As increasing numbers of people left Ireland in the years after the Second World War – the departures reached their peak in 1957 – laments and worries followed them. ‘The best are leaving’, went the cry. Clair Wills takes this cliché as her starting point, interrogating its many possible meanings, from fears of national decline to pride in the achievements of the Irish abroad. Tensions between these interpretations and their contexts act as the central organising principle of the book. They shaped migrants’ expectations and experiences and they mediate our access to the past.

Despite the diversity of the migrant flow to Britain and the many considerations and emotions surrounding it, its characterisations have remained remarkably constant. Drawing on a range of literary and autobiographical texts, films, and artwork, Wills analyses representations of post-war migration. The book is divided into two main parts – the first dealing with emigration from Ireland and the second with immigration into Britain – because each has its associated discourses. The chapters read like a series of vignettes focusing in detail on selected cultural artefacts, which are contextualised so that someone unfamiliar with them could still follow the narrative. All fit well into the overarching argument that writers, artists, and intellectuals deployed stereotypes, whether positive or negative, in varying ways in response to the pressures of historical circumstance.

While Mary E. Daly, Enda Delaney, J. J. Lee, and others have previously examined government and church attitudes towards Irish emigration, Wills’s take on them is refreshing. She focuses on the ideological underpinnings, questioning how and why certain discourses prevailed. For example, she points to the influence of Social Darwinism, which gave rise to the classification of emigrants into ‘types’ and alarmist views of the population crisis as ‘race suicide’ (p. 35). The idea that ‘the best are leaving’ could thus relate to the loss of the most ‘respectable’ people (based on social class) or of the ‘pure Gaelic stock’ (based on racial theories) that cultural nationalists idealised. Gender complicates the picture, as women’s emigration was debated with particular vehemence. If constructions of ideal womanhood bolstered images of nation and family in independent Ireland, then by emigrating they were seen as abandoning their duties to chase commercial comforts, for ‘their love of “things” in general stretched to desirable objects such as ovens and sinks, not to mention electricity and running water’ (p. 70). Though couched in terms of the dangers of Anglicisation and consumerism, fears expressed about migration were intimately linked to anxieties about modernisation and Irish society itself.

The second part of the book comprises three chapters dealing with the Irish in Britain and depictions of them from both inside and outside the group. In Chapter 3 Wills argues that texts such as those by Dónall Mac Amhlaigh and Richard Power can be treated as works of ethnography as well as of memoir. However, while she quotes Irish-language writing in both its original and translated forms in earlier chapters, these writers are not afforded the same courtesy. This is problematic because Mac Amhlaigh expressed dissatisfaction with Valentin Iremonger’s translation of Dialann deoraí (An Irish navvy) and its tone is sometimes at variance with the original. Irish writers, as well as British observers, dipped into the reservoir of cultural stereotypes, which Wills examines in Chapter 4. She demonstrates that in the post-war era these representations were not merely repeated, but reconfigured, particularly in the context of the welfare state. The final chapter addresses depictions of manual labour in non-textual artefacts: Phillip Donnellan’s film The Irishmen (1965) and Frank Auerbach’s paintings of building sites, one of which features in colour on the cover of the book. While Wills might have made more of the film’s soundtrack, her inclusion of images and emphasis on the visual is exemplary.

Literary scholars such as Wills have much to contribute to historical research and this book demonstrates the value of a true interdisciplinary approach. It challenges us to think consciously about representations and discourses, to look at ‘traditional’ sources in new ways and to look to ‘non-traditional’ visual and literary sources as well. While historians may find the bibliography a bit thin, the strength of this text lies in its ability to position close textual analysis within broader ideological and historical frameworks. For that reason, it makes a valuable contribution to Irish migration scholarship.