ABSTRACT
Emigration has been a rite of passage for generations of young people coming of age in Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1801 and 1921 at least 8 million people left Ireland, destined for new lives in North America, Great Britain and Australasia. l In the case of long-distance migration from nineteenth-century Ireland, a number of accounts are based on exhaustive reconstructions of the backgrounds of those who left and the role of kin and community networks in assisting nineteenth-century emigration to North America, Australia and New Zealand.2 These studies document the way in which migrant networks influenced the original decision to leave Ireland, the choice of destination and the sometimes difficult process of adaptation to new, strange and often unfamiliar climes.
