Bronwen Walter

The limitations of whiteness and the boundaries of Englishness Second-generation Irish identifications and positionings in multiethnic Britain

The focus of this article is the second-generation Irish in England. It is based on data collected as part of the Irish 2 project, which examined processes of identity formation amongst the second-generation Irish population in England and Scotland. The article examines and maps identifications and positionings of second-generation Irish people and discusses how two hegemonic domains - Ireland and England - intersect in the lives of the children of Irish-born parents, with material and psychological consequences. Their positionings in multiethnic Britain are compared with those of ‘visible’ minority ethnic groups, and their narratives of belonging and non-belonging are analysed in terms of the limitations of whiteness and the boundaries of Englishness.

Deconstructing whiteness: Irish women in Britain

The Irish are largely invisible as an ethnic group in Britain but continue to be racialized as inferior and alien Others. Invisibility has been reinforced by academic treatment. Most historians have assumed that a framework of assimilation is appropriate and this outcome is uncritically accepted as desirable. Sociologists on the other hand have excluded the Irish from consideration, providing tacit support for the ‘myth of homogeneity’ of white people in Britain against the supposedly new phenomenon of threatening (Black) ‘immigrants’.Focus on the paradigm of ‘colour’ has limited the range of racist ideologies examined and led to denial of anti-Irish racism. But an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the ‘Irish Catholic’ was a significant Other in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Despite contemporary forgetting, hostility towards the Irish continues, over and above immediate reactions to recent IRA campaigns. Verbal abuse and racial harassment are documented in London and elsewhere, but unacknowledged.The masculine imagery of ‘Paddy’ hides the existence of Irish women in Britain, although they have outnumbered men since the 1920s. In America, by contrast, there is a strong stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and her central contribution to Irish upward mobility is recognized. But invisibility does not protect Irish women in Britain from racism. Indeed, they are often more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society. Moreover, women have played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which continues to resonate closely with Irishness and difference.

Irishness, gender, and place

National identities are profoundly gendered, yet difference is subordinated to unity. In this paper the largely unacknowledged intersections of Irishness and gender in Britain are explored. It is argued that Irishness has at least two distinct dimensions, each gendered in ways reflecting the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. One is the ‘roots’ of the collectivity, mediated through the diaspora experience. The second is the construction of Irishness by Britishness, characterised as male, middle class, Home Counties, Anglican Protestant, and white. Irish women are positioned in relation to these hegemonic values and are racialised both by invisibility and by exclusion.

Family stories, public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Abstract Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.

Whiteness and diasporic Irishness: nation, gender and class

Whiteness is often detached from the notion of diaspora in the recent flurry of interest in the phenomenon, yet it is a key feature of some of the largest and oldest displacements. This paper explores the specific contexts of white racial belonging and status over two centuries in two main destinations of the Irish diaspora, the USA and Britain. Its major contribution is a tracing of the untold story of ‘How the Irish became white in Britain’ to parallel and contrast with the much more fully developed narrative in the USA. It argues that, contrary to popular belief, the racialisation of the Irish in England did not fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but became transmuted in new forms which have continued to place the ‘white’ Irish outside the boundaries of the English nation. These have been strangely ignored by social scientists, who conflate Irishness and working-class identities in England without acknowledging the distinctive contribution of Irish backgrounds to constructions of class difference. Gender locates Irish women and men differently in relation to these class positions, for example allowing mothers to be blamed for the perpetuation of the underclass. Class and gender are also largely unrecognised dimensions of Irish ethnicity in the USA, where the presence of ‘poor white’ neighbourhoods continues to challenge the iconic story of Irish upward mobility. Irishness thus remains central to the construction of mainstream ‘white’ identities in both the USA and Britain into the twenty-first century.

From ‘flood’ to ‘trickle’: Irish migration to Britain 1987–2006

A dramatic change in the size and direction of emigration from Ireland has taken place over the past 20 years. The most striking feature is the sharp decline in movement to Britain from the Republic of Ireland, a traditional supplier of labour for well over 200 years. By contrast there has been a small increase in emigration from Northern Ireland, an important element of which is higher education students from Protestant backgrounds, who may be permanent migrants. Detailed statistics available from the Central Statistics Office of the Republic of Ireland show that proportionately more women have left as gross numbers have declined. This reflects the persistence of social, rather than predominantly economic, causes of emigration, also evident in the range of socially excluded people for whom Britain represents a ‘safety valve’. Two groups now characterise the Irish population in Britain; the ageing 1950s cohort and their children and grandchildren, the large second and third generations.

Including the Irish: taken-for-granted characters in English films

The Irish have become embedded in the ‘diaspora space’ of England so that their presence is taken for granted. This article explores the ways in which films made by English directors include Irish characters in apparently unplanned and incidental ways which reflect their own assumptions and those of their audiences about the ‘natural’ place of the Irish in English social landscapes. It interrogates the understandings and intentions of the director (Richard Eyre), screenwriter (Patrick Marber) and actors (Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson) in the film Notes on a Scandal which adds an Irish character to Zoë Hellers novel. Many other narrative films contain small clues, usually denoted by voices, but also ‘looks’, culture and roles. These sources enrich the evidence available to social scientists analysing the deep entanglement of the Irish with both the long-settled and more recently arrived populations living in England.

New perspectives on women and the Irish diaspora

Joseph Horgan’s 2008 collection of poems Slipping Letters beneath the Sea offers a careful exploration of the private and public histories of Irish immigrants in midtwentieth-century Britain and is especially concerned with the challenges their children face in forging a relationship with home. It is, where it needs to be, fearless in calling attention to the amnesiac tendencies of the Irish politician, for whom, for too long, the emigrant remained, as Eavan Boland writes in ‘The Emigrant Irish’, ‘out the back, of our houses, of our minds’.Horgan imagines women migrants, in the colloquial language of the 1950s, as ‘slips of girls, slipping away’. The image of the Irish woman migrant ‘slipping away’ is all too appropriate; as recently as the 1990s, she remained the mysterious ‘great unknown’ of Irish emigrant history. The flourishing of Irish diaspora studies and of the study of women in the Irish diaspora has ensured that this lacuna has been addressed in important ways, but this special issue comes at a moment when it would seem a new chapter in the history of Irish migration is being written. With that in mind, a number of the following articles raise questions about the new wave of emigration from post-‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland, and how this frames the experience of the Irish woman migrant, while others look back to earlier moments in the history of Irish migration, or make case studies of spheres of culture in which larger concerns about the place of women in different diasporic settings are examined. In ‘Compare and Contrast: Understanding Irish Migration to Britain in a Wider Context’, Louise Ryan explores the potential of a comparative approach to migration and the possibilities that lie beyond the study of migrant groups in isolation. She points to different forms of historical myopia that have impeded comparative work and examines how the same processes of elision have sometimes skewed the representation and understanding of the experience of women migrants. Drawing on her research across Irish, Polish, Muslim and French migrant groups, she weighs up the usefulness of comparative analysis and, in particular, in her consideration of research on Irish and Polish women, its value to understanding their distinctive experiences. Breda Gray investigates the potential gains of a different kind of comparative work in ‘“Generation Emigration”: The Politics of (Trans)national Social Reproduction in Twenty-first century Ireland’ by examining the modes and methods of communication that dominate in the present moment alongside earlier gender-based studies of migrant networks in the 1990s. She looks closely at personal testimonies from The Irish Times’ ‘Generation Emigration’ forum, an online platform established in 2011, that has sought to capture new and emerging conversations

“Hidden” Diasporas? Second- and Third-Generation Irish in England and Scotland

Bronwen Walter challenges the low profile of the Irish diaspora in Britain in the celebration of The Gathering in Ireland in 2013. This is part of an ongoing denial of the scale and significance of emigration to Britain, reflecting expectations of higher economic returns from Irish-American investors. Drawing on qualitative data from the Irish 2 Project, Walter shows that Britain also fails to acknowledge the specificity of Irish backgrounds, though there are important differences between England and Scotland. There is reluctance in England to disaggregate the “white” ethnic category, whilst in Scotland Irish-descent identities are still controversial and strongly contested.

Placing Irish women within and beyond the British Empire

their scattering has been on a global scale, including locations both with substantial numbers and with small pockets, there has been a particular emphasis on the English-speaking world, shadowing the colonial enterprise of the larger neighbour, Britain. This chapter aims to explore different contexts in which settlement has taken place, both geographically and socially. It will draw on existing secondary sources, which frequently document in detail women’s experiences in particular national situations but could also be interrogated to raise new questions about Irish women’s ‘places’ in different societies. In this way it may provide a more coherent framework for thinking about Irish women in the diaspora, as well as including Irish women in a larger global picture. The notion of ‘placing’ is central to this discussion. It references the specificity of particular named locations at many scales from household and family to neighbourhood, region and nation. It also denotes social positioning, linking with class and social mobility, ethnic mixing and a range of other identities which may be claimed and ascribed. Irish women are ‘placed’ by themselves, members of their own ethnic group and by others, as well as by writers and artists who represent their lives in print and visually. Placing, rather than the more usual association of diasporas with displacement, indicates concern with new attachments and identifications for women and their descendants. Such a broad project could take many directions. Three will be attempted here, each drawing on case studies. The first is an exploration of intersections between Irish women and members of other diasporic groups in Britain, examining similarities and differences in their lives. The second compares Irish women’s experiences of different destinations within the British Empire and its Commonwealth successor. Finally parallels are drawn with a diaspora outside 7