Reflections on sociology of Irish diaspora

Abstract

This article reflects on the relatively small body of work that constitutes sociology of Irish diaspora. It argues that Irish diaspora should be an expanded and higher prioritized field of study for Irish sociology.

There is a relatively small body of work to consider when reflecting on the sociology of Irish diaspora. The study of the Irish diaspora is dominated by history and literature, the two hallowed disciplines of Irish academia. A critical group of geographers both in Ireland and abroad have also been important for our understanding of the dynamics of Irish diaspora. There are very good sociology departments in the third-level institutions in Ireland, but none of them are full of experts on the diaspora. The sociology department at Maynooth University is unusual in that it was headed at its outset by someone whose doctoral research focused on the Irish diaspora. Even more unusually Liam Ryan’s (1990) subject was the Irish in London.

The Irish Journal of Sociology (IJS) devoted a special issue to the Irish diaspora in 2002 edited by Jim McAuley. And in the second issue of 2015, the IJS included a special section on contemporary Irish emigration, edited by Louise Ryan and myself. Further, for the 30th anniversary issue, I have been asked to contribute this essay. These actions demonstrate an awareness within the discipline in Ireland that discussion of the diaspora is relevant for Irish sociologists or others studying the sociology of Ireland. Does it go much further than this? Has there been any substantive improvement since McAuley (2002, 4) wrote in the IJS the following words?

Historians, social geographers and those concerned with the literature surrounding migration have long dominated the area of study into the Irish diaspora. While such studies have provided much detailed and useful study of particular cities, regions and country, there has been too little attempt at a coherent systematic social analysis or to apply some core sociological approaches to the Irish diaspora. (2002, 4)

In this piece, I am going to begin by rehearsing some of the main reasons why study of emigration and the Irish diaspora should be a higher priority and is essential for understanding contemporary Ireland. The main body of the essay examines the sociology of the Irish diaspora by recounting how we developed an undergraduate Irish Studies degree in London. This was based around core emigration and diaspora topics rooted in historical texts and a sociological perspective. I then look briefly at the work of sociologists for whom Irish diaspora has been their chief object of study for at least a part of their research career.

The relative absence of emigration and diaspora in Irish sociology that I discuss here (although this absence is not restricted to sociology in Ireland, see Hickman and Ryan 2020) exists despite emigration being a defining feature of Irish history and contemporary experiences. The Great Famine has had enormous attention, in terms of its impact both in Ireland and on the massive emigrations that followed (thanks to many a dedicated historian of diaspora). But the impact of the two major phases of emigration in the 20th century – the 1950s and 1980s – has been less integrated into the national story. The economic and social crisis that engulfed Ireland in 2008−2010 spurred the third major phase of Irish emigration since the 1940s. By any lights therefore emigration and diaspora should figure large in accounts of modern Ireland.

Contact and exchanges between the ‘homeland’ (Ireland) and the various spaces and places of the diaspora have been and continue to be mutually influential. It is impossible to consider what constitutes ‘Irishness’ today without acknowledging its contested character. Because of the specific history of Ireland, of which emigration and partition are two emblematic features, understanding Irishness cannot be limited to within the boundaries of the nation state. The success of modern Ireland is generally measured by those who do not emigrate and the measurement does not generally include the experiences and the social, cultural and economic remittances of those who left Ireland.

Despite much larger numbers of the Irish-born residing in Britain than in the United States (USA) for the past 70 years, the quintessential Irish migrant in most Irish-based accounts (journalistic or academic) is usually recounted as someone who left for the USA in the 19th century. The relative silence about the Irish in Britain (a subject I have been writing about for years) is in part due to movement to England barely being seen as emigration. There is also perhaps a stigma of failure attached to it that is not associated with going to the USA. So the stereotype of the Irish immigrant in Britain as a down-on-his-luck Irish labourer is pitched against one of a rich and ignorant (of Ireland) Irish American. The third stereotype is that of the emigrant as an entrepreneurial adventurer or experience-seeking professional away for a few years before returning to enrich Ireland.

Is there room in Ireland's images of an Irish emigrant and member of the diaspora for the young drug taker from a small Irish town or city, or the young woman who left seeking an abortion, or the young person leaving because of physical or sexual abuse, or because they could not be openly gay or lesbian? Irish diaspora includes many ‘hidden histories’ of Ireland that the traditional stereotypes mask. Are the stereotypes in Ireland – of the successful Irish American businessman and the retired and impoverished Irish construction worker in Britain (both male) – a way of ‘not knowing’ the diaspora and therefore avoiding the momentous implications that emigration has had in Ireland's formation? Irish society is a highly porous entity, as demonstrated by the emigration and immigration patterns over the past quarter of a century. A form of 26-county nationalism, or to put it another way a ‘bonding of Irishness to the Republic of Ireland’, has taken place over the recent past and younger generations seem to buy into this as much as any other. Arguably sociology in Ireland has been inflected with the same perspective.

There is evidence also that young emigrants are rethinking their relationship with Ireland. Some are proclaiming that they should not lose their citizenship rights on leaving Ireland and would like votes for citizens abroad. What is required, then, is greater recognition in national narratives of emigration and its impact and of the influence of the diaspora. There is also a need for a greater emphasis on what have been the continuous contacts and exchanges that characterize Ireland's place in the global economic system.

Sociology of the Irish diaspora

Due to the dominance and wide-ranging nature of history, geography and literature in studies of the Irish diaspora, there has been no particular empirical niche for the sociology of the diaspora. I, as a sociologist, began by studying the Irish in Britain. I am autobiographically part of that formation and when I commenced my research in the 1980s, it was a subject completely under-researched by sociologists in general. I was grateful for the many volumes by historians (based in Ireland and in Britain), the work of some geographers, especially Walter (2001), and one particular sociological text The Irish in Britain (Jackson, 1963). The latter I pored over extensively and at one point knew much of it by heart.

By the end of the 1980s, I was employed at the Polytechnic of North London (later the University of North London, then London Metropolitan University) and setting up an undergraduate degree in Irish Studies. We structured it so that in each of 3 years there was a core course: Irish migration to Britain; Irish in London; Irish in the USA. Students, many of whom were Irish emigrants or second generation, had to study these courses and take optional courses in history or literature, of which there was quite a number. By rooting the degree in a ‘local’ socio-historical approach, the students were able to produce work about their own family’s history and experiences. These texts are original and valuable for researchers and are housed in the Archive of the Irish in Britain, in the library of London Metropolitan University.

I remember in launching the course, there was an extended discussion about appointing an external examiner. I was resolute that it was not going to be an historian or a literary academic. We happily asked the geographer Bronwen Walter to be the first external and when her term was up, we asked the aforementioned Liam Ryan. Fortunately he agreed. For a new degree in a soon-to-be new university, it was paramount that the externals be supportive of the vision of the curriculum. These first two external examiners were not only student-centred, which suited the institutional ethos at North London, but also they were fully cognizant of the need to study emigration and diaspora for their own sake and in order to understand modern Ireland.

The challenge from the Irish Studies degree course, to extant study of the Irish diaspora, was not only disciplined-based but also concerned with questioning the assimilation paradigm that dominated historical texts on the Irish in Britain. It is interesting that Jackson had securely positioned studying the Irish in Britain as part of a wider necessity to study ‘immigrant communities’ recognizing that the immigrant is not ‘the only changeable factor in a complex situation of interchange and inter-relationship’ (1963, 162–3). Apart from centering the degree on a core of migration courses and challenging assimilatory theories, the most innovatory aspect was a third-year course on the Irish in the USA. A diasporic element was therefore included from the beginning, before the term ‘diaspora’ became ubiquitous in migration studies (from the mid-1990s onwards). Generally in teaching about the Irish in the USA, we mined many of the existing ethnic historiographies for ‘facts’ about different generations and locations of Irish emigrants and their families and combined this with a structural analysis inspired by works such as Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The creation of Black and Irish identities in the United States (Williams, 1990).

Back in the 1980s/early 1990s, there was already a considerable amount of published material about the Irish in America and the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) had been going since 1960. However, its conference papers were never overburdened by contributions from sociologists. When I joined and attended for the first time in 1997, there were a small group of anthropologists but I had to hunt for a sociologist I remember attending one ACIS annual meeting in either 2004 or 2005, and in the bar one evening, Declan Kiberd, who was one of the keynotes that year, commented (even lamented) that I and Bill Rolston were the only two sociologists present in a conference of over 200 people.

Dominated by academics studying Ireland, the ACIS has only included significant numbers of papers about the Irish diaspora in the past 20 years or so, mostly put forward by historians and literary scholars. There have been significant books by sociologists about the Irish in America. For example, Mary Corcoran’s Irish Illegals: Transients between Two Societies Corcoran (1993). I found this work very useful because in a traditional sociological fashion, the research generated a typology of 1980s Irish emigrants to the USA. Comparing the Irish in Britain to this analysis enabled me to begin to distinguish the specificities of different sites of Irish diaspora. Ide O’Carroll has written two books about the Irish in USA: Models for Movers (1990/2015) about Irish women's emigration to America; and her more recent Irish Transatlantics 1980–2015 (O'Carroll, 2018) mostly about Irish emigrants in the Boston area and their relationship to both countries. The strength of the latter book is a detailed analysis of interviews with Irish emigrants and it focuses on what they tell us about migration in a time of rapid technological and multimedia change.

Turning to published research about the Irish in Britain there are a few sociologists to take note of, though not that many. Both Breda Gray and Louise Ryan have produced significant work on emigration to and settlement in Britain and both have sought to examine the gendered nature of understandings of the Irish diaspora. Both scholars utilize interview data and/or focus groups in producing strong analytic accounts of Irish diaspora. Gray's Women and the Irish Diaspora (2004) focuses on Britain and covers the experiences of both Irish migrant women and second-generation women. It explores how gender is structuring at a relational level and in subsequent work, she has done much to illuminate gendered transnational practices (Gray, 2014). Louise Ryan, in particular, has undertaken comparative research and produced systematic accounts of the experiences of Irish migrants in Britain (Ryan, 2001), and contrasted them with, for example, Polish, French and other migrants. In many ways fulfilling Jackson's earlier injunction. She has been a key exponent and developer of the use of social network analysis in the study of migration and diaspora and has highlighted the weakness in gender-neutral conceptualizations of ethnoreligious boundaries (Ryan, 2014).

Other sociologists of the Irish in Britain whose work must be noted in this scarce field include Hickey (1967/2006) who gave us was one of the earlier accounts of Irish communities in Wales; Mairtin Mac AnGhail and Chris Haywood (2003, 2014) who have a long track record researching the Irish in Britain, their work is especially useful on masculinities, youth and educational settings; Bernard Halpin (2000) has produced very useful quantitative data on the Irish in Britain; Marc Scully (2010, 2012) has carried out valuable research teasing out a variety of issues in relation to Irish identities, predominantly in Britain and Ireland, he is a social psychologist whose work is very sociological; and John Nagle (2008, 2015) whose early work focused on the Irish in London, raising essential questions about attempts by the London Irish to make Irishness inclusive and to create cross-community alliances under government-sponsored ‘multicultural’ initiatives.

Both Gray (2014) and Ryan (2014) were contributors to Women and Irish diaspora identities, edited by the historian Jim MacPherson and myself (MacPherson and Hickman 2014). Despite our best efforts to be interdisciplinary, this volume which addresses theories, concepts and new perspectives is still dominated by the contributions of historians. An early edited collection, Location and dislocation in contemporary Irish society, which focused on emigration and Irish identities (Mac Laughlin, 1997) included five sociology contributors, a high point, some of them have gone on to specialize in other areas, ostensibly unconnected with emigration and diaspora. An issue of Éire-Ireland, edited by Piaras Mac Einri and Tina O'Toole, in 2012 managed to include three sociologists, Gray (2012), myself (Hickman 2012) and Alice Feldman (2012). Another volume with a strong diaspora focus is Consuming St Patrick's Day (Skinner and Bryan 2015) with strong anthropological leanings it included two sociologists, myself (Hickman 2015) and John Nagle (2015). A more recent volume, Rethinking the Irish Diaspora (Devlin and Pierse, 2018), is a heady mix of historians, geographers and literary specialists. It includes just one social scientist, Danielle Mackle, who studied and now teaches social work at Queen's University, Belfast, writing about marriage equality in the north and south.

None of these 21st-century volumes excluded or limited sociologists by design, in most cases far from it, there are just relatively few sociologists working on the Irish diaspora and the interests of the particular publication narrow the possibilities even further. One volume, Are the Irish Different? (Inglis, 2014), is concerned with the marginalization of a sociological perspective generally in Ireland and is constructed as an intervention. Three chapters, contributed by Mac An Ghail (2014), Michele Dillon (2014) and myself (Hickman 2014), address the diaspora directly and the book's index has many referrals for emigration, diaspora and immigration. This is heartening as again it demonstrates awareness of the significance of emigration and diaspora but not to the point of it becoming a prioritized field of study.

Concluding points

I have focused on sociology of Irish diaspora in the USA and Britain because they have been the two main destinations for Irish emigrants, in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively; and of the post-2010 cohort of Irish migrants, the largest proportion has also headed to Britain. The literature of Irish diaspora is heavily weighted in the direction of these two locations. Although there is now published work on many other destinations, these have primarily been produced by historians, geographers and the occasional economist or political scientist. Many accounts of the Irish diaspora cover employment, family, religion, politics, identities and other major themes derived primarily from the approach of ethnic historiographies. It is rarer that they encompass diaspora/transnational theories (although this applies less to younger scholars) or the implications of theories of intersectionality (although this does not apply to scholars concerned with the gendering of the diaspora).

A challenge was laid down in 1997 by an American sociologist. She argued that the social position of today's immigrants (she was addressing 1980s immigrants from Ireland to the USA), their forms of struggle and their future prospects are all shaped by their position in the racial hierarchy and by Irish forms of race thinking. Her assessment was that Irish migrants uncritically adopted the dominant USA politics of privileging whites over racial minorities. She advocated the development of scholarship which explores race as a component that systematically structures immigrant experience and thought that such scholarship would substantially enhance the history of Irish immigration to the USA and would help understand transnational racial structures (Luibheid, 1997, 254). A number of labour and other historians have addressed racial structures/relations when writing about the Irish in the USA. My own research on the Irish in Britain has long been concerned with analyzing the positioning of Irish migrants and their descendants, cognizant of the characteristics of each generational cohort of Irish emigrants, in a variety of hierarchies (e.g. class, ethnicity, race, religion) within the British society (Hickman, 2005). More recently, this interest has grown to encompass Irish migrants and their descendants in the USA (Hickman, 2012).

The challenge laid down by Luibheid remains an important one and ideally formed one would imagine for sociologists. Also not fully realized is McAuley's (2002) vision of sociologists developing a coherent and systematic social analysis or applying core sociological approaches to the Irish diaspora. My own vision is of integrating the story and analysis of Irish diaspora with that of contemporary Ireland. However, a fuller account of the theories, concepts and perspectives about Irish diaspora, which could be the beginning of such an integration, was not possible in 3000 words here and will have to await a future day.