Irish Migrants in New Communities: Seeking the Fair Land?

by Noémie Beck (Contribution by), Malcolm Campbell (Contribution by), Bridget Connelly (Contribution by), Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin (Contribution by), Tara Manning (Contribution by)

Overview

Irish migrants in new communities: Seeking the Fair Land? comprises the second collection of essays by these editors exploring fresh aspects and perspectives on the subject of the Irish diaspora. This volume, edited by Máirtín Ó Catháin and Mícheál Ó hAodha, develops many of the oral history themes of the first book and concentrates more on issues surrounding the adaptation of migrants to new or host environments and cultures. These new places often have a jarring effect, as well as a welcoming air, and the Irish bring their own interpretations, hostilities, and suspicions, all of which are explored in a fascinating and original number of new perspectives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739173831
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/16/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	174
File size:	928 KB

About the Author

Máirtín Ó Catháin is lecturer in history at the School of Education and Social Science, University of Central Lancashire.

Mícheál Ó hAodha is visiting lecturer in the Department of History, University of Limerick.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Fitting in
Chapter 1- Tribal Kings and Tattooed Chiefs: The Hidden Irish of the Pacific World
Malcolm Campbell
Chapter 2- Legends of the Graceville Conamaras
Bridget Connelly
Chapter 3- ‘Je ne suis jamais allé en Irlande’: An Irish Journey to La Beauce, Quebec
Noémie Beck and Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin
Chapter 4- ‘Nobody’s baby’: Forgotten Irish nationals in post-independence India
Kate O’Malley
Chapter 5- Sisters in the field: The courageous journey of the pioneering Loreto sisters to India and Canada
Tara Manning
Chapter 6- Irish Soldiers in the American Civil War
Patricia B. Swan and James B. Swan
Part 2: Shaping up
Chapter 7- The Irish Wellspring
Jay Tunney
Chapter 8- ‘From Poverty to Posterity’: Assisted Emigration from Connemara in the 1880s
Gerard Moran
Chapter 9- Michael Mooney and the Leadville Miners’ Strike of 1880
James Patrick Walsh
Chapter 10- ‘I Wish I Was Back Home in Derry’: Songs Composed in the H Blocks and the Paradox of Exile
Lachlan Whalen

Editorial Reviews

Like the pioneering spirit evinced by its subjects, this collection of essays explores and uncovers striking new evidence about the formidable reach of the Irish diaspora. In doing so, it reaffirms for Irish migration studies the centrality of personal narrative in its many guises, whether it is oral testimony, letters, folklore, ballads, or diaries, as an indispensable source for comprehending and evaluating migrant consciousness.

Tony Murray

Irish Migrants in New Communities: Seeking the Fair Land? contains an eclectic assortment of tales of the Irish experience of emigration. It gives a voice to a host of almost forgotten migrants (nuns, miners, seafaring vagabonds, and soldiers), tracing their complex relationship with the lands of their birth and adoption. This collection is an unexpected pot of gold, its ten chapters expertly interrogating the theme of exile, what it meant to be Irish, and what was lost in the leaving of Ireland.

Rory Sweetman

Máirtín Ó Catháin and Mícheál Ó hAodha's Irish Migrants in New Communities: Seeking the Fair Land? is an eclectic collection of fascinating essays on a varied and sometimes motley crew of Irish emigrants, castaways, missionaries, and external and internal 'exiles,' ranging from Terence Connell, 'King of the Horrifories' in New Guinea, to Irish-American labor leader Michael Mooney, nearly lynched by Colorado's right-wing vigilantes, to Bobby Sands in his lesser-known role as Long Kesh guitarist and song-writer. This is a book of stories about people sometimes forgotten by their own descendants, and often betrayed and traduced by History's 'winners,' but now recovered to edify a new generation of Irishmen and -women who are forced once more, by their economic and political overlords, to 'seek the fair land' outside Ireland.

Kerby Miller