Immigration into the Republic of Ireland: a bibliography of recent research

Abstract

Until relatively recently, research on migration to the Republic of Ireland has been limited to a handful of texts. As immigration into Ireland has increased over the last decade, so has the volume of published research exploring this phenomenon, with a significant increase in the number of published research reports, policy studies and submissions, conference proceedings, monographs, academic papers, book chapters and theses. However the piecemeal and often ad hoc nature of the growth of this bibliography presents specific problems for both researchers and participants. This paper draws together a comprehensive (though not exhaustive) bibliography of research into immigration in Ireland. The bibliography is organised into a typology of research on migration into Ireland by considering the existing corpus of work under nine headings. The paper concludes by highlighting the potential contribution that human geography can offer to our understandings of the processes and dimensions of migration to twenty-first century Ireland.

Keywords:

• Ireland
• immigration
• research
• bibliography
• references

Notes

1. Hereafter ‘Ireland’.

2. The establishment of a number of research initiatives exploring immigration in a number of Irish universities, specifically UCD, DCU and TCD. is a welcome development. In addition there are plans to re-open the Irish Centre for Migration Studies in UCC.

3. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive and constantly updated bibliography on migration to Ireland similar to the gender in geography bibliography organised by the FEMGEOG listserv discussion group members, see http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/fembib/.

4. Note however that Travellers, in the strict sense, fall outside the scope of this review. For that reason a few illustrative references are cited but this is not a comprehensive list. Historical and general references, e.g. on Jewish immigration into Ireland. should also not be regarded as more than illustrative.

5. Population and Migration Estimates, CSO, April 2005.

6. Small numbers of refugees (from Hungary, Chile, Vietnam) were admitted into Ireland as part of organised reception programmes in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s.

7. It should be pointed out that migrants also went to rural parts of more developed countries, although this was often seasonal and was proportionately much more modest than movements to urban areas.

8. Judging by return rates of Irish migrants in the 1990s, up to half those currently in Ireland from Central and Eastern Europe may ultimately go home. In the medium term Poles and Latvians may well give way to Bulgarians and Romanians and, in the longer term, to Turks, Russians, Moldovans and Ukrainians.