Enda Delaney

The Irish in post-war Britain

Introduction 1. Leaving Home 2. In A Strange Land 3. People and Places 4. Cultures of Adjustment 5. A Sense of Self

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.

The Irish diaspora

Abroad, the history of Irish emigration is one of the success stories of the world. Dispossessed and ravaged by war, famine and centuries of economic decline, the Irish nevertheless managed to battle their way to pinnacles of political and economic success, epitomised by the entry to the White House ofJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy, the descendant of a Famine emigrant from county Wexford. Success was not achieved without great suffering and loss, both in terms of life and human happiness.f

Irish migration, networks and ethnic identities since 1750: An Introduction

The long-cherished myth of Irish migration as primarily a traumatic process that fractured existing social relations has now been replaced by a more nuanced understanding of Irelands diasporic pas...

Directions in historiography Our island story? Towards a transnational history of late modern Ireland

The besetting sin of all historical writing is myopia. Large as well as small nations suffer equally from the disheartening insularity of rarely looking beyond the borders of the nation state as geographical borders mutate into mental, cultural and historiographical ones. Myopias close relative is the unshakeable doctrine of exceptionalism: the assumption that each nations history is, by definition, sui generis . National histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered notions of a shared identity and created the sense of an embryonic nation. A critical element in this process was stressing the exceptional characteristics, such as the tradition of liberal governance in Britain, American liberty or the revolutionary origins of the French state. That this history of nations was presented for popular consumption as a story is understandable – story-telling is the most effective method of communicating a narrative to a wide audience.