The sociology of critical diasporan epistemology: British state and academic erasure of post-war Irish immigrants

Abstract

This article engages with a critical moment in the lives of the post-war generation of Irish immigrants – their vanishing from the British social and cultural map. Across the state, academy and popular culture, portrayals of the Irish are discursively represented as contingent upon a pervasive containing category of the black–white dualism and an accompanying power relations of oppression and dominance oppositional racial logic. In response to the dominant narrative of the state and academic erasure of the Irish, the article suggests a critical intervention, the sociology of critical diasporan epistemology, consisting of three interconnecting conceptual moves: a nuanced account of the black–white dualism that complicates the notion of Irish invisibility; a shift from a competitive hierarchal model to a relational model of state–migrant relations; and a dynamic intersectional analysis with accompanying complex hierarchies of power. This enables a re-reading of the dominant historical narrative and its legacy for contemporary society, while making visible the Irish in the wider story of British sociology of migration and ethnicity.

Introduction

The post-war generation of Irish immigrants is vanishing from the British social and cultural map. At an immediate level, having formed one of the largest migrant communities in Britain, and over the longest time, it may be claimed that the passing of this generation is understood as a natural demographic process in the life cycle of an ageing population (Carroll et al., 2022). The post-war generation refers to a particular cohort of emigrants from the mid-1940s to early 1960s involving mass emigration during this period (Daly, 2006; Delaney, 2007; Wills, 2015). Much British sociological and cultural studies research in writing out their presence has done little to disturb this common-sense understanding that acts to naturalize a historically complex geopolitical and sociocultural phenomenon. Discursively, across the state, academy and popular culture, portrayals of the Irish are represented as contingent upon a pervasive race-relations based black–white dichotomy and an accompanying power relations of oppression and dominance. Hence, they have been positioned as outside both studies of migration and ethnicity and as not subject to a contemporary form of racism. In contesting this dominant position, Irish Studies scholars have been successful in establishing that a contradictory and ambivalent state narrative of denial of cultural difference has circulated, asserting sameness as part of the British Isles ‘family’, while at the same time, systemic institutional mechanisms of racial exclusion across public spaces have operated against the Irish (Hickman & Walter, 1997). This generation as a reserve army of labour – women and men – alongside other major post-colonial diaspora communities, were key players economically, culturally and psychically. It is argued that an unintended major effect of the dominant state model, employing the containing category of the black–white dualism, and its accompanying oppositional racial logic is to obscure an understanding of mid-twentieth century Irish migrants’ lives. Building on Irish Studies, Critical Sociology and Cultural Studies, an alternative framing enables a shift from a descriptive representation of a vanishing population, as a cohort experiencing a natural demographic process of ageing, to an analytical understanding, as a state-led socially and culturally produced phenomenon.

In response to the dominant narrative of the state and academic erasure of the Irish, this article suggests a theoretical intervention, the sociology of critical diasporan epistemology, consisting of three interconnecting conceptual moves: a nuanced account of the black–white dualism that complicates the notion of Irish invisibility; a shift from a competitive hierarchal model to a relational model of state–migrant relations; and a dynamic intersectional analysis with accompanying complex hierarchies of power. This enables a reinterpretation of the dominant historical narrative and its legacy for contemporary society, while making visible the Irish in the wider story of British sociology of migration and ethnicity. The article begins by exploring the state’s refusing and denying the political concept of anti-Irish racism. ¹ This is followed by a critical examination of the sociological discursive erasure of the post-war Irish diaspora as ethnic/racialized subjects. The next section outlines the critical intervention. Finally, the article maps social and cultural institutional spaces involving the specificities of Irish diasporic everyday life.

The state’s refusing and denying the political concept of anti-Irish racism

Central to the operationalizing of the invisibility of the Irish, key issues can be identified in the playing out of a continuing (post-)colonial racial logic across the British state, with the shift from the projection of the Irish during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the nation’s major racial other to the projected dominant claim by British academics of the inclusion of the Irish within the nation during the mid-twentieth century. These issues were post-war immigration controls and citizenship, highlighted, for example, in relation to the free movement of British and Irish citizens between the two jurisdictions, known as the Common Travel Area (De Mars et al., 2018), and race relations legislation, a central element of which involved official definitions of racism and categories constituting racism. Questioning the established account of the British government’s policy on race relations, immigration controls and racism for a post-1945 generation, the dominant narrative that has been written up as the official historical version of the explanation of the Tory government’s 1962 restrictive immigration controls was that it was primarily generated by fear of a race relations problem that they defined in terms of immigrants from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan. Reinscribing the government’s position in prescribing colour as the defining category of racial exclusion, this has become established in social science texts as the key moment when the Irish community, officially classified as white, was formally recognized as belonging within the British nation. Most significantly, these legislative shifts can be read as central mechanisms in the production of the black–white dualism that was at the heart of both an emerging racial common-sense and an academic understanding, in which official explanations of racism focused on post-1945 New Commonwealth and Pakistani immigration and settlement as the dominant paradigm in which ‘blacks’ (African-Caribbeans and South Asians) were marked by race and ethnicity, while the Irish as ‘white’ were unmarked. With colour projected as the defining characteristic of racism, this led to a narrative of social closure and predetermined outcomes. Operating within an oppositional dualism, an epistemological assumption of this racial logic was that their privileged whiteness guaranteed the Irish inclusion within the state with equal status with British subjects. In this process, the Irish as England’s largest labour migrant group and ethnic minority were forcibly included in an homogeneous whiteness, thus evacuating Irish ethnicity while disavowing anti-Irish racism – thus officially reinforcing their invisibility (Campbell, 2013). ²

There have been significant academic criticisms highlighting major limitations of this reductionist, one-dimensional colour-coded comparison between Irish and New Commonwealth migrants, as represented in most British sociological and cultural studies texts. For example, cultural historians Schaffer and Nasar (2018, p. 213) suggest a more nuanced perspective, arguing that the ‘Irish exemption from this section of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act should not, however, be seen as an indicator that the British saw the Irish as equal, or even as desirable immigrants, though it does suggest that Irish migrants were seen as racially familiar, perhaps as assimilable, in a way that black and Asian people were not.’ Paul (1997), in her extensive historical study of the period, provides incisive productive insights in examining the key categories in play at the time, including exploring how the British government constructed a category in which at a formal level the Irish were neither subjects nor aliens, and at an informal level neither British nor foreign. Bailkin (2012), in a highly reflexive account, makes a similarly original contribution in her text The Afterlife of Empire, pointing out in relation to the 1962 legislation that although there tended to be an exclusive focus on entry to the country with little consideration given to the question of departure, she found that Irish migrants were the highest number of those deported. While Carter et al.’s (2000) classic sociology text, critically exploring internal government documents, argued that they illustrated the deracialization of the Irish who ‘are not-whether they like it or not-a different race from the ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain’ (CAB 129/77 CP (55) 102 3 August 1955; Carter et al., 2000, p. 36). Furthermore, Carter et al. provided evidence of the wide range of public institutions, committees and senior civil servants with a shared perspective of the Irish rather than West Indians as a major social problem. Such critical work resonates with Irish Studies scholars across the UK and globally, who were of particular importance, as exemplified in Hickman’s sociological and historical research (Hickman, 1995; Hickman & Walter, 1997), in providing detailed studies demonstrating major limitations in the official narrative. Hickman’s socio-historical approach was a necessary reminder to sociologists, particularly when a postmodernist strand insisted on the newness of cultural phenomena, that a more rounded analysis of the then current dynamics of racial politics demanded a rigorous investigation of historical continuities alongside structural discontinuities. Hickman provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of this period, including a forensic investigation of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Furthermore, Hickman and Ryan (2020, p. 101) argued that: ‘Large-scale Irish migration in the post-war period meant that, to sustain the black/white dichotomy, the Irish had to be re-racialized as emphatically “white” (there having been considerable historical doubt on this score) and “forcibly included” within the cultural parameters of the nation.’

The sociological discursive erasure of the post-war Irish diaspora as ethnic/racialized subjects

In contrast to the cultural historians’ and Irish Studies scholars’ broader analytical perspectives explored above, during the 1970s and 1980s, with notable exceptions, much sociological and cultural theorists’ work was of central significance in reinscribing the British state’s denial of ethnic difference to the Irish. Here, the focus is on the disciplines of British sociology and cultural studies and more specifically conceptual frameworks of the sub-fields of race and ethnic studies, which have their own closures that include and exclude (Gilligan, 2022). During this period, the disavowal of the concept of anti-Irish racism – or what some would call a structuring absence – was found in a wide range of paradigms in British sociological representations of racism and ethnicity. This included the early race-relations problematic and continued through class-based Marxist and Weberian accounts to post-colonial theories. In influential texts, such as Banton (1967), Rex (1970), Hall et al. (1982) and Gilroy (1987), the Irish were not indexed in the bibliography and in the main text there was often a perfunctory reference to them as having experienced racism in the nineteenth century. Said (1993, p. 284) provides a critique of this pervasive textual position, writing that: ‘It is an amazing thing that the problem of Irish liberation not only has continued longer than other comparable struggles but it is so often not regarded as being an imperial or nationalist issue; instead it is comprehended as an aberration within the British dominion. The facts conclusively reveal otherwise.’ With notable exceptions, most British sociological and cultural studies commentators have not and continue not to recognize these ‘social facts’ (such exceptions include Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1993; Brah, 1992; Garner, 2009; Miles, 1982). For example, British sociological accounts of immigration made a cursory claim of the need to explore a wide range of migrations before returning to the main object of their analysis, that of post-war black migration (Solomos, 1989, p. 40).

During this period British anti-racist activism had developed its own specific cultural history. With increasing state and popular institutional racial violence against African-Caribbeans and South Asians, American race-relations frameworks produced in the 1960s/1970s were widely invoked in making sense of what was going on in Britain. As Myers (2015, p. 24) argues: ‘As far as race ideas, were concerned the biggest single influence, not just in Britain but for other European nations was provided by the United States of America (USA).’ The American black movement at this particular historical moment, which resonated with black people across a wide range of societies, was of strategic importance in helping to construct earlier versions of British anti-racism. Furthermore, whereas the rise of fascism and more specifically Nazi anti-Semitism was highly generative of earlier theories of racism, the American black political struggles of the 1960s alongside the Vietnamese resistance to American imperialism were of pivotal significance for the post-1960s British generation in their political coming of age. We need to hold onto the importance of this critical political and theoretical contribution to an understanding of historical and contemporary racisms. There is a constant conceptual and political tension between arguing for a broader explanatory framework that takes account of changing ethnic and racial dynamics, including that it does not distract from the ongoing reality of the systematic racism experienced by people of colour within global conditions of white supremacy and the political far right. However, the main argument here is that British theorists, in adopting the American model, often failed to adapt it to the local specificities of the British/English nation-state with its specific class and gendered formation and reproduction, as part of the wider historical project of European colonialism and imperialism. Importantly, the Americanization of anti-racism served to underplay Britain’s colonial history after empire. Within a rapidly transforming global context, it is suggested that a specific historically and geographically based form of racism was conflated with a general theory of racism. It should be added that at this time, there were major contestations over the meanings of the concepts of race, racism and anti-racism, including analytical contributions that challenged this dominant model, such as Sivanandan (1983, p. 4), who argued that: ‘Ethnicity was a tool to blunt the edge of black struggle, return “black” to its constituent parts of Afro-Caribbean, Asian, African, Irish – and also, at the same time, allow the nascent bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie really, to move up the system.’

A further strategy deployed by British sociological and cultural theorists in the disavowal of post-war Irish migrants was to ignore Irish scholars’ critical engagement in the field of enquiry. One of the most surprising neglected interventions was Campbell’s (2013) ‘Policing the Irish: Whiteness, “race” and British cultural studies’. In this article, Campbell explores the absence of the Irish from British cultural studies’ work on race and ethnicity, with a specific focus on two key texts in the field, produced at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham: The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS, 1978) and Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1982). Campbell critically investigates a mugging that took place in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1972, that is the central focus of analysis in Policing the Crisis. This high-profile criminal case involved three youths, Paul Story, James Duignan and Mustafa Fuat, who attacked an Irish working-class man, Robert Keenan. Campbell uses a detailed comparison of the media account with the Policing the Crisis account of the event that finely illustrates how the erasure of Irishness operates. In the former, the victim was named as Irish, as well as James Duignan being identified as born in Ireland alongside the diverse ethnicity of the other two youths involved. There were also letters in the press about the Handsworth mugging in which one writer decoded James Duignan’s mother’s name – Mrs Duignan – with her 12 kids, as Roman Catholic and an alien, who should be back in Southern Ireland. In contrast to these racial signifiers and how they operated being made explicit, thus providing evidence of anti-Irish racism, Hall et al., the authors of Policing the Crisis, eliminated all traces of Irishness or Irish migrants. McLaughlin (2008) highlights the contrast between Hall et al.’s identification with the youths with whom they formed a support group and the marginalisation of Keenan in the text, Policing the Crisis, who was dismissed as a ‘needless victim’.

Campbell points out that Hall et al.’s discursive suppression of the Irish had specific effects for subsequent accounts of this influential text in obscuring the representation of the Irishness of the main characters involved in this violent attack. He cites Barker’s (1992) claim that the argument of Policing the Crisis ‘begins with the story of Arthur Hills, a pensioner, who was attacked by three young black men on his way home from the theatre in Handsworth, Birmingham in August 1972’ (Barker, 1992, p. 81). Here, Keenan is Anglicized to Hills, while Duignan is referred to as black. Furthermore, Hallsworth (2005) writes of an elderly white victim and three black youths, and Farred (2003) assumes that Duignan was white English. For Campbell (2013, pp. 145–146), ‘in such accounts, Irish ethnicity is an anomalous category that cannot be accommodated and is conceptually erased; the Irish “victim” becomes white English while the Irish “perpetrator” becomes black’. For him, these texts were representative of the wider field in the evacuation of Irishness – here, ‘Duignan, it seems, can be black or white English, but not Irish’ (Campbell, 2013, p. 146). Campbell (2013, p. 146) continues: ‘The elision of Irishness in Policing – and in subsequent accounts of the text – appears to have been informed by what Ang and Stratton (1995) call the “continued reproduction of a rock-solid white/black dichotomy” (p. 21) in cultural studies’ work on “race” and ethnicity.’

The sociology of critical diasporan epistemology as a theoretical intervention

Mohabeer (2022, p. 1031), recently reflecting on the complexity of writing a method to explore visibility in relation to difference and othering, argues for a ‘deeper development of a multidimensional construct of invisibility [that] can provide a reasoned and valuable additional lens to address a range of social dynamics’. Irish Studies scholars, alongside a minority of British sociological and cultural theorists, could be seen to have been early contributors to such a debate. In producing theoretically advanced understandings of the concept of invisibility, they provide insights into a specific case, the 1950s generation of Irish migrants, that challenge prevailing state and academic perspectives produced throughout this period. A more nuanced account of the black–white dualism and the accompanying invisibility of the Irish begins with a socio-historical approach, maintaining that in contrast to the constructed invisibility of the mid-twentieth century Irish diaspora, the visibility of nineteenth century migration was highly significant in establishing racial images of the Irish in Britain, with particularly a post-Famine generation coming to be represented as one of the main recipients of British imperial and colonial exploitation (Curtis, 1968; Hickman, 1995; Higgins in McAuliffe, 2012). This was an important moment for the British, in the historical and geographical reproduction of their collective self-identity as a ‘superior race’, who actively dis-identified with the Irish as an ‘inferior and degenerate race’ (Miles, 1982, pp. 121–150). Indeed, the Irish have served a long apprenticeship within Britain’s economy of signs providing a diverse range of cultural archetypes within changing social formations across early and late modernity – the projected eternal Paddy (De Nie, 2004). An archaeology of the recent past might reveal: Paddy the exile, Paddy the lumpen proletariat, Paddy the socially excluded, Paddy the urban terrorist and Paddy the hybrid – the insider/outsider.

As illustrated above, the process of disconnecting the 1950s generation Irish diaspora and racialization was generated by the state, and discursively reinscribed in the academy. As Miles (1989, p. 426) critically observes: ‘Any discussion of emigration in Britain, and its consequences, over the last twenty-five years will usually equate the terms “race”, “coloured”, and “race-relations”. Even if we accept the validity of such terms, the association is contrary to the evidence . . . since 1945 down to 1971 the Irish constituted the largest immigrant minority in Britain.’ Such evidence included, as Glynn et al. (2013, p. 2) point out, that during the 1950s ‘over 400,000 people (net) emigrated. Roughly three out of every five children who grew up in 1950s Ireland left the country at some stage. Considering the recently founded Republic of Ireland’s population then stood at less than 3 million, to lose almost 15% of the population in one decade . . . was astonishing.’ In contrast, Myers (2015, p. 123) notes: ‘The figures for the New Commonwealth, and non-white, immigrants [were] comparatively small with approximately 125,000 West Indians, 55,000 South Asians and fewer West Africans arriving in the period between 1945 and 1958.’ Self-evidently, numbers were not (and are not) the primary indicator of racial visibility or invisibility. Nevertheless, under-theorized concepts of visibility and invisibility associated with the dominant black–white dichotomy operating at a descriptive level of colour racism, and more specifically the ascription of a position of racial invisibility to post-war Irish migrants, were most familiar across the academy, media and popular culture (Popoviciu et al., 2006). In Banton’s (1998) terms, it may be argued that in relation to the Irish, most sociologists conflated folk and academic meanings of conceptual constructions of notions of race, ethnicity and (in)visibility. In response to the dominant narrative of the state and academic erasure of the Irish, this section sets out an explanation of a range of literatures that provide supporting arguments in the suggested critical intervention. The latter seeks to facilitate a conceptual reconfiguration that challenges how academic discourses (re)produce dominant ways of knowing.

A first conceptual move involves adopting a more nuanced account of visibility/invisibility, in capturing the shifting dynamics of multi-layered power-inflected institutional social relations, as illustrated below. Historically, from within this frame the Irish diaspora have a complex, ambivalent involvement in both European and American colonialism and imperialism and their accompanying forms of racism – being both ‘natives’ and ‘white’. Their ambivalence comes from the fact that the Irish in this dichotomy are not either/or (Garner, 2003). Such a critique of their historical experience highlights the epistemological and methodological limitations of much British sociological and cultural studies work and suggests a way forward in representing the post-war Irish as an ethnic and racial anomalous category (Lloyd, 1993). This is resonant of the cultural historians above referring to the post-war generation as occupying a more nuanced ethnic/racial category beyond the black–white dualism. A legacy of such work has generated a number of methodological complexities. Of particular concern is how research strategies can be devised that accommodate pre-given identity categories that do not automatically assign a pre-given epistemological status. One also needs to be aware that such an approach can in itself re-create the homogenizing of difference. Furthermore, research in this area needs to be contextualized by a wider politics of culture, involving ‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’ among and between the major diasporic communities and the British indigenous majority (Said, 1993). Within the context of the complexity of writing a method on visibility/invisibility to which Mohabeer refers above, there is a potential danger in deconstructing the black–white binary and suggesting a need to focus on the (white) Irish diaspora’s subaltern subjectivity, that it will be read as implying some kind of equivalence with black oppression or assuming a post-colour racism position. Such debates have taken place within a US context involving contestation of hierarchies of ethnic oppression. Furthermore, Irish scholars have warned against a tendency within post-colonialism to argue for a position of exceptionalism with reference to the historical Irish experience within the British imperialist and colonialist era (Cleary, 2007).

A second conceptual move involves a shift beyond the dominant reductionist British public framing that constructed the three main post-war migrant groups – from the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean and the Republic of Ireland – in opposition to each other, in terms of hierarchies of difference and sameness. Such an alternative methodological reflexive reading shifts from a comparative hierarchal model informed by a colonial-based legacy of divide and rule that excluded the Irish from immigration controls, to a relational model. This opens up a range of new insights that repositions and makes visible the Irish in the story of British migration, within a wider context of a complex choreography in the governance of managing state–migrant relations. These social relations were (and continue to be) played out across local neighbourhoods through a nuanced semantics of shifting boundaries of post-colonial communities and bodies operating through ill-defined, unstable categories and classifications – identity, subjecthood and national belonging – that were continually in flux after empire (Joesten, 2022). Such a move challenges the dominant state (and academic) view during this critical period that defined and classified the ‘white Irish’ in terms of sameness rather than difference, and thus belonging within the British nation. From this intervening framework perspective, the public policy response to the Irish was a strategic move by the British state in repositioning former colonial nations, as a divided Tory administration set out to reconfigure/recalibrate national identity after empire, hold together the Commonwealth, and retain Britain’s pre-eminent place in the world as a global power.

Importantly, Ireland has served a long hidden history as a laboratory for British empire, with emerging highly influential ideas across both Britain and the island of Ireland continuing a legacy, as indicated below (Scanlon, 2025). Furthermore, such critical analysis needs to situate this generation within a wider geopolitical, socio-historical and cultural context, that was informed by a post-World War II economic crisis, a national industrial reconstruction, a developing welfare state and a state reimagining of the British nation and collective belonging, situated within interconnecting relations between Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (Bell & O’Dowd, 2024).

Working within a relational model of post-colonial nations, Brah’s (1992, p. 133) work on notions of multi-racisms and diaspora space has been particularly productive in enabling this alternative sociological perspective. For example, she argues for the need to locate different racisms within the specificity of different sets of economic, political and cultural circumstances that have been reproduced through specific mechanisms and which find different expressions in different societies. As she adds: ‘anti-black racism, anti-Irish racism, anti-Jewish racism, anti-Arab-racism, different varieties of Orientalisms: all have their distinctive features’. At the same time, Brah (1996, p. 209) maintains that we are located within a diaspora space, meaning the socially inhabited conditions where the entanglement of identities constructed as ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant’, national and transnational constitute the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are contested. Her work provides a lens through which to explore a complex entanglement of connections between diverse post-war diasporas, including the Irish, within the shared life of local institutions, in the under-researched collective cultural production of multi-generation communities (Joesten, 2022).

A third conceptual move involves the adoption of a dynamic intersectional analysis. Mid-twentieth century working class Irish migrants in Britain inherited re-worked versions of nineteenth century prevailing discourses that constructed a narrative intelligibility that served to consolidate the racialized figure of the modern Irish (Popoviciu et al., 2006). The intervening framework enables us to go beyond the one-dimensional racialized image of Paddy – the dominant cultural stereotype of the reductionist male labourer/navvy. The latter was a concept that referred to nineteenth century canal and railway construction workers; by the twentieth century it referred often derogatively more generally to manual workers with reference to the Irish, albeit the work and lifestyle involved a specific trajectory. Such a revisioning begins with the social fact that Irish-born women outnumbered Irish-born men in Britain since the 1920s. One way to conceptualize responses to the processes of changing definitions of the Irish diaspora and nationhood is to view them as a set of narratives of ‘self-production’ that are dispersed through an intersectional analysis and accompanying multiplicity of power relations. As Knights and McHughes (1990, p. 287) argue: ‘individuals are not the passive recipients or object of structural processes, but are constructively engaged in the securing of identities’. A major limitation of theorizing in relation to national belonging is that conventional notions about national inclusion/exclusion appear as a simple one-dimensional product of the post-war generation’s cultural context. By theoretically shifting from a focus on product to process, their nationality and ethnicity can be seen as examples of ‘doing culture’.

What becomes of central importance is to explore the constitutive elements of their identity-making, in relation to emerging diasporan selves and identities. In writing of an intersectional perspective of the nation, we get a glimpse of how these diasporic subjects assembled a migrant identity within the context of inventing a place, a language and a new sensibility of urban industrial life. Within the context of the hard face of the state, an (un)civil society, dangerous industrial workplaces and limited and often hostile interaction with the local British population, they were impelled to reinvent themselves – generating a narrative of ghettoized migrant survival, within a dominant, normative, white English class and gender order. We can explore the unpredictability of the shifting constellation of emerging racialized, mobile, ethnic subjectivities at the Irish–British nexus of intersecting, contradictory systems of domination and subordination both between and within Irish and British class/gendered formations. Furthermore, categories of identities can be seen to operate not in isolation and do not independently intersect. Rather, categories such as ethnicity/race, class, gender, religion and sexuality both coalesce and contradict at the same time. Importantly, it is the simultaneity of categories of difference that enables us to capture the complexity of the state and public institutional power play involved and the creative and agentic responses (Holvino, 2008). Alongside framing post-war Irish migrants as contained within the black–white dichotomy, an accompanying strategy in the cultural erasure from Britain’s ethnic and racial map has been the systemic failure to engage with the specificity of their experience of racialization and more broadly of their social and cultural way of life, which is now outlined.

Mapping social and cultural institutional spaces: The specificities of Irish diasporic everyday lives

It is argued that the three conceptual moves that constitute the suggested theoretical intervention enable us to shift the interpretive framing from a limiting template involving the reductive reification of assumed national assimilation/inclusion to focus on the complexity of interconnecting multiple subject positions with reference to the state positioning of the post-war generation of the Irish and their own self-positioning, as Britain’s post-war largest diasporic community. In locating the specificity of their lives, this critical intervention highlights absences in much British sociological and cultural studies texts about their national positioning, cultural belonging and subjecthood. Building on this, there is an exploration of the under-reporting or erasure across the everydayness, the encounters and the cultural, social and economic forms of life that have been central to the production of the invisibility of the Irish diaspora. An intersectional analysis informed by gender, nation, class and religion reveals that this included: the writing out of women; the exclusion of Northern Ireland; state criminalization of the Irish as the main ‘enemy within’; the centrality of migrant workers – both women and men – as key to the construction of the British economy and institutional life, including specific cohorts of ‘sub-citizens’; and the significance of the local neighbourhood Catholic church to the Irish diaspora, both in terms of remembering past homeland institutional religious practices and living a present diasporic cultural habitus. These interrelated aspects are now examined.

The projection of the dominant cultural stereotype of the reductionist male labourer/navvy resulted in women, their specific incorporation and their lived experiences being erased from studies of migration, which has found that Irish-born women in Britain compared to men were differentially positioned by the British state, while simultaneously they developed gender-specific migratory patterns (Redmond, 2018). Garrett (2000), in his article ‘The hidden history of the PFIs: The repatriation of unmarried mothers and their children from England to Ireland in the 1950s and the 1960s’, illustrates how this differential gendered positioning operated, while at the same time examining how repatriation as a British exclusionary gendered practice within this context captures a further layer of the complexity of the state production of the vanishing of post-war Irish migrants from the social and cultural map. ³ Garrett (2000, p. 39) highlights how ‘some of the concerns about Irish immigration in the post-war period were also grounded in specific concerns about “Irish girls” because “the hierarchy of belonging” developed in Britain, during the period of post-war reconstruction, “was not only raced, but also gendered”. Thus, the criminality of “Irish girls” in Britain, as reflected in the proportion they comprised of the prison population, was highlighted.’ The classification of criminality refers to a generalized representation of a moral panic linking the projected ‘Irish girls’ and prostitution.

From an intersectional perspective, the gendering of migration, inclusive of women’s history, has the potential to highlight an alternative epistemological understanding beyond the exclusivity of the male-centred workplace and beyond updating the legacy of the nineteenth century navvy by simply adding on the category of nursing, the main post-war female occupation (Redmond, 2018). Feminist research has revealed a wide range of occupations for women, and diverse motivations for migration and trajectories of social mobility, in terms of professional and personal lives. Furthermore, feminist research has illustrated that the inclusivity of women workers opens up our understanding of the complex dynamics of transnational migration into wider questions beyond the simple dichotomy of the national question, to issues of patriarchy and sexual politics at ‘home’, as they are played out in the Republic of Ireland in relation to the history, organization and meaning of family life, the land, inheritance, the Catholic Church and their (non)participation in public life (Daly, 2006). Women’s narratives capture the intensity of an internalized sense of the simultaneity of desire and loss of leaving when reflecting on home, place and belonging and might be understood as located within a wider concept of diasporan families, in which the dynamics and shifting meanings of everyday life are performed in diverse ways in their forging of diverse diasporic subjectivities, which begins to challenge the neat abstract simplicities of assuming the modernity of urban Britain displacing the tradition of rural Ireland (Coulter, 2003). With reference to their lives in racialized Britain, the gendered specificity of women’s migration included their often being ‘more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society’, and the intricate manoeuvring across the racial surveillance of their everyday institutional engagement (Hickman & Walter, 1995, p. 5). Here, we can begin to excavate the range of versions of intersecting Irishness and masculinity/femininity that are ascribed to and self-produced by the post-war generation of women and men as emigrants/immigrants, thus attempting to capture transnationally informed complex social relations and diasporic (auto)biographies across multiple localities, inflected through moving histories and geographies of power within the changing morphology of urban sites and micro-geographies of local neighbourhoods that continue to be socially and culturally reproduced among a contemporary second generation (Clifford, 1994; Redmond, 2018).

At the same time, this alternative epistemological approach enables us to see how immigration has been represented in terms of a generalized other, resulting in the gender dynamics of men’s experiences been sociologically under-theorized (Beatty, 2016). In other words, gender is not seen as constitutive of the processes of migration, which in turn helps reconstitute the meaning of Irish womanhood and manhood. The more recent degendering and desexualization of migration serves to diminish the complex historical and contemporary interplay between Britishness and Irishness in relation to the question of nation, nationalism, masculinity/femininity and embodied desire (Eagleton, 1995). More specifically, it fails to acknowledge the changing meanings attached to the feminization of racialized social groups and the enactment of performative contradictions by feminized, embodied Irish males and the contemporary legacy beyond sex/gender frames produced in post-new social movement individualized times (Hazley, 2020; Moulton, 2023).

Alongside the degendering of the nation, the continuation of the contested constitutional status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom has been of central significance in its impact upon the subject status of migrants from the Irish Republic within Britain. From an intersectional perspective this complicates the question of their purported national inclusion and assimilation beyond the reductionist British academic claim of their whiteness (McVeigh & Rolston, 2021). Gilligan (2022) provides a comprehensive account of the hidden intertwining of UK immigration controls and race relations legislation with Northern Ireland. He writes how ‘The NI blind-spot in immigration policy has played a role in making the Irish, partially, White in UK ethnic and racial studies’ (Gilligan, 2022, p. 439). R. Greenslade (2019), situating the Irish border as a defining issue of Brexit, refers to ‘The Belfast Blindspot’, arguing that ‘Britain still doesn’t get Northern Ireland’. In so doing, he highlights a long history of state and sociological commentators excluding Northern Ireland at policy and theoretical levels in relation to questions of national belonging and ethnic identity-making, resulting in it being treated as a ‘place apart’ (Gilligan, 2017).

Furthermore, the British state’s criminalization of the Irish diaspora has been generated primarily on security grounds over a number of decades by the ongoing political and military involvement of Britain in Northern Ireland, with specific implications for Irish men, gendering and masculinity. While the Irish were formally offered citizenship rights by the British state, this was accompanied by the threat of deportation and other coercive state strategies, most notably the criminalization of their community. This was exemplified by the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was set up initially as a temporary measure following the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings that lasted till 1989, with its immediate effect of a high-profile anti-Irish campaign led by the local media and political representatives that drove Irish ethnicity underground (Farrell, 1999, p. 31). This is of particular relevance given that the surveillance and criminalization of mid-twentieth century Irish migrants were subjectively understood as central to their state positioning as a ‘suspect community’ and the accompanying experience of local neighbourhood extreme hostility (Hickman & Ryan, 2020; Hillyard, 1993). In turn, this was critical in the production of a shifting understanding of racialization with the ascription of the bomber displacing that of notions of stupidity and drunkenness as the most popular representations of the post-war cohort of Irish men. Much British sociology failed to engage with the critical location of Northern Ireland in the Irish diaspora’s enactment and performance of their identity-making as a community, both in terms of their positioning by the state and their self-national identification. At the same time, this sustained disinterest has had major disciplinary implications more broadly for an understanding of race and ethnic relations over the decades. Here, we return to a reductionist British framing, referred to above, of the static hierarchal comparative model of post-colonial nations with its wider implications at this time of sociology’s reinscription of the state’s ascribed disconnections between the major diasporic communities. Over the years in relation to critical social and cultural issues, sociologists have analysed events in Britain with an exclusively specific explanatory focus on black and South Asian diasporic communities. For example, the 1980s policing of inner-city riots/disturbances and the introduction of rubber bullets and water cannons were conceptually framed as a national shift in authoritarian policing of young blacks without any reference to the ongoing experience of the policing of nationalists and republicans in Northern Ireland. Across European countries The Troubles in Northern Ireland were represented as a neo-colonial struggle between the British state and Irish nationalists, with Northern Ireland remaining Britain’s testing laboratory for repressive legislation, surveillance technology and riot control equipment (Hardy, 1997, p. 4). However, with few exceptions, there was little interest from British sociologists, who accepted the state’s framing as an internal sectarian dispute that served to exclude the state as an active player.

Alongside the projection of the IRA bomber, the Irish navvy within the spatial location of the workplace was of equal significance in the cultural production of the racialization of the Irish. The sociological under-reporting of women migrant workers’ experiences resulted in a projected exclusive image of (working class) Irish male workers, which is opened up by addressing the interconnecting class and gender dynamics of their experiences (Corbally, 2015). The interdependence of the Republic of Ireland and Britain in the post-war years played out in terms of this generation constituting a reserve army of labour: The Men who Built Britain (Cowley, 2001). At a political level, they addressed the needs of the former, in terms of its ‘surplus’ labour population from the emigrant nursery of the world finding employment and meeting the economic needs of the latter, in terms of a supply of a cheap, reliable, highly flexible and mobile labour force to draw upon according to the logic of the market (Mac Laughlin, 1994; Scully, 2015). At a cultural level, the workplace was a central space for the state production of the long established historical racial tropes that continued to mark this generation, as illustrated by the mythologized concept of the Irish navvy (Mac Amhlaigh, 2013). This trajectory involved men with a range of social deprivations that resulted cumulatively in them acquiring a lifestyle associated with the vulnerabilities of highly marginalized citizens. Indeed, people born in Ireland from the post-war cohort have suffered disproportionately from accidents, illness and suicide, with Irish men being shown to die younger in Britain than in Ireland, where overall health standards were lower (L. Greenslade, 1992). They were part of a generation for whom the island of Ireland was not big enough, constituting the expelled of Berger and Mohr’s (1975) study of migrant workers in Europe, A Seventh Man. They were born into a national exclusion that continued throughout their lives, with many Irish men experiencing dual processes of proletarianization as former rural workers and racialization within Britain. Most did not intend to stay in Britain and so never fully integrated as citizens with a sense of welfare or civil rights. Since their arrival they were over-represented in a shadow economy of low-skilled, ‘on the lump’ (cash in hand) manual work in construction, marked by non-unionization, job insecurity and dangerous conditions – a disappearing industrial world of ‘navvying’, ‘gangermen’ ‘skins’ and ‘gaffers’ (Mulvey, 2021). The work demanded a nomadic lifestyle, involving for many of these men living in temporary accommodation, never marrying or having children.

British sociology, working within the conceptual framework of a black–white dichotomy, assumed that the Irish benefitted within the workplace on the basis of their whiteness. Adopting a more nuanced account of the black–white dichotomy, a relational model of interconnected post-colonial communities in Britain illustrates a more complex picture. At a local neighbourhood level, diasporic communities, and more specifically from an intersectional perspective, class and gendered sectors of the diasporic communities, tended to predominate urban occupations. Hence, this was an important site for the construction of ideas about race, ethnicity and racism after empire. Irish scholars’ work on this trajectory of embodied Irish men provides evidence that in the local production of hierarchies of ethnic masculinities, this trajectory of Irish navvies was ascribed the lowest status (Popoviciu et al., 2006). Furthermore, the systemic physical and symbolic violence that the wider Irish community experienced from the police and local people was encoded in a range of terms. For example, the interpellation of the post-war Irish migrant as a racialized figure was designated within a post-colonial British discourse as Paddy, and associated terms such as Paddy wagon (transporting Irish prisoners to jail). This was the distorted hidden history of race relations/anti-racism that was invisible in the work of Hall et al.’s (1982) Policing the Crisis, as cited above by Sean Campbell. In a later reflection on the text, one of the authors, Jefferson (2008, p. 114), deploying a classic populist trope to refer to the man attacked – Keenan, as ‘a drunken Irishman’ – presents this as an arbitrary event. The suggested alternative epistemological reading is that for this trajectory of mid-twentieth century Irish (male) migrants, an assumed existing sub-population within Britain, the racially ambivalent status of the ascription of Paddy, marked by invisibility and instability (within the ideologically projected black–white dualism), alongside internal fracturing (accompanying the social mobility of the bourgeois Irish diaspora), often failed to resonate within the then current British regimes of ethno-racial and religious representations. Ironically, Hall et al.’s (1982) project, as indicated in the subtitle of their text, Mugging, the State and Law and Order, set out to explore the state construction of race (see Beatty, 2022).

Religion operating as a symbolic system of national and cultural identity and identification was a further major cultural archetype mobilized against the Irish. An intersectional analysis highlights that being an Irish Catholic, often derisorily labelled as Roman Catholic (i.e. alien) by the local English population, was projected as a key signifier of otherness, signalling cultural outsider within the local neighbourhood and more widely at a national level denoting a sense of not belonging. Contentious issues involved religious events, including Catholic processions along local roads celebrating the real presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (Corpus Christi) and ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday, as well as more mundane events, such as parking for church services and for Irish sporting/cultural occasions. Alongside the workplace, that for many Irish male migrants involved spatial segregation operating within the context of a majority or an all Irish workforce, social and cultural life was also often segregated from the local population. Institutionally, their lives were organized and revolved around the local neighbourhood Catholic church. Historically, the Catholic Church, alongside local county organizations and the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association), was central in the mediation and settlement of the migration of the Irish Catholic diaspora and their children. In terms of structure, the church was central to the schooling, cultural, sporting, as well as spiritual everyday lives of the community. In terms of subjectivity, Catholic identity was an indivisible element of the ethno-religious identity formation of Irish Catholic diasporic subjects and their families during this period. The Catholic Church had an ambivalent relationship to Irish migrants involving a range of tensions, including for example a national and class tension between the predominantly English Catholic hierarchy and Irish-born priests in local parishes. Hickman (1995), in Religion, Class and Identity, captures how this tension was played out. She traces the historical and sociological roots of the Catholic School, highlighting the important concepts of ‘incorporation’ and ‘denationalization’ of the Irish in Britain. In contrast to the promotion of Irish culture among Irish priests in local parish centres, she argues that central to the state denationalizing strategy was to ensure that references to Ireland and Irishness were removed from the school curriculum.

Many British sociologists during this period tended to assume a general secularism among the white UK population, with Northern Ireland projected as the outlier. However, as Kumar (2000, p. 593) argues in ‘Nation and empire’: ‘Northern Ireland remains tragically divided between Catholics and Protestants, the latter being perhaps the most, and also perhaps the last, British people’. Again, the sociological invisibility of the Irish diaspora unintendedly served to distort an understanding of the field of ethnic and race relations. Here, we see the presence of the Irish reveals a residual religious consciousness of the local British within diaspora space (Brah, 1996). Furthermore, recent research I carried out addressed the shifting (gendered) visibility of Muslims (Mac an Ghaill et al., 2023). Particularly productive was an exploration of comparative diasporic biographies of the state-projected Pakistani Muslim and the Catholic Irish second generations in Birmingham. This transnational urban space, and more specifically ‘no-go’ inner-city local neighbourhoods have sustained being the subject of sensationalist state- and media-projected images over the years, as the centre of IRA and Jihadi terrorism and radicalization. British sociologists ignoring Irish scholars’ critical engagement in the field of enquiry failed to make these connections, resulting in claims during the 1990s/early 2000s, at a policy and theoretical level, that a marked discursive shift had emerged with the projection of the category religion displacing the category ethnicity as the primary marker of Muslims’ public identity. This racialization of religion tended to be discussed without reference to the Irish diaspora within Britain or Northern Ireland or without reference to the Jewish community. Hopefully, this exploration of comparative diasporic biographies will enable a nuanced re-reading of the dominant historical narrative and its legacy for contemporary society, while making visible the Irish in the wider story of British sociology of migration and ethnicity.

Conclusion

At earlier moments in post-war Irish migration to Britain, arriving as emigrants and their settlement as immigrants, narratives of migrant post-colonial protest and the establishment of official recognition of an ethnic classification were significant collective achievements. At this moment, with their vanishing from the British social and cultural map, the article’s suggested theoretical intervention, the sociology of critical diasporan epistemology, enables not a remembering but a revisioning of this history. Shifting the dominant framing of the historical representation of migrant relations from a comparative hierarchal model to a relational model can be seen to provide a more nuanced analysis. In so doing, it opens up wider sociological questions about the Irish as central to the complex choreography of British state–migrant relations among the three main post-colonial migrant groups after empire – from the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean and the Republic of Ireland – and how they were played out across local neighbourhoods. With reference to these wider disciplinary issues, a recent project, entitled Look Back to Look Forward, presents the complex legacy of the interconnections between the post-war generations of diasporas: both those hidden by the state in manoeuvring public policy and in collective identity-making among post-war diasporic communities occupying shared institutional spaces that continue to be critical in making sense of the diverse trajectories of contemporary generations of diasporas and the indigenous majority. ⁴ In other words, epistemologically, such concepts as diasporan space enable us to trace movement from the earlier establishing and securing of individual ethnic/religious communities to the interconnectivity and complex engagement between diverse post-war diasporas. This de-bordering movement is now being more fully lived out across local British neighbourhoods, as a shared legacy among their children/grandchildren in the collective cultural production of multi-generation communities, shifting beyond static identities to dynamic identifications. As Schaffer and Nasar (2018, p. 222) claim: ‘Telling the story of white Irish migrants has the potential to clarify the significance of colour in migration history, as well as to improve historical understanding of the multiple processes by which Britain has been shaped by constructions of racial difference.’

Simultaneously, in reconfiguring the category of Irishness from an Irish diasporan perspective, the construction of an inclusiveness allows for different geographical locations and ways of living out of Irishness, displaying the opportunity to define and perform Irishness, thus expanding notions of cultural belonging, marked by multiplicity, historicity and dynamism (Joesten, 2022; McVeigh & Rolston, 2021; Mulvey, 2021; Redmond, 2018). Such a project may contribute to a broader understanding, suggested in the research-based theatre work of Harte (2017). As he indicates, this is a central theme of President Michael D. Higgins’s speeches, that the historical experience of the Irish diaspora serves as a resource in contributing to a global ethical response, resonating with the philosophy of the late Pope Francis, to the formation of contemporary diasporas, including the latest arrivals of migrants and refugees across the island of Ireland and Britain.