the literature both by historians and other interested scholars.

The Irish in Britain: The invisibility of ethnicity and anti-Irish racism

(2000). The Irish in Britain: The invisibility of ethnicity and anti-Irish racism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 137-147.

‘Britain's Irish Question: Britain's European Question?’ British-Irish relations in the context of European Union and The Belfast Agreement

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

Regional Mortality and the Irish in Britain: Findings from the ONS Longitudinal Study

We explore predictions from three sociological models linking excess Irish mortality in England and Wales with urban and regional patterns of settlement and mortality.The analysis is prospective, of urban residents aged 25‐74 in a 1 per cent sample of the 1971 Census of England and Wales, linked with death certificates from 1971‐1985 (the ONS Longitudinal Study). Analysis is by multilevel modelling of probabilities of death.The association of past Irish immigration with contemporary regional mortality is confirmed. However Model 1, suggesting that excess Irish mortality is solely a regional effect related to the economic history of the north and west, is rejected. Model 2, suggesting that excess Irish mortality is due to political and religious differences which have tended to disadvantage this group similarly across regions of England and Wales, is supported. Model 3, suggesting that the economic model (1) and cultural model (2) interact, creating sharper political and religious divisions and greater excess Irish mortality in the north and west, is rejected.

Notes from the diaspora: anti-discriminatory social work practice, Irish people and the practice curriculum

This discussion will focus on anti-discriminatory social work practice and Irish people. Here, it will be asserted that an Irish dimension has been historically excluded from all debates centred on anti-discriminatory practice. The complex issue of cultural identity will be briefly explored and issues specific to Irish ‘invisibility’ will be addressed. The paper will then look at key factors in relation to the Irish in Britain and, in conclusion, suggestions will be made as to how an Irish dimension to anti-discriminatory practice might be incorporated into the practice curriculum.

The Congregation of Christian Brothers in Scotland, 1951-1983

Books which claim to give an account of either the Irish or the Catholic Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hardly give mention of the Christian Brothers and their missions. J. A. Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London 1938), is recognised as an investigative study of a long neglected file of scholarly accomplishment, but the Christian Brothers are not even mentioned. David Mathew, Catholicism in England, 1535-1935 (London 1936), likewise gives no reference to the Brothers. Thomas Burke in his Catholic History of Liverpool gives transient references to the Christian Brothers,1 but peruse the pages of The English Catholics, 1850-1950, a series of academic papers edited by Bishop Beck, and you will discover only four passing references.2 I would argue, however, that the missions of the Christian Brothers in Britain have been an important influence in the life of the Church and education. In the early part of the nineteenth century three men made a substantial impact on the Irish scene: Daniel O'Connell, political agitator; Father Theobald Mathew, founder of the Temperance Movement; and Edmund Rice, founder of the Congregation of Brothers of the Christian Schools of Ireland, and founder of the Order of Presentation Brothers, who has been described by his biographer as 'an outstanding influence of the period, and most important'.3 Rice was born in 1762 at Westcourt, Co. Kilkenny. After giving up a successful business, in 1802 he entered into religious life by founding and opening a school for the poor and underprivileged Catholic boys in Waterford. By 1820 the order was established on sanction by a papal brief, and by 1826 several communities and schools were established in the towns and cities of Ireland. In 1825 and 1826 Rice sent communites to Preston and London respectively, and this was the foundation of the first Christian Brothers' mission to England. The Brothers withdrew in 1880 due to a variety of events and circumstances which slowly chipped away, eroding the expansion of the Institute's work in England in the

Health research on the Irish in Britain

Health research on the Irish in Britain

Reconstructing deconstructing 'race': British political discourses about the Irish in Britain

This article examines the 'forced inclusion' of the Irish within a 'myth of homogeneity' which developed in Britain from the 1950s onwards. In particular, it explains the complex reasons for exclusion of the Irish from the immigration controls introduced in the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Further, the article challenges the notion that this exclusion of the Irish from the 1962 legislation was primarily due to their 'whiteness'. It explores the significance of Northern Ireland's location in the United Kingdom for British policies in relation to citizens of the Irish Republic. The article ends by arguing that 'forced inclusion' within a national collectivity is no necessary protection against racialization, problematization and discrimination.

Health research on the Irish in Britain: invisible and excluded

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