Irish Migration, 1950–2007

There was a dramatic transformation in the second half of the twentieth cen­tury when net emigration - dominant since the beginning of the eighteenth century - was reversed to net immigration. In the 1950s the prospect of such a transformation was almost unthinkable: as was reported at the time, if a little over-dramatically, ‘all economists and sociologists are agreed that, if this ominous trend continues, in another century the Irish race will have van­ished, much like the Mayans, leaving only their monuments behind them’ (O’Brien 1954, 7; Delaney 2000, 203). With the tradition of emigration as strong as ever, there seemed no end to it: ‘the common talk amongst parents in the towns, as in rural Ireland, is of their children having to emigrate as soon as their education is completed in order to be sure of a reasonable live­lihood’ (Government of Ireland 1958, 5). In Northern Ireland, emigration was smaller in scale but the prospects at home seemed little better. Neither the Republic of Ireland nor Northern Ireland had much experience of inward migration arising from British decolonisation. However, their emigrants in Britain and their descendants did. Having been the largest immigrant group by far since the eighteenth century, the situation of the Irish in metropolitan Britain, as in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century,changed greatly in the 1960s with the impact of New Commonwealth immigration (Walter et al. 2002). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Commonwealth · Economic history · Emigration · Genealogy · Geography · Immigration · Irish · Net migration rate · Political science · Population · Sociology · Demography · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration