The close entanglements of families spread between Ireland and England are often ignored as transnational links, reflecting the hazy understanding of separate states within the 'British Isles' especially outside the Irish Republic. It examines the public record available in autobiographical memoirs and novels. It also examines the private accounts produced in discussion groups and interviews generated by the ESRC-funded Irish Project to uncover the complex family networks which structure migration flows between Ireland and England. The chapter considers life story data from second-generation Irish women and men living in England, to explore ways in which childhood memories have contributed to constructions of identity at different stages of their lives. The largest number of emigrants to Britain came from rural Ireland, especially the counties of the western seaboard where farms were smallest and economic life most vulnerable. Second-generation Irish people with 'mixed race' heritages have different childhood memories of visiting Ireland.

This chapter examines the development of Ireland's diaspora strategy from 2000. It provides an analytical framework through which diaspora strategies might be best understood, and considers some important criticisms of the diaspora for development agenda. The chapter draws three aspects of this framework for further scrutiny: motives, institutions and strategies, and supporting infrastructures. It focuses on changing motives of the Irish state towards its diaspora, the institutions and strategies which are overseeing Ireland's diaspora policies, and the quality and effectiveness of the supporting or flanking infrastructures upon which Ireland depends. The chapter also focuses on how Ireland is seeking to refresh, re-energize and build anew its relationships with its diaspora. It concludes by identifying a number of questions which the further development of an Irish diaspora strategy might usefully address.

This chapter describes 203 post-1980 Irish immigrants in Australia, one of Ireland's most distant emigrant destinations. Immigrants from both Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI) are included, thereby providing an all-island, Catholic-Protestant perspective and giving voice to the oft- invisible NI diaspora contingent. In Australia the parameters of belonging were challenged, particularly for those NI Protestants who had self-identified as Northern Irish or British. Emigrants generally 'are cut off from the representation of an important strand of their histories by a series of absence from spaces of cultural reproduction, in education, memorials and popular culture'. Throughout Australia, many ethno-cultural organizations specifically cater for Irish immigrants. In the past such organizations provided important focal points for Irish immigrants, not only as social venues but also as an entree into the ethno-cultural employment network.

This chapter compares and contrasts across the Socialist Sunday School (SSS) and Black Saturday School (BSS) movements by developing three analytic themes. These themes offer a productive pathway for conceptualising and understanding these histories as counter-publics, and for understanding the role of children’s education in radical social change. First, I explore the attempt of these movements to challenge wider social inequalities and injustices through children’s educational initiatives. In particular, I consider the place of childhood and youth politics in the struggles for social change. Second, the ways in which both of these radical education movements reclaimed past heritage, and asserted present and future capability, is examined. Here, the principal importance of knowledge authority and common culture in the BSS and SSS movements is considered. Third, and last, I reflect on the place of class and blackness as common markers of culture and selfhood in the SSS and BSS movements, and on the importance of developing collective identities in the struggle for social change.

People from West Africa have featured particularly strongly, but immigrants from many different parts of the continent have also moved to Ireland, sometimes in significant numbers. A small but growing literature charts the experiences of these migrants from the continent of Africa. This chapter seeks to add further to the growing literature by reporting on the experiences of a small number of recent migrants from the continent of Africa to Ireland. Migrant communities are commonly deemed to be transnational in nature and as such any attempt to understand the lived experience of these communities must make reference to at least two physical places. Conceptualizations of the family and of family life held by the African immigrants who participated in this study support this view. The important role that such transnational financial transfers play in a migrant's country of origin is well established in the literature.

This brief introduction to Part III provides an outline of chapters five and six, and a taster from the Black Saturday School archives, highlighting their approach to radical education. In addition, it introduces the men and women who were interviewed for the book, and whose oral testimony is draw upon in the account of the movement presented in chapters five and six.

Chapter four examines how Socialist Sunday Schools (SSSs) negotiated the wider political field, and defended their right to develop educational cultures of socialism for children and young people. This chapter explores the ways in which diverse SSS teachers attempted to express a universal humanity for their students, imbued with understandings of class, gender and race. First, the contested position of SSSs within the broader socialist movement, including the challenges wrought by the emergence of the Communist Party, is examined. Following on from this, second, this chapter explores the wider political contestations that surrounded the SSS movement as the state, and conservative and religious pundits intervened into their practice. Third, the SSS movement’s expression of a universal working-class humanity is analysed, focusing in particular at the complex universalising discourses of nature and internationalism in class politics, and the ways in which this both referenced, and obscured, fragmentation and difference in working-class experience. Fourth, through examining SSS curricula and literature as well as the personal experiences of teachers and students, the final section focuses attention on the significant influence of women within the movement, and the gendered nature of SSS work.

This chapter explores the North Atlantic as a space for loyalist network-building that connected the politics and identities forged within Canadian localities with those in Ireland and mainly in its northern province, Ulster. The tour, that took in both Canada and the United States, was undertaken by two representatives of the newly minted Ulster Loyal and Anti-Repeal Union (ULARU): Rev. R.R. Kane, an Anglican minister from Belfast, and George Hill Smith, an Armagh barrister. The chapter presents a more nuanced picture of the cartography of 'Irish diasporic space' in North America by considering the Canadian and loyalist contexts. The Canada- and Ireland-specific conceptions of loyalty thus combined with the trans-imperial discourse of 'British liberties' to structure rationales for why British imperialism had been a force for good in the world.

This brief introduction to Part II, introduces the Socialist Sunday School movement, the first community-based schooling initiative to be examined in this book. It provides an outline of chapters three and four, and a taster from the Socialist Sunday School archives highlighting the schools’ radical educational practices.

This chapter explores the emergence of the BSS movement. First, in order to understand the intellectual and political influences on the late-twentieth-century black politic, the historical and political genealogy of black resistance is examined. Second, contextualising the emergence of the BSS movement within broader of black politics. This chapter explores the historical circumstances that led to the inception and consequent proliferation of BSSs across England, including the institutional racism of state schooling. Finally, exploring the projection of a black community and selfhood, the placement of ‘blackness’ as a foundational conceptual tenet of BSSs, and the collective cultures they fostered, is considered. In this discussion BSS curricula and schooling practices are examined, revealing diverse experiences and understandings of class, race and gender in the creation – and projection – of collective black cultures in BSSs.

Chapter three examines the primary characteristics of the Socialist Sunday School (SSS) movement’s practice and its articulated purpose. Firstly, this chapter outlines the emergence of SSSs within the existing socialist initiatives for children. In doing so, this chapter traces the progression of this community-based schooling movement from a small scattering of schools to a British alliance, complete with a range of institutional and cultural apparatuses including school meeting agendas, alternative socialist curriculum and songbooks. Secondly, the SSSs’ creation of a children’s radical education is explored, including their development of socialist cultures of childhood, alternative pedagogies and curricula. Thirdly and finally, the ways in which the SSS movement drew upon the cultural resources of the Christian religion to develop its educational practices is analysed. This discussion investigates the ways in which the SSS movement was related to the ‘religion of socialism’ approach in Britain, combining a concern for socialist morality and ethics with socialist politics as a means to connect socialism to children’s education.

This chapter shows how working with people from other disciplines has shaped authors' research on migration and integration in Ireland. It discusses how authors collaboratively defined the object of their research, the methods of data collection and preparation for research, and explores how they attempt to analyze the data. The chapter shows how authors challenge to the disciplinary bounding of migration studies opens new possibilities for understanding migration as a process and as a lived experience. Like many other researchers interested in migration to Ireland, authors' main method of data collection is the interview. From this research, authors have gathered three specific sources of primary data: the interview recordings, the interview transcripts, and authors' observations in and around individual interviews as well as the interview process. The authors' approach to migration research prioritizes context, and analyses language and space over time.