Abstract
In sixteen chapters, this book ambitions a demystifying overview of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish migration to English-speaking countries, from the point of view of what the publication blurb calls ‘reimagined Irishness’. This is a book about identities rather than mobility, aimed at an informed but non-specialist readership.
It opens with a short prequel, outlining late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish migration to English-speaking destinations. The omission of sustained reference to earlier Irish mobility patterns is unfortunate. It deprives the book of important points of comparison with early modern mobility patterns, overlooks the crucial influence migration into Ireland had on the emergence of early modern and modern mobility patterns and it can oversimplify the complex religious configurations within Irish migration, collapsing, for instance, the creedal complexities of the migrant Scots, Scots-Irish and English into a single Protestant monolith (pp. 181–2).
Over half of the work is devoted to North America, principally the USA, with shorter sections on Australia and New Zealand, where interesting and useful geographical distinctions are drawn. Treating the same basic migration under five geographical headings inevitably makes for repetition, especially given the author's broadly narrative approach. With a topic of this breadth, it is unsurprising that he relies on secondary sources, usually standard accounts of the topic under discussion, and what seem like randomly chosen individual migrant stories. It would have been useful to set these accounts, in a separate chapter perhaps, in their own historiographical contexts. They are, after all, as much the products of their authors’ viewpoints as the book under review is. But there is surprisingly little here on how these historians’ use of their sources reflected political, social and cultural realities in the so-called ‘receiving’ societies. This partly explains the lack of a satisfying comparison between the Irish and say German, Italian and Eastern European, especially Jewish, migrations. This is a pity as more attention to the historiography would have assisted the author in defending his view that, if the migrant Irish were somehow special, it was not in the way Irish nationalist historiographies would have us believe. What is special about nineteenth-century Irish migration is its relative scale, a point well made by the author.
Given that this is a book about identity rather than mobility, and given that we’re talking about Ireland, it's hard to get away from religion. Overall, the author's take is unremarkable: nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish religious history may be summarised as the construction and collapse of a Catholic institutional monolith, one which the vagaries of Irish mobility extended to the British colonies. Although the monolith model has the virtue of simplicity, one suspects that its deployment here is justified less on the grounds of historical adequacy than those of narrative expediency. As an interpretation, it draws heavily on Emmet Larkin's ‘devotional revolution’ trope, which recurs at regular intervals in the book (pp. 160, 180, 185, 277 and 315). No criticism of this hardiest of Irish historiographical canards appears capable of returning it to the historical obscurity it once enjoyed.
It is perhaps because the book is intended for a popular audience that the author tends to fetishise personal agency, especially with reference to small groups of white males, many ‘led’ by Paul Cullen and including Fr Anthony Fahy, who was somehow ‘responsible’ for 30,000 Irish in Argentina (pp. 157, 38). Exaggerated individual agency simplifies sprawling narratives like this one, but it presumes an uncalibrated understanding of ‘power’ and tends to ascribe excessive significance to handy individuals. Similarly simplifying is the author's assumption that the evolution of Irish identity can be understood as a simple linear progress from self-confident, inflexible and authoritarian credulity to ‘convivial secular hedonism’ (pp. 156–7, 367). This fits in nicely with topical interest in the demise of Catholicism in Ireland but something more nuanced would have captured more of the complexity.
The book is more convincing when it probes, alas too briefly, the massive buy-in of US Irish migrants to Catholic schools, parishes and social infrastructure. The author points out how the appetite for social cohesion was one reason explaining high church attendance among mid-nineteenth-century Irish Catholics in America. If Irish-American laity permitted the church to assume the importance in their lives that it enjoyed, it was at least partly because that is how they wanted and needed it to be (p. 181). Trust and authority were inevitably prone to withdrawals of loyalty and consent, as recent experience has demonstrated. In this regard, it is interesting to note, yet again, how easily the Irish abroad took on and cast off identities, sometimes because they had to, sometimes because it suited. The relative lightness of Irish cultural baggage may help explain this. It may also help clarify why Irish identities proved so attractive to non-Irish groups, and not only for St Patrick's Day. If this is a compliment to the openness of Irish ‘identities’, it is a backhanded one. It may be easy for Irish cultural wannabes to identify with ‘convivial secular hedonism’ but they usually baulk at Lough Derg and an Ghaeilge. At the same time, it is important to point out that Irish identities have exerted centrifugal force too. One thinks of the thousands for whom the journey abroad was a rejection of and liberation from prescribed identity. Sometimes people leave home because they hate either who they are or who they have been obliged to become. On arrival at their destination, the last people they want to associate with are their own. Abroad, Irish culture refusniks, especially those who have tired of invented, marketed identities, have made their mark, even though their impact is inevitably less immediately visible. It would be enlightening to retrieve this dimension of the migrant experience too.
Finally, in a book intended for non-specialist readerships, the more extensive use of maps, charts and graphs would have leveraged the statistical component of the text for greater pedagogical effect. These minor shortcomings aside, however, one can recommend the book as a comprehensive overview of the vast literature on an enduringly absorbing phenomenon.