Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Each successive century in Irish history from the sixteenth century onwards saw increasing volumes of people emigrating from the island. Ulster lords, Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish dissidents and poverty-stricken farmers who migrated to continental Europe in the seventeenth century; Ulster Presbyterians who migrated to the east coast of North America in the eighteenth; early nineteenth-century migrants to Canada and Britain; famine-era migrants to the United States; late nineteenth-century migrants to the overseas British Empire, former British colonies and Mexican Texas; and twentieth-century migrants to the industrial cities of Great Britain all form part of Irish emigration history. Recent years have witnessed a welcome renaissance in Irish migration historiography that has facilitated a definitive move away from stereotypical depictions and analyses of Irish migrants as poor, famine-stricken and Catholic, moving expeditiously from rural Ireland to the urban New World. A fuller picture has emerged, allowing us to examine migrations as diverse as those of Gaelic kerne soldiers to sixteenth-century continental Europe, ‘gens merveilleux sauvages,’ and of young Irish women who trained as nurses in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, ‘coming home full of style.’ The difficulty in surveying this bountiful array of new work lies in drawing generalisations about migration from Ireland on the basis of such varied phenomena. Migration has long been considered a central and defining feature of Irish history, at least from the nineteenth century onwards, but many assumptions about the character of Irish migration do not stand up to rigorous analysis. This guest lecture will examine some of the lesser-known features of Ireland’s history of emigration, underlining the significance of emigration for the country’s history, not just as a “social safety-valve” but also in view of its economic and political ramifications.