Returnees, Forgotten Foreigners and New Immigrants

Migration has had an enormous impact on Irish society, yet studies of Irish migration are typically outward-looking and focus on the diaspora abroad. This chapter seeks to challenge this tendency by tracing movement into the country from return migrants in the late nineteenth century to new immigrants in the 2000s. Returned migrants shared extensive details of the world they encountered outside of Ireland when they came home and, as a result, ‘helped bridge the cultural gap between Ireland and the urban world. Their speech, clothing, and manners inevitably infected the home population, producing a droll blend of Ireland, Britain, and America’. ¹ But historians have devoted little time or space to discussing return migration to Ireland, especially before independence, despite the fact that it involved hundreds of thousands of people coming back with firsthand experiences of life in America or Britain. This is partly due to the lack of data and information available, but also because of an assumption that only a minimal number ever returned from across the Atlantic. Surprisingly little is known about the amount of emigrants who came back from the UK during the twentieth century, either. Ireland also has an infrequently referenced but rich immigration history, as will be demonstrated in the second part of this chapter. Just as return migration grew in the second half of the nineteenth century, so too did immigration. Between 1841 and 1911, the amount of British-born people moving to the island more than quadrupled to almost 140,000. The number of residents born outside Ireland or Britain increased sixfold during the same period to nearly 30,000, with Ireland becoming home to more and more American- and European-born migrants at a time when the island’s population was suffering a serious decline. During the 1960s and 1970s, another notable rise in British and European immigration occurred in the Republic of Ireland. These trends, however, paled in comparison with what occurred from the late-1990s onwards. Over a very short period of time Ireland came to contain a larger proportion of immigrants than many Western European countries that had experienced considerable immigration for fifty years or more. By 2011, an astonishing 17 per cent of the population had been born abroad. ² Returnees, forgotten foreigners and new immigrants all brought first-hand experiences from overseas when they moved to Ireland. This chapter examines the effect this had on Irish society over the last 150 years.