DIASPORA
LET’S IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT Irish history without migration. That seems almost impossible to contemplate. No movement of English and Scottish settlers across the North Channel and Irish Sea to settle in Ireland throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under various schemes of plantation and settlement, and in doing so irrevocably alter the ethnic and religious composition of the island. No 1641 rebellion when Ulster Catholic resentment about dispossession and displacement boiled over into a sectarian bloodbath. And what of the mass migrations to colonial America of Ulster Presbyterians, who played such a critical role in the American revolutionary era? How would the ethnic and religious composition of the people on the island of Ireland differ, and indeed that of the major receiving societies of North America, Britain, and Australasia? And what of the alternative scenarios that can be imagined if the great diasporas of the modern era had not taken place to continental Europe, North America, Australia, Britain, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and many other places? In a moment of fantastical excursion the revolutionary nationalist, Patrick Pearse, considered in 1913 another consequence of the absence of emigration—a huge population living on the island of Ireland.1 For Pearse this was a desirable outcome, even though every nationalist leader since Daniel O’Connell in the 1830s has accepted that exile was the fate of a significant number of each generation born in Ireland. Even Éamon de Valera’s views on emigration, when stripped of the usual rhetoric, could not deny the powerlessness of any government when it came to the movements of people.2
But emigration was neither inevitable nor wholly predictable. Most European societies experienced migration. Some, like Germany, England, Sweden, Norway, Scotland, Italy, and Spain, had a very high incidence of emigration at particular points in time, such as the early twentieth century or the years after the Second World War. That said, no other Western European society has had a chronological range of movement as long as Ireland’s, which stretches from the beginning of recorded human history to the present day. And, equally, no other Western European country could lay claim to the sheer geographical diversity of the settlement patterns over four centuries. Only a few places across the world have not had some contact with the “wandering” Irish, be it as navvies, soldiers, servants, merchants, colonial administrators, priests, or nuns. Why this wanderlust was so deeply embedded in Irish consciousness is clearly a matter for informed speculation. In neo-Marxist analyses the role of the periphery is to supply the metropolitan core with a bountiful supply of cheap labor, and Ireland at face value fulfills this role. More persuasively, the fate of a small island with limited supplies of national resources, peripherally located on the edge of a major landmass, may simply be to export what is arguably the greatest resource, its people. No one as yet has come up with an overarching explanation for the scale and duration of Irish emigration since 1600, perhaps because a one-size-fits-all model would never really be that useful and would only serve to conceal the inherent diversity and complexity of the history of this diaspora.
I
Few of these lofty issues concerned Owen Peter Mangan (1839–1927). Mangan had a truly remarkable life, and his experiences are broadly emblematic of the nineteenth-century world that he and his fellow migrants encountered.3 Born in Billy Hill, County Cavan in 1839, he vividly recounted in 1912 the trials and tribulations of his everyday nineteenth-century world. Mangan’s father was imprisoned after a conviction for making poteen, but he died shortly after when Owen was just two. His mother married a hedge-school teacher who was a “spoiled priest,” as many were, but he was cruel to the children. Owen was left with his brother in the care of an old woman, though they soon escaped in search of their mother, who by now was living in Monaghan with her new husband. There followed an itinerant existence until he left Ireland for work in the Lancashire textile industry in 1853. After a varied series of occupations, including time as a policeman in St Helens, Lancashire, Mangan eventually ended up running his own provisions shop in the 1860s. He got caught up with the Fenian scare of the late 1860s, eventually selling the shop. Concluding, probably accurately, that he had little future in England, in 1867 he left for Philadelphia, where his brother was based. Soon after that he headed north back into the textile industry at Fall River, Massachusetts, then the center of the American clothing manufacture boom. After some time there, he moved yet again, to Rhode Island, first settling in Providence and eventually becoming a salesman for the Metropolitan Insurance Company. He lived out his days in Lynn, Massachusetts, and died aged eighty-eight years in 1927, but not before he had recounted his experiences for posterity.
Similarly, who could have predicted that one of the principals in the unfolding drama that ultimately led to the recall of the viceroy Lord Torrington from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1850 would be a Kilkenny-born Protestant doctor, Christopher Elliott (1810–1859)? Elliott had come to Ceylon in 1845, first as a government surgeon, though before long he set up his own practice in Colombo, achieving widespread respect for his medical knowledge. He became involved with a small newspaper, the Colombo Observer, of which he was both owner and editor.4 After the brutal suppression of the Matale Revolution in 1848, Elliott used his network of contacts in London to raise the issue at Westminster, forcing a parliamentary investigation that ultimately resulted in the recall of the viceroy.5
Thousands of miles away on the northern pillar of the Arc de Triomphe, listed among France’s most distinguished soldiers, is the name Dillon. Arthur Dillon (1750–1794), known as Count Dillon in France, was the last of a long line of Dillons who served in the French army in the Regiment of Dillon. The Dillons were part of the “Wild Geese,” Catholics who left Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fighting in the armies of Spain and France. Born and raised in England, he was the grandson of Arthur Dillon (1670–1733), the Irish Jacobite commander who founded the regiment and fought with distinction in the French army in campaigns in Spain and Italy in the early 1700s.6 His grandson too was a courageous and talented soldier, serving as a general in the French forces during the American War of Independence; eventually he was made governor of Tobago in the 1780s. After the French Revolution in 1789, his loyalty to the new republican regime came under suspicion. Recalled to Paris to answer charges of being involved in a royalist conspiracy, he was condemned to death during the Reign of Terror and was guillotined in April 1794.
Or take another very different example: Mary Harris Jones (1837?–1930), born in Cork in the later 1830s, who emigrated to North America during the Great Famine, first arriving in Canada and then eventually settling in Chicago, where her seamstress shop was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871.7 In the 1890s she rose to prominence as a radical trade union leader and feminist, dubbed “Mother Jones.” To this day an iconic figure for socialists, trade unionists, and feminists, she campaigned against child labor, and sought to improve working conditions for women workers, miners, and other marginalized groups. She was famously described by a district attorney in West Virginia as “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1902, after she ignored numerous injunctions banning public meetings during a miners’ strike.
What connects these very different individuals is the interaction between Ireland and its massive diaspora, stretching back over the last four centuries. Since 1600, at least ten million people have left Ireland, settling in every part of the globe. Despite the links between the Irish at home and those scattered across the world, they are often completely neglected in historical accounts of modern Ireland, shunted off into oblivion and seen as in no way relevant to anything that occurred in Ireland. Yet all the major events in modern Irish history—including the 1798 Rebellion, the Great Famine of 1845–1852, the Land Question of the 1870s and 1880s, and the Irish Revolution of 1914–1923—were intimately connected with and influenced by the diaspora. To write the Irish story without the diaspora is to render a partial account. It is worth remembering that in 1910 the Irish-born population of New York at 250,000 people was only exceeded by the populations of Dublin and Belfast. In other words, the third-largest “Irish” city was across the Atlantic.8
II
Between 1600 and the present day the history of Ireland was profoundly shaped by the experience of migration and diasporic settlement.9 The general patterns are well known, but it is worth reminding ourselves that the initial movement of people was of settlers who arrived as part of wider plantation and settlement policies initiated by the crown in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. English and Scottish settlers, some soldiers, others merely seeking land and opportunity, arrived in significant numbers, seeking to bring “civilization” to the island. Much of the settlement in east Ulster was based around the informal movement of Scots across the North Channel rather than planned migrations. Historians now view the colonization of Ireland within broader frameworks of the concerns of British policy in the wider Atlantic world.10
Just as people arrived, there was also the concurrent displacement and subsequent exile of the Catholic middle classes, particularly to continental Europe in the dramatic moment of the flight of the earls. These “Wild Geese,” who have attracted sustained scholarly attention, settled in parts of France and Spanish Flanders, some joining the Catholic armies of Europe, even constituting themselves as separate regiments, as in the case of the Dillon regiment mentioned above.11 The Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s resulted in the confiscation of land and the exile of thousands of Catholics, many of whom ended up in the West Indies. The movement of Catholics to Europe continued across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, predominantly from middle-class families involved in commerce, the clergy, or strong landholding families who managed to evade confiscation. Irish Colleges on the continent, such as the ones at Douai, Salamanca, Paris, and Leuven, provided training for young clerics and acted as centers for Gaelic scholarship and learning, now largely displaced from Ireland itself under penal legislation.12 But it was not just clerics who spent time in Europe. Middle-class Catholics had extensive trade and mercantile contacts with continental Europe and indeed North America, especially with Newfoundland, and these also proved highly versatile migration pathways.
One remarkable cache of more than 125 letters seized from a ship traveling from Bordeaux to Dublin in 1757 gives a unique insight into an Irish diasporic community in France at a time of crisis due to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War the previous year. What emerges from these letters are the diverse religious identities of the correspondents, including John Black, a Protestant merchant who was a central figure in the Irish community at Bordeaux and who recounted stories to his son told to him by his grandmother of the massacres of Protestants during the 1641 rebellion.13 But the principal concerns were the more immediate ones of family and kin, and the correspondence shows just how important maintaining these relationships was, regardless of distance. A son, for instance, excused his lack of communication as “nothing but a bad habit that I got here.”14 Such remarkable sources are rare glimpses into conversations about essentially quite mundane yet vital matters for the individuals involved.
The life and career of Richard Hennessy (1729–1800) is a fascinating example of the tensions that existed in eighteenth-century Ireland and of how emigration was an avenue for opportunity.15 Hennessy was born in 1729, near Mallow, County Cork, where his family had managed to hold on to their lands. A second son, he was a childhood friend and schoolmate of Edmund Burke, and later married Burke’s first cousin in 1765. Despite the widely held view that he entered the French army as a senior officer in 1748, in fact he was just an ordinary soldier. He traveled to Ostend, where his uncle had a brandy-exporting business, but there were no opportunities for him there. He then moved to Cognac, where a number of Irish people were involved with the brandy trade, and his first business venture there failed. Then he moved to Bordeaux. After a series of family tragedies including the death of his wife and two sons in 1781, he decided to return to Cognac where his son, James, had been running a cognac house for another Irishman, James Saule. Saule’s death in 1788 provided the opportunity for father and son to establish the partnership of Jas. Hennessy and Sons, today a global brand. The Hennessys were a shrewd and versatile pair, and during the Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s served in the local National Guard and were fortunate enough to secure very profitable contracts to supply the French armed forces. Richard maintained close links with Ireland throughout his life in France, not least because it was good for business. On a visit to London in 1791–1792, he visited his childhood friend, Edmund Burke, at his estate in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. When he contemplated returning to Ireland on this visit, he concluded that such a trip would “I think be attended with more pain than pleasure.”16
But the most important element of eighteenth-century emigration was the remarkable movement of Ulster Presbyterians to the “land of liberty.” While arriving at precise numbers of those who left is highly problematic, at least 250,000 people emigrated from Ireland before 1775.17 Roughly three-quarters of those who left Ireland between 1700 and 1776 were Irish Protestants, mainly but not exclusively Ulster Presbyterians.18 That said, an increasing proportion of Protestants from Leinster and Munster also left Ireland for the New World. Much has been written about the role that the Scots-Irish (or “Scotch-Irish,” as they came to be known) played in colonial and revolutionary America in virtually every sphere of life. The image of the Scots-Irish as pioneers working to bring “civilization” to the more remote regions of the American colonies is an enduring one, but this often had terrible consequences for Native Americans who thwarted these plans, and historians are now paying a great deal more attention to the often catastrophic encounters between colonial Americans and indigenous peoples.19 The contribution of the Scots-Irish to the American Revolution has been raised to hagiographic proportions, yet there is no doubt that many Ulster Scots were wholeheartedly supportive of the impetus to end English “tyranny.” “Call this war by whatever name you may,” observed a German officer, “only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.”20 That Irish Protestants contributed to a disproportionate degree was largely due to a political and religious culture that stressed liberty and freedom, and equally the particular conditions that they encountered in the American colonies.21
As with most migrants who left Ireland after 1600, their subsequent histories were shaped in part by their Irish background and culture but also formed in response to the environments that they subsequently inhabited. One of the key issues for scholars has been to explore how ideas, especially political ideologies, were modified or remade through the process of movement. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the transmission of radicalism in both directions across the Atlantic in the later eighteenth century, associated with the French and American Revolutions and ultimately the 1798 Irish rebellion. Painstaking reconstruction of the diffusion of ideas among radicals in Ireland, Britain, Europe, and North America demonstrates the complexity and intensity of these connections across oceans.22
Contrary to the widespread assumption that mass Catholic migrations began with the Great Famine, in the years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the arrival of potato blight in Ireland in September 1845, approximately a million people left Ireland for North America, and perhaps half that number traveled to Britain, with thirty thousand obtaining state assistance to go to Australia on their own volition, and another forty thousand sent as transported criminals.23 Several distinguishing features of this era are particularly noteworthy, not least the increasing number of middle-class Catholics leaving and the emergence of Britain as the destination of choice, especially for the poorer Irish who did not possess the resources to fund an expensive passage across the Atlantic. As David Fitzpatrick has observed, “for the intending emigrant from Ireland, Britain’s attraction was largely negative: the costs of getting there, and indeed of returning home, were relatively low.”24 When the poor inquiry was undertaking its work in the early 1830s, it commissioned George Cornewall Lewis to conduct a survey of the Irish in Britain, which he did with characteristic thoroughness. What Lewis’s investigations showed was that many of the Irish living in British cities had come over in the 1820s, and the principal attraction was the availability of large numbers of industrial jobs with good wages created by the booming industries.25
The Great Famine changed everything. First, it led to an uncoordinated exodus, especially from 1846 on, when many took the harsh and dangerous winter voyage to Canada rather than stay in Ireland. The year 1847 was even worse, and the enduring image of the “coffin ship” stems from that year, when on-board mortality on ships carrying refugees from the crisis was high. Stricter regulation of conditions on ships lowered the death rates substantially in the following years. At least one million left Ireland during the Famine, another million in the five years that followed, in what was one of the most dramatic movements of population in recorded history.26 In 1851 more than a quarter of a million people were recorded as having left the country for “overseas” destinations.27 Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, there was a roughly one-in-three chance that a child born in Ireland coming of age would emigrate.28 Emigration became a stage then in the life cycle of young people, with profound consequences for Irish society. Irish movement across the Atlantic in the later nineteenth century was unusual in two respects: first, it was a movement of individuals rather than family groups, and second, females left in roughly equal numbers as males. This exodus had its peaks and troughs over the following fifty years, before the onset of the First World War temporarily cut off the option of emigration.29
Once the “normal” business of emigration resumed, the two new Irish states faced the prospect of the continuance of large-scale emigration in the 1920s, which may well have suited the political elites ruling the newly established entities. Those living in Northern Ireland could obtain financial support to fund journeys to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Ironically, short-distance movement predominated in the outward flows from the southern state, especially to Britain after the economy there improved in the mid-1930s. Britain was the new America with some startling consequences. For those who did leave in the 1930s, it was usually only intended to be a short stay, even if life created some unexpected twists and turns that eventually led to permanent settlement in Britain.30
The Second World War and the post-war building boom in the 1940s created many opportunities for younger migrants, and by the 1950s emigration was again reaching epidemic proportions, causing acute embarrassment to the government of the day. It was estimated in the mid-1950s that on average fifty thousand people left Ireland each year, mostly traveling to Britain. The newly independent Irish state was one of the few countries in the world to have experienced a declining population from the 1850s until the 1960s, wholly as a result of emigration. Even though rates of emigration from Northern Ireland were nowhere near the southern levels, the Stormont government does not seem to have been especially interested in emigration, perhaps because it disproportionately affected lower-skilled Catholics in West Ulster. By the 1970s improvements in the Irish economy led to a movement into the country, primarily of people who left in the 1950s and 1960s. Emigration again resumed its traditional role when a severe recession hit Ireland in the 1980s.
The mid-1990s marked a turning point in the long history of Irish migrations. The rapid economic growth and attendant prosperity associated with the “Celtic Tiger” created sufficient employment opportunities for generations coming of age for the first time since the establishment of the independent Irish state. That does not mean that emigration ceased—even at the high point of the Celtic Tiger era in 2006, people still left—but it did fundamentally alter the context. As soon as the Celtic Tiger collapsed in 2008–2009 and unemployment rose dramatically in the following years, emigration again became the safety valve that it had been for the previous 160 years. The “new” Irish left in large numbers, opting for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the more traditional route to Britain. For a generation that never expected to have to leave the country, it was a traumatic moment.
Meanwhile, one unanticipated consequence of rapid economic growth created a movement of people that in time will prove to be as significant as the arrival of English and Scottish settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the first time in modern Irish history, large numbers of people who were born outside Ireland came to live in the country, and immigration, which was virtually unheard of prior to the 1990s, developed as a significant component of population change. In 2007 just before the crash, more than 150,000 immigrants arrived in Ireland, some Irish-born, most not. Under European Union (EU) legislation, citizens of other member states could travel without restriction, and they settled in Ireland in large numbers, mainly coming from the new EU accession countries who joined the EU in May 2004, especially Poland. Another distinct flow of migrants was from outside the EU from places as diverse as China and Africa. The most recent estimates indicate that more than 500,000 people living in Ireland were born outside the country: in other words roughly one in eight of the state’s population was a “non-Irish national,” to use the crude official terminology.31 In less than two decades the ethnic composition of the population living in independent Ireland has been transformed from a homogenous white Irish-born one to a multicultural and multi-ethnic identity. For this reason, historians may well see the 2000s as a pivotal turning point in the evolution of modern Ireland in the twenty-first century.
III
The decision to leave Ireland was based on a complex set of factors, involving assessment of future life chances, economic and social opportunities, and an overall sense of whether life would be better elsewhere. Much the same reasons dominated the calculations of those who settled in Ireland over the past four centuries. For instance, the 1690s, one of the harshest decades in Scottish history, generated quite significant migration to Ulster. The movement of fifty thousand Scottish Presbyterians partly laid the foundations for the exchange of cultures and people that two centuries later would make possible the emergence of Ulster unionism.32 At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the 1950s were for independent Ireland years of deep economic recession, and mass migration reached heights that were matched only by the Famine years of the 1840s. But this could also work the other way around when potential destinations were in the grip of recession, as occurred during the recession in the American economy of the 1870s. The best example is, of course, the so-called Celtic Tiger era, when a society completely unaccustomed to inward migrations found that, largely to its surprise, that one of the consequences of economic prosperity was that people would come to live in your country.
There were, needless to say, times when such finely calibrated decisions mattered little. During the Cromwellian era the transportation of Irish Catholics as indentured servants to the Caribbean and elsewhere was a forced movement in a time of great upheaval. Equally the Famine exiles who left in the 1840s and early 1850s for North America and Britain were essentially refugees fleeing starvation and death, many of whom subsequently nurtured bitter memories of the role of the British government in failing to prevent starvation or, more critically, large-scale evictions by heartless landlords. Political revolutions such as the 1798 uprising and the Young Ireland revolt of 1848 produced small but very active and vocal exile communities. More controversially the flight of southern Protestants in the midst of the violent conflict and sectarian tensions of the Irish Revolution has been described as a forced exodus.33 At the time, and subsequently thereafter, huge symbolic significance was attached to the movement of relatively small numbers of Protestants, since this was a barometer of how minorities would be treated in the new emerging nationalist Ireland. Again there was a parallel with the expulsion of Belfast Catholics in 1922, many of whom made their way across the border into the Irish Free State.34
The migration of minorities more generally has received some treatment by historians. People on the margins of the orthodoxy of Irish society have consistently seen emigration as a pathway to emancipation, or more fundamentally, to acceptance. Young unmarried pregnant women who went to Britain to have their children or those who because of their sexual orientation were unable to continue living in the country equally perceived themselves as exiles, as did the defeated republicans who left the country in large numbers in the early 1920s heading to the United States, sensing retribution by the victorious Free State government.35 Another vocal minority were the creative writers, for whom displacement was both a rite of passage and a state of consciousness, most famously represented in the work of the best-known exile, James Joyce. But there were also such writers as Patrick MacGill and Michael McGowan, who wrote eloquently of their own experiences of emigration in Britain and the United States, blending personal memoir with essentially the collective autobiography of generations of exiles, most of whom left little by way of a historical trace.36
So even though economic considerations were one of the principal reasons for leaving Ireland, they were by no means the only cause of emigration. This is neatly encapsulated in the issue of gender, or rather the relative parity of male and female departures from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. For a variety of reasons, including the nature of the national education system—which tended to promote skills such as speaking English—Irish females were well equipped to compete in what was effectively an international labor market. So whether it be personal service in the expanding northeastern cities of the United States, or factory work in wartime Britain, Irish women could be assured of opportunities. Even though earning money was understandably a consideration, so too were autonomy and escaping the rigid control that was such a feature of life in rural Ireland. One young woman captured this nicely when she was asked whether she would return home to Ireland; the response was that she had “a better life in Croydon than Sligo.”37
Few historians now frame migration in a “push-pull” list of factors, seeing such a dichotomy as unable to capture the complexities of the human experience. If economists are wont to speak of human capital, labor as a commodity, and cost-benefits analysis of migration, historians seek now to understand, recover, and explore the context in which people left Ireland. Such contextual readings challenge older traditionalist accounts, which stress poverty in Ireland and abundant opportunities in North America or Britain. The best recent scholarship moves away from clichéd understandings of modern Ireland and pays equal attention to the complexities of the Irish environment from which people left, and the new worlds they inhabited, focusing on the relationship between the two. Such transnational approaches reflect broader trends in the writing of global migration history but have a particular Irish dimension, because most of the leading scholars who have worked on Irish migration—such as D. H. Akenson, David Fitzpatrick, and Kerby A. Miller, and the late Patrick O’Farrell—are also recognized as distinguished specialists on the history of modern Ireland. The result is a number of hugely influential studies since the 1980s that have dominated the field and have set out the parameters for future scholarship.38 This body of scholarship has then integrated the diaspora with historical writing on the evolution of modern Ireland. A new generation of scholars has now emerged who sees the connections between Irish migrants and their homeland as shaping a whole range of topics from ethnic identity and political violence to attitudes toward land.39
One of the unresolved issues in the history of the Irish diaspora is the changing preference for short- or long-distance migrations over time. In other words, why did Britain prove the destination of choice in the twentieth century, yet the majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exiles departed for North America? In the seventeenth century continental Europe was the favored haven for exiles from Ireland, yet after 1850 only political exiles made their way to Paris to conspire and plot treason. How do we explain the distance movement to Australia and New Zealand, which peaked in popularity at certain points in the nineteenth century, and is today one of the favored migration patterns? Where do South America, the Caribbean, and Asia fit into the overall framework? Or why did the aspiring Catholic middle-class bureaucrat choose the Indian civil service over the opportunities available in metropolitan London? Needless to say, there is no obvious explanation about why one person chooses to settle in Liverpool over Philadelphia in the 1850s. And structural approaches—while explaining much about the wider political, economic, or social contexts—do not satisfactorily explain the behavior of individuals.
So historians tend to emphasize the interaction of individual aspirations, hopes, and fears with broader factors, such as the economic conditions in the sending and receiving societies, the knowledge about opportunities and living conditions that was transmitted across oceans by letters or people, and the role of social networks in enabling and supporting individual moves. Just as Ulster Presbyterians set off in search of religious toleration in the “land of liberty” during the eighteenth century, so too did the lure of America capture many Irish imaginations in the later nineteenth century. Less is known about the extent to which individuals who left Ireland as part of an institution had detailed information or much by way of choice. For religious missionaries, knowledge of the intended place of settlement was critical, and one Catholic seminary, All Hallows College in Dublin, was established in 1842 to produce priests for the missions. That these missionaries were deeply implicated in the colonial project of British Victorian imperialism is not especially novel, yet the extent to which the Irish Catholic Church exploited opportunities available in the British Empire for its own evangelical ends is a less palatable element for generations of Irish Catholics brought up on the images of suffering and destitution in modern Africa.
What emerges from a plethora of fine-grained studies of Irish migration and settlement is that it was far less of a move from the known to the unknown. Potential migrants could often cite chapter and verse the conditions in faraway and distant places. This was encapsulated in a conversation that the liberal Unionist and agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett had with a farmer in County Galway at the turn of the twentieth century. When Plunkett asked why the farmer’s daughter chose to emigrate to the United States rather than move within the county where work was available, the response was “because it is nearer,” meaning that she knew more about New York from friends and family than any part of Ireland, apart from her locality.40 These studies are often based on detailed historical reconstructions of particular groups of migrants from Ireland or on examining unfamiliar or less-known sites of settlement, which demonstrates the importance of complexity in understanding the history of the Irish diaspora. For example, a fascinating study of migrants from a single parish of Inistioge, County Kilkenny, to Newfoundland between the 1780s and 1840s involves painstaking genealogical research on the Irish backgrounds of the migrants.41 Likewise Bruce Elliott’s book on families of Protestants from south Leinster who settled in Upper Canada is an impressive work of innovative scholarship.42 More recently Tyler Anbinder’s findings on the lives of the Famine Irish who settled in New York City as examined through the prism of their savings habits again manages to confound conventional wisdom by demonstrating the patterns of wealth accumulation over decades.43 What each of these studies shows is contingency and the ability to be flexible when circumstances dictate. Like the Irish at home, the diasporic Irish had to adapt to the worlds that they now inhabited, and all the better if this could be done quickly.
However, adaptation does not equate with assimilation. In the 1960s and 1970s historians and social scientists were preoccupied with immigrant assimilation—the now largely discredited process by which migrants become American, British, or Australian. It was not a question of if but when did the Irish assimilate for an older generation of scholars. More recent work rejects such arguments based on a linear model that eventually leads to one-sided assimilation.44 The key concern now is explaining the construction and articulation of an Irish ethnic identity, and how this varied over time and space. Most of the accounts focus on the first generation or those born in Ireland, but a few pioneering accounts, such as the work of Timothy J. Meagher, explore the construction of ethnic identity over several generations.45
One of the most productive ways of exploring ethnic identity is through the analysis of first-hand testimonies. Migrant letters and diaries are a unique body of source material that essentially involves “eavesdropping” on a conversation that occurred over thousands of miles. A classic work of scholarship is David Fitzpatrick’s investigation of Irish migration to Australia through the analysis of 111 personal letters sent by family members. Other scholars have examined the Irish in New Zealand, Argentina, and Australia, again using letters and other forms of personal testimony. Kerby A. Miller and his associates have likewise broken new ground in the study of the American Irish by collecting a wide range of little-known materials in the form of autobiographies, memoirs, and other first-hand accounts for the period between 1675 and 1815.46 Published autobiographies are harder to decode, given that the author always intended this material for publication, though a recent critical anthology shows just how much potential these types of sources have for the historian of the diasporic Irish.47 Finally, the most authentic and unmediated type of source material is the words of the migrant themselves as recounted in oral history interviews. Studies that have made use of such oral histories often rightly dwell on the interpretative issues raised by using such first-hand testimonies to tell a migration story, but in terms of the vividness and richness of the materials, few documentary sources can match oral histories.48
IV
What does all this mean for the student of modern Irish history? The significance of migration and diaspora for an understanding of modern Ireland should be readily apparent. Insular approaches, focusing on essentially the domestic history of the island, can no longer assume they capture the full range of the Irish historical experience. To write generations out of this history simply because they or their ancestors had to leave is to establish a hierarchy of national identity based solely on place of birth. Even such well-known political figures as the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, Seán Mac Stíofáin, defy this narrow definition of national identity. Mac Stíofáin confounded all the stereotypes of Irish republicans: he was English by birth, originally Protestant by religion, but baptized a Catholic at the age of seven.49 Irishness was never circumscribed by place of birth, as hundreds of studies of the diaspora clearly show, even if the venerable inhabitants of the “motherland” are sometimes less than keen to acknowledge this.
The major political movements in modern Ireland also had a diasporic dimension, more so for Irish nationalism than for unionism. The diaspora was a critical component for Irish nationalists from the 1798 rebellion on, providing moral and financial support, volunteers, weapons, political muscle, publicity, and experience. One recent study demonstrates how revolutionary Irish nationalism in the later nineteenth century was shaped by its transnational dimensions.50 Nationalist leaders from Charles Stewart Parnell to John Redmond and Éamon de Valera and even up to the present-day Gerry Adams have long recognized the political power of the diaspora, particularly in the United States but also in Australasia and Britain. Irish and then Ulster unionism appealed less to the huge numbers of people of Protestant descent across the globe.51 The reasons are not entirely clear, though one factor is that the Protestant Irish did not nurture the same sense of grievance that fostered expatriate Irish nationalism. Another explanation may lie in the reactions to different streams of Irish migrants. The Protestant Irish rarely attracted much public attention in the principal receiving societies, and in places where they were numerically significant—such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—they quickly established such organizations as the Orange Order and Masonic Lodges to assert their allegiance to crown and country.52 Only when communal Orange and Green violence broke out—as it did famously in New York City in 1870 and 1871—was attention focused on the “Orange” diaspora.53
Nativism suffused with anti-Catholicism, which was especially virulent in the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged the emergence of an identity that was in the first instance defensive and then broadened out into a more open form of ethnic pride and patriotism. An important theme that emerges in much of the work done on Irish-American nationalism is that although the homeland was obviously important, local, regional, and national concerns in the United States also shaped the politics and outlooks of the American Irish.54 This is especially apparent in the range of American Irish ethnic organizations that developed in the later nineteenth century that had as much to do with asserting middle-class respectability as with diasporic nationalism. Ironically in a competitive multi-ethnic society, becoming American inevitably involved articulations of Irishness, and nowhere is this better seen that in the campaign to establish a “hibernarchy” in the American Catholic Church and the machine politics of the Irish in the Democratic party.
Often neglected in accounts of Irish diasporic identity is the changing context with respect to the arrival of other migrant groups. Whereas the Famine Irish who landed in the 1840s and 1850s were seen as a threatening menace to the stability of both American and British society—perceived as bringing with them poverty, disease, and the even more pernicious influence of Catholicism—by the end of that century the gaze was no longer on the Irish, as southern and Eastern European immigrants dominated the fears of Americans, and Eastern European Jews occupied British mind-sets. It is no coincidence that when the first substantive piece of legislation to restrict entry to the United States was introduced in 1924, the Irish received a generous quota of visas, which incidentally was never filled in the interwar years.55 Likewise in Australia, the middle-class Irish quickly established themselves in the emerging nineteenth-century elite, and over time the Catholic Irish assumed positions of leadership in the Catholic Church (most famously in the cases of Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran and Archbishop Daniel Mannix), the political system, the labor movement, and many other elements of Australian life. In post-war Britain the large numbers of Irish who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s were completely overshadowed by the small numbers of black immigrants from the “new” Commonwealth, who attracted much public comment. At one time the Irish were seen as “marginal Britons,” but up to the outbreak of the civil conflict in Ulster they were viewed as essentially part of British society, even if the Irish had very different views themselves. The Troubles changed all this—especially the bombing campaigns in England, which provoked a resurgence of anti-Irish hostility and prejudice that only diminished in the wake of the Belfast Agreement of 1998.56
One of the most intriguing developments in recent scholarship is exploring the cultural encounters that mass migration generated. A study by Mo Moulton of the Irish-English interchange of ideas, cultures, values, and prejudices in the interwar years maps out the potential of such an approach. Although these encounters generated conflict and dissonance, what is noteworthy is how “hybridity” (to borrow a term from cultural studies) characterizes the meeting of two profoundly different cultural outlooks. Similarly, work by Bernadette Whelan and Stephanie Rains has investigated the Irish-American encounter in popular culture in the twentieth century.57 What emerges from this fascinating and original work is how deeply embedded American values were in popular culture in twentieth-century Ireland. These were disseminated by frequent contact with relatives and friends living in the United States, by mass media (especially the cinema), and by that ubiquitous figure in rural Ireland, the returned “Yank.”58
An additional dimension relates to material culture and the physical manifestations of the diaspora. Earlier work by the historical geographer John Mannion on the material culture of the Newfoundland Irish especially has been supplemented by more recent accounts of the Du Pont Irish in Delaware, mostly Ulster Catholics, and the things they collected, consumed, and sought out. Dress was another prominent marker of material culture.59 In John B. Keane’s play, Many Young Men of Twenty (1961), a searing indictment of emigration from post-war Ireland, one of the characters back from England shows his prosperity by the quality of his clothing. Even fashion trends current in Britain or America could make their way into unexplored corners of rural Ireland, as the migrants returned home on holidays, looking smart and becoming what one contemporary identified as the best advertisement for emigration. Fashionable clothing could end up in some unusual places: parcels of secondhand clothing were sent to many families in Ireland by relatives and friends living in the United States.60
V
Migration and diaspora are fundamental to the understanding of modern Irish history. As David Fitzpatrick has reminded us, only with an appreciation of its significance is it possible to grapple with the complexities of Irish history over the past four centuries:
Emigration was also one of the great formative factors in modern Irish history. Without studying emigration, one could scarcely hope to explain Ireland’s peculiar blend of archaism and modernity as manifested in its economy, demography, social structure and political culture. Majority emigration means, moreover, that the study of Irish history must not be limited to Ireland.61
The hallmark of the Irish migrations since early modern times is diversity, and the challenge is to fuse the overall context with the many microstudies of individuals, communities, and regions. At one time migration studies was a deeply quantitative enterprise, essentially collecting and analyzing information about groups collected by the authorities in Ireland and elsewhere, not least in the censuses. And while that still is an important element, historians have turned to other techniques, some—as is the case for detailed textual analysis of letters and other forms of personal testimonies—derived from other disciplines, such as literature and linguistics. The other dimension is that there is a move away from the well-studied sites of the Irish diaspora, such as North America, Britain, Western Europe, and Australia, to lesser-known yet equally revealing flows to parts of the British Empire in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as well as to Eastern Europe and South America. Finally, scholars no longer see Irish emigration as exceptional or indeed even unique: the pressing need, as with many other areas of Irish history, is to place the Irish experience within transnational and comparative contexts, showing how Ireland was connected to its diaspora, and how other countries with similar levels of mobility fared. Only then can we say with any certainty what was different, if anything, about the Irish diaspora.
FURTHER READING
There is no satisfactory single-volume study of the Irish diaspora since 1600. For the early modern period, Nicholas Canny, “Ireland and Continental Europe,” in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) is the most up-to-date survey, but see also L. M. Cullen, “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The relevant chapters by David Noel Doyle, David Fitzpatrick, and Patrick O’Farrell in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), New History of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 and 2006), volumes 5 and 6, are excellent studies of the Irish emigration and the Irish in Britain, North America, and Australasia. D. H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1993) is a pioneering study with a global focus, questioning received wisdoms, and is mostly concerned with the period after 1820. By far by the most original and most significant book to be published in the last half century is Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); another masterpiece is on Irish migrations to Australia: David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). More modest overviews can be found in David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 1801–1921 (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1984) and Enda Delaney, Irish Emigration since 1921 (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 2002). Single-country studies are available for most of the main destinations. The best ones include Donald M. MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora in Britain, 1750–1939 (2nd ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow: Macmillan, 2000); C. J. Houston and W. J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present (3rd ed., Cork: Cork University Press, 2000); and Angela McCarthy, Irish Migrants in New Zealand, 1840–1937: “The Desired Haven” (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005).
1. Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), p. 183.
2. See Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston and Montreal/Liverpool: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 57f.
3. Corrected typescript of autobiographical narrative, dated January 3, 1912, by Owen Peter Mangan (b. 1839 in Co. Cavan), NLI MS 22,462. This account was first brought to the attention of scholars by David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, V: Ireland under the Union, 1 (1801–70) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 563–564.
4. Anon., “Christopher Elliott,” Tropical Agriculturalist 13: 6 (1893), pp. 361–367.
5. Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 310–317. He is identified incorrectly as Charles Elliott.
6. Richard Hayes, Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1949), pp. 60–62.
7. “Jones, Mary Harris (‘Mother Jones’),” Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. Enda Delaney, “Our Island Story? Towards a Transnational History of Late Modern Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 37: 148 (2011), p. 86.
9. For an overview, see Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). For the historiography, see D. H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1994); Enda Delaney, Kevin Kenny, and Donald M. MacRaild, “Symposium: Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora,” Irish Economic and Social History 33 (2006), pp. 35–52; Mary Hickman, “Migration and Diaspora,” in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117–136; J. J. Lee, “The Irish Diaspora in the Nineteenth Century,” in L. M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher (eds.), Nineteenth Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), pp. 182–222; Kevin Kenny, “Writing the History of the Irish Diaspora,” in Robert J. Savage, Jr. (ed.), Ireland in the New Century: Politics, Culture and Identity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 206–226; Kevin Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison: the Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History 90 (2003), pp. 359–398.
10. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British: 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jane Ohlmeyer, “ ‘Civilizinge of Those Rude Partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s,” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 124–147; Jane Ohlmeyer, “A Laboratory for Empire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,” in Kevin A. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 26–60.
11. See Nicholas Canny, “Ireland and Continental Europe, c. 1600–1750,” in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 333–355.
12. Canny, “Ireland and Continental Europe,” pp. 343–344.
13. L. M. Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas M. Truxes (eds.), The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), p. 67. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century patterns of movement more generally, see L. M. Cullen, “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 113–152.
14. Cullen, Shovlin, and Truxes, Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, p. 96.
15. See L. M. Cullen, The Irish Brandy Houses of Eighteenth-Century France (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000).
16. “Hennessy, Richard,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
17. Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 657.
18. Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 149
19. See Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
20. Quoted in Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, p. 165.
21. David Noel Doyle, “The Irish in North America, 1776–1845,” in Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, V, pp. 682–725; Miller, Boling, and Doyle, Irish Immigrants In the Land of Canaan; David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin: Education Company of Ireland, 1981); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
22. Kevin Whelan, “The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Kathleen Wilson, (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 216–238.
23. Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” p. 565.
24. David Fitzpatrick, “ ‘A Peculiar Tramping People’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70,” in Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, V, p. 626.
25. Fitzpatrick, “A Peculiar Tramping People,” p. 627.
26. One of the best accounts remains Oliver MacDonagh, “The Irish Famine Emigration to the United States,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976), pp. 357–446.
27. For an attempt to write a transnational history of the Great Famine, see Enda Delaney, “Ireland’s Great Famine: A Transnational History,” in Niall Whelehan (ed.), Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (New York: Routledge, 2014).
28. Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” p. 566.
29. For an excellent overview, see David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1984).
30. See Enda Delaney, Irish Emigration since 1921 (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 2012).
31. Central Statistics Office, Population and Migration Estimates, April 2014 (http://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2014/).
32. Alvin Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 61.
33. For recent assessment, see Andy Bielenberg, “Exodus: The Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants During the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War,” Past & Present 218 (2013), pp. 199–233
34. Peter Hart, The IRA at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 241–258.
35. Gavin Foster, “No ‘Wild Geese’ This Time? IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War,” Éire-Ireland 47: 1 (2012), pp. 94–122.
36. Michael McGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1962); Patrick McGill, Children of the Dead End (London: H. Jenkins, 1914); Donall Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1964).
37. Quoted in Delaney, Demography, State and Society, p. 175.
38. Akenson, Irish Diaspora; Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation; Miller, Emigrants and Exile; Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present (Cork: Cork University Press, third ed., 2001).
39. Whelehan (ed.), Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History.
40. Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century (London: John Murray, revised ed., 1905), p. 56.
41. John Mannion and Fidelma Maddock, “Old World Antecedents, New World Adaptations: Inistioge Immigrants in Newfoundland,” in William Nolan and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Kilkenny: History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1990), pp. 345–404.
42. Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988).
43. Tyler Anbinder, “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts,” Journal of American History 99: 3 (2012), pp. 741–770.
44. Mary J. Hickman, “Alternative Historiographies of the Irish in Britain: A Critique of the Segregation/Assimilation Model,” in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (London: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 236–253.
45. Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class and Ethnic Identity in a New England City (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
46. Miller, Boling, and Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan.
47. Liam Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).
48. See Enda Delaney, The Irish in Post-war Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 7–8.
49. “Mac Stiofáin, Sean,” Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
50. Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
51. See Andrew J. Wilson, “Ulster Unionists in America, 1972–1985,” in New Hibernia Review 11: 1 (2007), pp. 50–73; Lindsey Flewelling, “Ulster Unionism and America, 1880–1920” (Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2012).
52. David Fitzpatrick, “Exporting Brotherhood: Orangeism in South Australia,” in Enda Delaney and Donald M. MacRaild (eds.), Irish Migration, Networks and Ethnic Identity since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2007); Donald M. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, c. 1850–1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 286–320; Donald M. MacRaild, “Wherever Orange Is Worn: Orangeism and Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28: 2 (2002), pp. 98–117; William Jenkins, “Between the Lodge and the Meeting-House: Mapping Irish Protestant Identities and Social Worlds in Late Victorian Toronto,” Social and Cultural Geography 4 (2003), pp. 75–98; Eric Kaufmann, “The Orange Order in Scotland since 1860: A Social Analysis,” in M. J. Mitchell (ed.), New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2008), pp. 159–190.
53. Michael A. Gordon, The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
54. See Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
55. Delaney, Demography, State and Society, pp. 43–44.
56. Gary McGladdery, The Provisional IRA in England: The Bombing Campaign, 1973–1997 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2006).
57. Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd, and Bernadette Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), chapter 4; Stephanie Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).
58. For an older but still useful account, see Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 129–143.
59. John Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); Margaret M. Mulrooney, Black Powder, White Lace: The Du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2002).
60. Hilary O’Kelly, “Parcels from America: American Clothes in Ireland, c. 1930–1980,” in Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark (eds.), Old Clothes, New Looks (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
61. Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, p. 1.