Migration and the Making of Ireland

Bryan Fanning

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253059284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Ireland has been shaped by centuries of emigration as millions escaped poverty, famine, religious persecution, and war. But what happens when we reconsider this well-worn history by exploring the ways Ireland has also been shaped by immigration?

From slave markets in Viking Dublin to social media use by modern asylum seekers, Migration and the Making of Ireland identifies the political, religious, and cultural factors that have influenced immigration to Ireland over the span of four centuries. A senior scholar of migration and social policy, Bryan Fanning offers a rich understanding of the lived experiences of immigrants. Using firsthand accounts of those who navigate citizenship entitlements, gender rights, and religious and cultural differences in Ireland, Fanning reveals a key yet understudied aspect of Irish history.

Engaging and eloquent, Migration and the Making of Ireland provides long overdue consideration to those who made new lives in Ireland even as they made Ireland new.

ONE

INTRODUCTION

Conversations about immigration in Ireland tend to turn to the experiences of Irish emigrants and of the communities these left behind. Emigration, in the Irish imagination, is associated with the Great Famine and the subsequent hollowing out of rural society due to the exit of millions of people in the decades that followed. Emigration drove down the population of post-independence Ireland and there have been resurgences of emigration during the 1980s and during the last decade. It has been recorded in folk culture and ballads as a great trauma, and has been addressed by playwrights, painters and historians. A considerable body of academic scholarship and literature has sought to grapple with these cultural legacies. By comparison, the lives and travails of recent and past immigrants have yet to become part of the mainstream Irish story.

The number of migrants who have settled in Ireland is small compared to the several million who emigrated during the same period. Yet immigration has also shaped Ireland, mostly through the impact of incomers and their descendants upon Irish society, Ireland’s economy and Irish culture. Emigration has affected Ireland mostly through processes of subtraction, with some additions in the form of monetary, cultural and political remittances. The map sketched out in Migration and the Making of Ireland places a particular small island at the centre of the world. It explores commonalities and differences between the experiences of incoming and outgoing migrants with a strong emphasis on the recent waves of immigration that are re-shaping twenty-first-century Ireland.

Migration and the Making of Ireland is not the first book of its kind. It follows a decade on from Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin’s Migration in Irish History 1607–2007, which appeared a few years into the period of large-scale immigration considered at length in this book.¹ Fitzgerald and Lambkin’s book was mostly focused on the Irish diaspora and on earlier periods of colonial settlement, and was more preoccupied with theories of migration and diaspora, whereas this volume foregrounds the experiences of migrants to Ireland. The literature on Ireland’s new immigrant communities is an emerging one: chapters on Poles, Africans and Muslims in this book would have been impossible to write even a few years ago. The research on which these are based is mostly very recent. What both books do share, notwithstanding different methods and approaches, is the same chronological starting place. Following the Flight of Ulster’s Gaelic Earls, the seventeenth century witnessed colonial settlement and immigration on an unprecedented scale as well as large-scale emigration. By 1600, migration to and from Ireland was hardly novel, but what was new, as Enda Delaney states, ‘were the scale, context and consequences of population movements.’²

The perspectives on migration that have intrigued me the most are those of migrants themselves. Most immigrants and emigrants who left or came to Ireland journeyed to improve their circumstances. They often migrated under circumstances that were not of their choosing. However, they generally made the best use they could have of the resources at their disposal. Often these came from family members who had already come to or left Ireland. Processes of chain migration have been common through history whereby migrants remitted resources to their kin that either supported communities at home or helped family members to follow in their wake. Women, like men, emigrated to find better life opportunities and to support their families in Ireland or elsewhere, but also to find freedoms denied them at home.³

The challenge has been to find similar ways of addressing the experiences of emigrants and immigrants across space and time as all the different political, economic, cultural and religious contexts need to be understood. The basic similarities between what has motivated many migrant journeys make it possible to fruitfully examine both immigration and emigration in the same breath. The kinds of wider circumstances that push and pull migrants from one place to another also recur again and again. Emigration push factors have often much to do with social, economic and political processes that, in effect, squeeze people out. Immigration pull factors include the draw of freedoms and economic opportunities that exceed those in places of origin. The ebb and flow of human beings across the planet occurs within wider economic, legal and political systems that influence migration choices at an individual or family level. For example, economic factors have included systems of indenture that made migration affordable to poorer individuals and schemes of assisted migration operated by governments and private companies. The transportation of migrants has been at times big business for merchants, traffickers and middlemen.

Migration and the Making of Ireland draws on accounts of migrant journeys by historians and sociologists and from memoirs and newspapers mostly since the beginning of the seventeenth century, although the next chapter gives an overview of migration to Ireland during earlier periods. It considers the political, economic and legal circumstances that made immigration and emigration possible or necessary, and provides illustrative examples of the experiences of migrants and their families, while highlighting the differences between the migration experiences of women and men. It draws on biographies, letters, newspaper accounts, recent social research, case studies produced by organisations advocating on behalf of migrants, interviews and the work of historians and social scientists.

At an early stage in the writing of this book I had an exchange with an irate academic friend about the proper use of terminology. I used the term ‘migrant’ in Chapter 3 about (Plantations) to refer to settlers from Scotland who were part of the early-seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster. ‘If the notion of migration is to have any meaning,’ he replied, ‘it cannot cover just any old movement of people or animals, that’s what the word “movement” is for, with all its ambiguities and indeterminacies. And that means there has to be a point where the concept just doesn’t apply, as with the Plantation (colonisation), the Vikings (colonisation) and St Patrick (slavery).’ Yet the Plantation of Ulster included waves of settlement by ordinary labour ers, artisans and by people whose descendants migrated onwards to North American as indentured servants. Some of those who settled in or were planted in Ireland had migrated in order to flee persecution elsewhere.

Many of the Catholic Irish who emigrated were no less part of colonisation projects than those who came to Ulster from Scotland and England. Emigration from Ireland mostly occurred to places that were or had been part of the British Empire. Some Irish migrants arrived in the Caribbean as indentured servants and some of their descendants became slave-owners. Throughout the British Empire, Irish emigrants became part of colonial systems as soldiers, policemen, administrators and as missionaries.

Not one of the terms generally used to distinguish between migrants – immigrant, emigrant, economic migrant, forced migrant, indentured servant, undocumented person, guest worker, refugee, asylum seeker – is adequate to describe the complexities of specific cases, but the choice of terms tells us a lot about how migrants have been treated or legally defined in specific situations. For example, the legal systems of nation states have come to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, between guest workers requiring visas and labour migrants from countries where reciprocal agreements permit the free movement of people. Within the administrative logic of such systems human beings become defined by the categories in which they have been placed. Gradations of rights between citizens and non-citizens, immigrant ‘guest’ workers, undocumented workers, refugees and asylum seekers have emerged in a number of western countries that as recently as a century ago operated few restrictions on immigration.⁴

As well as setting out a broadly chronological account of migration to and from Ireland, the structure of the book is designed to explore and tease out a number of different kinds of categories used to classify human migrants in the Irish context. Some chapters explore the experiences of particular groups or categories of immigrants. Others present overviews of larger waves of immigration and emigration whilst providing examples of the experiences of various kinds of migrant journeys. These include two chapters on the seventeenth century. Chapter 3 is mostly focused on English and Scottish migration to Ireland in the wake of the Plantation of Ulster. Chapter 4 examines a complex system of migration to and from Ireland within which there were military migrations in both directions. Catholic Irish exiles served in Spain, Flanders and elsewhere whilst Cromwellian soldiers and later Huguenots who served William of Orange were settled in Ireland. The same conflicts also resulted in the transportation of Catholics to the West Indies, and the movement of Catholic clergy to the Continent. Seventeenth-century conflicts in Ireland had European as well as Atlantic dimensions, and both emigration from Ireland and waves of colonial settlement need to be understood in these wider contexts.⁵

Consideration of emigration from Ireland is divided into chapters that address the experiences of those who left before independence (Chapter 6) and after independence (Chapter 8). It was not until around 1820 that Catholics comprised the majority of migrants from Ireland to North America. Many Protestant emigrants were what came to be called Ulster Scots in Ireland, or Scots Irish in the United States.⁶ After the 1820s, lower shipping costs made it easier for Ireland’s mostly poorer Catholic majority to cross the Atlantic. Before independence, some emigration was a form of internal migration within the then-United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. After independence, the twenty-six-county Irish state could, in theory, have discouraged emigration or done more to provide alternatives to emigration.

Two chapters examine in detail the experiences over several generations of small immigrant communities in Ireland, and the challenges they faced in maintaining their distinct cultural and religious identities. Chapter 5 examines the experiences of Palatines as German-speaking-refugees-turned-colonial-settlers, and of their descendants who remained in Ireland or immigrated to North America. Chapter 7 examines the experiences of Litvaks, Jews and earlier Jewish migrants to Ireland who settled there in small numbers and had to contend with distinct forms of discrimination. Anti-Semitic immigration laws barred Jews from settling in Britain and Ireland for centuries until these were repealed by Oliver Cromwell. Nineteenth-century Jewish settlers and their descendants had to negotiate anti-Semitism. Yet, Ireland’s Jewish communities made a considerable contribution to the political, economic and literary life of Irish society. Their memoirs and family histories are drawn on here.

Chapters addressing the period since the partition of Ireland a century ago have focused on the experiences of migrants on both sides of the border. In some cases there has been much less research on migrant communities in Northern Ireland than in the Republic, sometimes reflecting the smaller size of these communities. Chapter 9 examines the experiences of refugees who arrived in Ireland from several different countries during the twentieth century. These included Jews, Hungarians, Vietnamese and Bosnians. Chapter 10 addresses those of black African immigrants from a number of sub-Saharan countries (but mostly from Nigeria) who were united in their experiences of racism and marginalisation. Many of these arrived as asylum seekers, an administrative category which denied some of the rights granted to those given refugee status by the Irish state, including the right to work. For all that the Irish often remember past waves of emigration as a trauma, many of those who left Ireland did so without having to overcome the kinds of barriers and restrictions encountered by some recent migrants who have made Ireland their home.

Chapter 11 compares and contrasts the experiences of immigrants from both European Union member states and non-EU countries who do not have an automatic right to live and work in Ireland. What comes to the fore is how different levels of rights and entitlements affect the experiences of immigrants. The chapter touches on the experiences of people from a number of different countries who have settled in the Republic and in Northern Ireland in significant numbers, including Filipinos, Chinese, Lithuanians and Latvians. Chapter 12 examines the specific experiences of recent immigrants from Poland who after 2004, when the European Union was enlarged, became the largest immigrant community in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland. More people in the Republic now speak Polish on a daily basis than speak Gaelic. Chapter 13 is focused on the experiences of Muslim immigrants again on both sides of the border. Whilst Ireland has had a small, predominantly Sunni, Muslim community for decades (mostly comprised of students and medical professionals), this has grown rapidly in recent years making Islam the Republic of Ireland’s fastest-growing religion. Muslim immigrants have come from several different countries and regions, including from North Africa, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan, and Britain. The chapter explores some of the complexity of Islam in Ireland at a time in the West when Islamophobia is rife and Muslims tend to be viewed with suspicion.

A conclusion chapter addresses some key recurring themes: how governments came to regulate migration; the impact of immigration controls on the lives of migrants to and from Ireland; and the influence of economic pressures on decisions to migrate in both directions. It also considers the ways in which migrants to and from Ireland variously came to adapt, assimilate and integrate.

Migration and the Making of Ireland was written at a time when immigration has become a major political issue in many countries. Much of the academic literature about this and most political debates appear to be focused on the perspectives and attitudes of host communities rather than, as here, on the lives and experiences of immigrants. In addition, integration debates as these have played out in a number of European countries have been mostly ones about national identity and about the anxieties of host communities. Whilst these are important issues, responses to immigration that do not also focus on how migrants are faring are at best abstract. One of the key aims of this book is to help make Irish debates about immigration more tangible and more focused on the experiences of immigrants’ perspectives.

TWO

INVASIONS

Annals dating back to the seventh century posited one of two commonplace Irish theories of migration. This was the presumption that Ireland had experienced several waves of immigration over thousands of years. The centuries-old annals of monks that were compiled into the twelfth-century Leabhar Gabhála Éireann (trans. Book of Invasions) dated the first settlement of Ireland to some 2,242 years after the creation of the world, as calculated by biblical scholars.¹ Irish myths were shoe-horned into a creationist chronology derived from the Old Testament by clerics who calculated that the world was created several thousand years earlier. These were cited in other early histories transcribed by monks elsewhere, such as the Historica Brittonum, which was composed around 830 AD.² Myths about Ireland’s early inhabitants from the Book of Invasions were taken at face value in popular histories of Ireland until the early twentieth century. The second commonplace theory – illustrated by post-fourteenth-century claims that the descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers had become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’ – posited that there were ongoing processes of cultural assimilation through which even invaders were absorbed over time.

The myths which posited the prehistoric making and re-making of Ireland through immigration have been challenged by evidence collected by archaeologists, geneticists and linguistic scholars. Archaeological evidence suggests that a succession of hunter-gatherers settled Ireland when it wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Invasions
• 3. Plantations
• 4. Transplantations
• 5. Palatines
• 6. Emigrations
• 7. Jews
• 8. Expatriates
• 9. Refugees
• 10. Africans
• 11. Immigrations
• 12. Poles
• 13. Muslims
• 14. Unsettlements
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author