ABSTRACT
This is a story of diaspora. It highlights a population of migrants and their descendents, whose lives remain largely hidden although their labour has been strongly in demand. When I tell you that they are women, you will find this situation unexceptional. Working women have never been fully recognised in the West and migrants are even more marginal. But this group of women has also been rendered invisible because of the specific political context in which they have moved. This is the troubled relationship between Britain and Ireland, which continues to have wide-ranging and largely unacknowledged ramifications within the two countries and well beyond them. One way in which this history has been submerged, and separated from the broader histories of colonialism, has been through the homogenising notion of ‘whiteness’.
