Liam Harte has undoubtedly rendered a singular service in producing this anthology with its varying accounts of Irish moves to Britain over an almost three-hundred-year period. It includes the writings of individuals from maids and policemen to literary stars such as W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey. Such writing has received little attention hitherto, the great exception being that of the navvy Patrick MacGill, whom Harte rightly dubs the “literary laureate” of “unskilled Irish migratory workers in twentieth-century Britain” (139).

For some it was a welcome escape or sometimes an opportunity not to be missed. Fleeing Dublin after being denounced by Jonathan Swift as a whore, Laetitia Pilkington eked out a writer’s living in London. A century on James Dawson Burn was delighted to escape his Ulster home: “I thus landed in Scotland a penniless wanderer, but with a mind full to overflowing with real joy at my escape from bondage” (26). After he left school in the 1970s the future pop star Bob Geldof decided he was “off. Off meant England. England had given me my first sense of real liberty” (267). For the young Justin McCarthy, later an Irish nationalist parliamentarian and author, “my yearnings were especially for a first sight of London” (55). McCarthy went on to write within a British cosmopolitan culture. London-based Francis Fahy supported late nineteenth-century Irish cultural movements such as the literary revival and the Gaelic League, while continuing to enjoy life: “Many a soiree of dance and song relieved the heaviness of our programme, many an outing into the woodlands of Kent and Surrey gave some of us our first delightful picture of the English countryside” (100).

For many others, mostly the poor, it was a different story. One nineteenth-century author moved from Belfast to work as a tailor in Liverpool but found himself the butt of “ridicule and scorn; every mean and vile epithet was too good for me” (34). For Dónal Foley, emigrating toward the end of the Second World War “was a nightmare adventure in which I was involved with all these strange people and strange faces” (236). Even an Anglo-Irish aristocrat such as the twentieth-century novelist Elizabeth Bowen found the change to England a trauma, a move “into a different mythology—in fact, into one totally alien to that of my forefathers none of whom had resided anywhere but in Ireland for some centuries” (126).

The characterization of diasporas is notoriously difficult. As far as Ireland is concerned the most prominent diaspora appears to be that of the Irish-American community. This is largely made up of descendants of Irish Catholics, as Irish Protestants generally integrated in Protestant American society without any great difficulty. People with Irish ancestors five or six generations back still identity as Irish, though that identity is nowadays generally little more of a recreational adjunct to a substantive American identity. The situation with the Irish in Britain is somewhat different, as Liam Harte’s anthology demonstrates. By my count, forty-nine of the sixty-three extracts included here are by persons who were born in Ireland and moved to Britain. Generally speaking the maintenance of an Irish identity by persons belonging to generations born in Britain is indicative of an antagonistic relationship with British society. And, indeed, among the fourteen biographical extracts from British-born authors is one by Seán MacStiofáin, chief of the terrorist Irish Republican Army during the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier in the volume is an account from Tom Barclay, who grew up in a nineteenth-century Leicester slum. His experience of Irishness was forged between the hostility of his English peers and the Anglophobia of his parents. It led in his case to the embrace of secular socialism rather than Irish republicanism. Some of the extracts from British-born authors show little sign of overt Irishness. The trade unionist Alice Foley seems indistinguishable from her fellow mill workers except when she assents to joining in reciting a “Hail Mary” when “a Catholic girl” proposes it at the outbreak of the First World War (133).

The descendants of those who settle well into British society generally disappear into a merged sense of British identity. It is often easier to do so than to maintain an Irish identity in a society where the Irish have not always been popular. Were this not so we might perhaps have some unusual candidates as Irish-Britons. Setting aside the queen, who is descended from most of the great Gaelic princely houses of the past, I once read that Margaret Thatcher had a great grandmother called O’Sullivan from County Kerry.

“The Irish in Britain,” the usual phrase for the Irish-British diaspora and the one that Liam Harte employs here, is therefore a telling one. One can be used-to-be-Irish-but-now-British or still-unhappily-Irish-in-Britain but not, it would seem, happily-Irish-British. In his thorough introduction, written largely from a literary-critical perspective, Harte uses terms such as “migration,” “emigration,” and “exile” almost interchangeably. This is another telling usage: perhaps the trope of exile was a necessary myth for some Irish people in Britain to cling onto to sustain an Irish identity. However, it would be unhelpful if this were used to bolster the old notion of the Irish in Britain as emigrants of despair, as opposed to the emigrants of hope who went to America. Harte’s introduction cites anecdotal examples from his authors of an almost uniformly grim attitude to the Irish by the British. Thus “trainee nurse Annie Smithson attributes her matron’s insistence that she remove her spray of shamrock on St Patrick’s Day in 1898 to a similar strain of bigotry” (xxxii). Yet, only two years later, when an isolated Britain was grateful for Irish military support during the Boer War, London was a sea of shamrocks and pro-Irish feeling on St. Patrick’s Day. And in his memoirs, Twenty Years Ago (London, 1905), not used in this anthology, Edmund Downey recalled that when his English employer wore a shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day in 1880, he found himself acclaimed by an Irish women fish seller with “isnt it meself that’s delighted to see you sportin’ the plant?” (42). Amid the grimness there were occasional sparks of humanity.