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 a rare example of a writer from this time who explored Irish feminist issues in the context of migration, Mulvihill anticipated a genre of comic fiction about Irish women's experiences in London which writers such as Lana Citron, Marian Keyes and Anne Enright would develop in later years. In this chapter, I focus on her first two novels, Natural Selection (1985) and Low Overheads (1987), which deal more fully with questions of London Irish identity than her third.

Mulvihill's London Irish protagonists serve as vehicles for interrogating the experiences of the Ryanair generation in London and also as effective foils for the author's wry observations on the society within which they settled. Mulvihill uses satire to point up the ways in which personal shortcomings are graphically exposed by events beyond the control of individuals. While primarily comic in approach, Natural Selection and Low Overheads nevertheless provide valuable insights into the gendered entanglements of diaspora. A specific north London milieu provides a site for putting the relationship between the Irish and the English under the microscope and demonstrates the ways in which processes of integration and social cohesion are subject to resistances and complications even in the most supposedly liberal and progressive environments.

Natural Selection (1985) by Margaret Mulvihill

Mulvihill's debut novel has resemblances to The Life of Riley and Schnitzer O'shea in so far as it is a comic portrayal of an Irish migrant caught up in the social and cultural machinations of the London literary world. The main protagonist of the novel is Maureen Ryan, a twenty-four-year-old Irish arts graduate from Dublin, who is described as ‘the apple of her accountant father's eye’ and ‘a conscientious newcomer to London’.