British migrants and Irish anxieties

Abstract

There is a long history of migration from Britain to Ireland, but it is rarely theorised as migration. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources as well as ongoing qualitative research, this paper makes visible the extended presence of British nationals, as migrants, in Ireland. In discussing the conflicted geographies of belonging of recent British migrants to Ireland, the paper highlights the ways in which postcolonial and nationalist discourses may suggest boundaries to belonging. However, these boundaries are undermined by the positioning of British migrants as not-quite-migrants in the changing landscape of migration in contemporary Ireland.

Keywords:

• migration
• Ireland
• Britain
• postcolonial theory

Acknowledgements

Dr Bettina Migge and I carried out the interviews discussed in this paper as part of a broader research project entitled ‘Towards a dynamic approach to research on migration and integration’. I wish to acknowledge the Irish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) who generously funded the project. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference of Irish Geographers in Cork in 2009, and at the NUI Maynooth Department of Anthropology seminar series in 2010. The paper has benefited from the comments received in both places and from the perceptive insights of Mark Boyle, Bernard Mahon and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. The use of the terms Britain, Ireland, UK, British, Irish, English and Scottish is complicated and requires explanation. Britain refers to England, Scotland and Wales, while the UK includes Britain and Northern Ireland. In general in this paper, I use the term British to identify people from England, Scotland and Wales. However, the Census in Ireland uses the term UK nationality rather than British nationality, so I use the term UK when directly referring to Census results. By Ireland/Irish, I generally mean the Republic of Ireland and its citizens. However, since the Republic of Ireland recognises people from Northern Ireland as Irish, and since many people from Northern Ireland identify as Irish, this is also a contested term.

2. In a recent paper, while acknowledging the increasingly blurred distinction between internal and international migration, King and Skeldon (2010, p. 1622) also recognise that the distinction ‘needs to be maintained’.

3. Preliminary results from the 2011 Census show that Polish nationals are now the largest migrant group in Ireland. In April 2011, 122,585 Poles lived in Ireland, compared with 112,259 from the UK, the second-largest group (Central Statistics Office, 2012).

4. The 18% of our sample who identified as British corresponded to the 18.9% of the non-Irish national population who were identified as having UK nationality in the 2011 Census (Central Statistics Office, 2012).

5. Interviewees are identified by year of arrival (2004 or 2007), nationality (UK) and a numeric identifier.

6. See Note 5.

7. To present longer quotes, I have used a technique described as ethnopoetry, which seeks to transform interview transcripts into poetry. See Aitken (2009, pp. 15–17) for a discussion of this method.