By the mid-1930s Britain had overtaken the United States as the primary destination for Irish migrants.¹ By the end of the Second World War, when Ireland experienced the largest wave of emigration since the Great Famine of the 1840s, this had become overwhelmingly the case.² Whereas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Scotland and the north of England had been the favoured destinations for Irish migrants, London and the south-east of England now emerged in this position.³ According to Jackson, the Irish-born population of London rose by more than half between 1951 and 1961 to reach 172,493.⁴ After the...

In the closing days of 2003, heated debates took place in the Irish parliament over the plight of elderly Irish men in Britain in the wake of a documentary shown on national television.¹ Many of the interviewees in the programme had spent the best part of their working lives on the building sites of England, but due to major changes in the construction industry over the previous twenty years and the financially insecure nature of their employment, such men were now living out their final days in extremely impoverished conditions in the very towns and cities they helped rebuild after...

Edna O’Brien is regarded today as one of Ireland’s most eminent writers. Declan Kiberd, for instance, has referred to her prose style as one of ‘surpassing beauty and exactitude’.¹ Such accolades, however, are a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the last ten to fifteen years that substantial critical attention has been paid to her work, largely due to the endeavours of feminist scholars.² Most criticism of O’Brien’s work has been from the perspective of gender and sexuality, something which is not surprising given the subject-matter of her early work.³ For critics who read her through psychoanalytical theory, it...

The prospects for pursuing a literary career in the censorious moral climate of mid-twentieth-century Ireland were seriously circumscribed. Literature was a key target of the draconian censorship laws passed by the government of the Irish Free State and there were few opportunities and outlets for young aspiring writers, many of whom were forced (in time-honoured fashion) to seek fulfilment of their ambitions abroad.¹ For centuries, London had provided Irish writers with a potentially international market for their work. As a global hub of theatre and publishing, and by 1945 more physically accessible than hitherto, it became the favoured choice of...

Emigration has been at the heart of Irish life for centuries, not least in the post-war years. Even if many men and women chose not to leave Ireland, nobody was entirely immune to the effects of migration. Most people knew at least one person, whether it was a relative or an acquaintance, who had decided to ‘take the boat’. Conversation and, to some degree, preoccupations and way of life in Ireland during the post-war years were deeply underscored by emigration. Even if its economic and social ravages were sometimes consigned to the periphery of public debate by politicians and the...

As Ireland slipped into severe recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s, unemployment rose dramatically. By 1984, it accounted for 16.4 per cent of the workforce and one in three out of work were under the age of twenty-five.¹ In parts of Dublin the figures were much higher, and it was here that the social consequences of unemployment were most marked, with a major drug and crime epidemic hitting the city. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, the intransigent position of the Thatcher government in relation to republican prisoners’ demands for political status led to the hunger strikes of 1981. As...

Margaret Mulvihill is one of the few Irish women writers to have written consistently about the experiences of the post-war Irish in Britain. Her three novels are all period pieces set in London in the 1980s and early 1990s and her characterizations of young Irish migrants from this time mirror some of the satirical observations in earlier work by Anthony Cronin and Donall Mac Amhlaigh. However, for Mulvihill, who was born in Dublin in 1954 and came to London in her twenties, her perspective on the subject of migration was also imbued with a pronounced feminist sensibility. Apart from being...

In the economic and political circumstances of 1980s’ Ireland, emigration presented an attractive option – and in some cases the only option – for young people north and south of the border. The two key protagonists of the works I examine in this chapter, the first from Dublin and the second from Belfast, are representative of these changes. Their authors, Joseph O’Connor and Robert McLiam Wilson respectively, were typical of a new generation of Irish authors at the time who brought a renewed youthful iconoclasm to the pages of Irish fiction. Here, familiar locations of Irish London (the building site;...

In her inaugural address as President of Ireland in 1990, Mary Robinson stated that she saw her election as an opportunity for Irish people worldwide to ‘tell diverse stories […] stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and social justice’.¹ Seven years later Gerry Smyth argued that

something fundamentally different has overtaken novelistic discourse in Ireland since the mid-1980s […] a willingness to confront the formal and conceptual legacies of a received literary (and wider social) tradition alongside a self-awareness of the role played by cultural narratives in mediating modern (or perhaps it would be better now...

In the British census of 2001, which for the first time allowed respondents to indicate their ‘cultural background’, only seven to eight per cent of an estimated two to two and a half million second-generation Irish people in Britain ticked the box marked ‘Irish’. Researchers have offered a number of reasons why such a small percentage of second-generation migrants were disinclined to identify themselves in this way, among them being a tendency to read the concept of ‘cultural background’ (or ethnicity) as equivalent to formal nationality.² The outcome of the census illustrates just how difficult it is to quantify or...

The authors of the three memoirs I analyse in this chapter are all second-generation Irish men who grew up in working-class neighbourhoods of post-war London and explore this experience from the perspective of middle age. In the course of writing about their backgrounds, they regenerate themes and tropes familiar from texts in the previous two parts of this study. These occur in relation to narratives of nationality and gender, and also with regard to religion, class and sexuality. The conflicts and disjunctions of belonging that ensue are in part common experiences of childhood and adolescence, but in other ways they...

In September 2009, Fintan O’Toole wrote an article in theIrish Timesin tribute to the late second-generation Irish poet, Michael Donaghy. Born in the Bronx, Donaghy lived most of his life in London and, through his work, epitomized the ambivalent yet undeniable attachment to Ireland experienced by many of the second generation. In the article, for which O’Toole coined the term I have used to title this chapter, he makes the following statement about Irishness:

Irish culture is nothing if not persistent. It can sometimes seem so elastic, so open to infinite variation and appropriation, as to be virtually...