Listen to the Podcast
English people in Ireland form a significant but under researched group set within what Professor Mary Gilmartin has alluded to as a complex and entangled historical relationship. Whilst research into in-migration to the Republic of Ireland has increased, there is a relative absence within this area on people who have moved from England to the ROI.
My research questions are as follows:
What has been the pattern of English people moving to Ireland since 1960?
Why have English people moved to Ireland?
How do English people in Ireland identify themselves, and how are they position by others in terms of categories and hierarchies of belonging?
What social practices and relationships are performed by English migrants in Ireland?
How do English migrants to Ireland experience a feeling of ‘home’?
I carried out 28 interviews with 32 people (the number difference accounts for four couples who were interviewed together). Pre-Covid, the plan had been to interview people across the Republic of Ireland and lots of wonderful people came forward to take part. As many others have had to, I had to restructure the project and work with what I managed to get across two fieldtrips which took me to Counties Donegal, Sligo, Cork, and Tipperary.
Participants had moved between 1973 and 2018 and predominately lived in rural or semi-rural areas, with just a handful in larger towns. Participants’ ages when they moved ranged between 6 and 68, the ages at the time of interview ranged between 30 and 83. I recruited participants through social media, newspaper articles, radio, and word of mouth.
As I was keen to explore home and belonging, it felt important to interview participants in a place where they felt ‘at home’ – unsurprisingly, perhaps, for most participants this meant conducting interviews in their own houses. I took a qualitative approach, using a combination of life history and semi-structured interviewing, beginning by asking participants to tell me how they came to live in the ROI.
The people I spoke to were incredibly generous with their time, sharing stories, memories, and emotions. It was curious to discover that many people who had moved to the ROI had expected Ireland to be quite similar to England, and often this was not the case. This was especially evident when participants spoke about encountering death rituals and funerals in their new local communities pivoting between shock, dismay, admiration and delight as they described their early encounters with Irish death practices.
The richness and depth of the data I amassed on death meant that I was recently able to present a paper on this topic at the 2022 Conference of Irish Geographers at the University of Limerick. My presentation was titled ‘Doesn’t he look well?’ Life and death stories from the English in Ireland and encapsulated many of the feelings and reflections of the wonderful participants who gave me an insight into their lives.
Many thanks to the QMUL LTDS Programme for funding my research.