Migrant Employment and the Recession — the Case of the Irish in Britain 1

The past decade has witnessed a substantial contraction in the size of the Irishborn community in Britain. This paper uses shift share analysis to assess the extent to which job losses amongst the Irish in Britain over the years 1971–1977 may have induced return migration to Ireland. The article concludes that such “push” factors are likely to have been relatively weak in comparison to the ‘pull’ of an Irish economy considerably more buoyant than that of Britain.