Home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary Ireland

Abstract

This paper discusses immigrant identity and place in contemporary Ireland. It draws from a longitudinal research project that involved recent immigrants to Ireland. Participants in the project came from 18 different countries, and ranged in age from 22 to 68. Their reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, adventure, and personal relationships. Combining insights from sociolinguistics and human geography, the paper first considers the different ways in which immigrants to Ireland narrate place and identity, paying particular attention to content and linguistic strategies. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a focus on the concept of “home,” highlighting the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants used to discursively construct notions of home and identity in their interviews. The paper concludes by arguing that detailed discourse level analysis of people's narratives of place offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place.

Keywords:

• migration
• identity
• place
• home
• language
• Ireland

Notes

1. Tomaz is a pseudonym.

2. The project, entitled “Towards a dynamic approach to research on migration and integration,” was supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

3. EU-15 countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

4. EU-10 countries are Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

5. Interviewees are identified by the year of arrival in Ireland (either 2004 or 2007) and by a nationality identifier (for example, POL for Poland) and a numeric identifier. The use of “b” signifies the second interview with the interviewee.

6. The contrast between unspoilt depopulated natural landscapes and built landscapes is a common trope in writing on Ireland (Graham 1997; Duffy 2013).

7. It is worth noting that immigrants often comment on difficulties in making friendships with the settled population, across a range of spatial contexts. For example, Ryan et al. (2008, p. 682) discuss this phenomenon in the British context, while Gmelch (1980, p. 139) highlights “the friendliness of people at home” as a motivation for return migration.

8. In this section, we focus on the narratives of people who do not have children. We discuss the geographies of belonging of migrant mothers in Ireland in Gilmartin and Migge (forthcoming).