As Ireland became a country of net immigration, the immigrants who came to Ireland were unprecedentedly diverse in terms of background, skills and demographic characteristics. This chapter elaborates the contours of immigrant integration under changing economic and demographic conditions. It analyzes some of the labour market arguments that have framed discussions of economic integration elsewhere, including questions about working conditions and labour market competition. Much of the discussion of 'immigrant jobs' developed in the quite different context of the USA, where undocumented workers are in illegally low-paid, non-permanent, poorly compensated jobs concentrated in household services, landscaping, agriculture and manufacturing. In theory, these jobs would not exist without a supply of immigrants as no native worker would accept these employment conditions. More importantly, most economic versions of integration are overly restrictive in their argument that integration relies upon similar immigrant workers having similar outcomes to native workers.

Chapter 6 turns to a consideration of BSS practices and their relationship to the state. First, this chapter examines the reclamation of educational authority made by BSSs, and the inter-relationship between this and the campaign demand for state schools to be accountable for their failure to educate black children. Following from this, second, the creation of black pedagogues and pedagogies, as community-based enactments of educational authority, are examined. Here in particular, gender narratives come to the fore through the ways in which men and women practiced their educational authority. Last, this chapter turns to the changing dynamics between the BSS movement and the state, and ways in which BSS teachers traversed the complex dual principles of community-control and government responsibility. As is explored, the slow and piecemeal incorporation of BSSs into local governmental funding mechanisms into the 1980s brought significant change – and challenge – for this community-based schooling movement.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on particular time periods or particular types of migration and describes three linking themes: networks, belongings and intersections. It discusses the experiences of childhood visits to Ireland by second-generation Irish in England. The book provides an analytical framework for understanding diaspora strategies in general, with a particular focus on the case of Ireland. It explores the role of traditional migrant 'print media' in the lives of migrants in Ireland while also pointing to the centrality of transnational media outlets in the lives of migrants. The book also focuses on Irish migrants to Australia. It then provides insights into the intersections between 'migrancy' and other social categories including gender, nationality and class/position in the labour hierarchy.

This chapter considers the place of education in the struggle for social change. Taking inspiration from cultural and feminist historians, Gerrard argues for the need to explore beyond institutional histories of the state in order to understand the role of education in social change. Responding to contemporary policy paradigms that often represent working-class students as ‘failing and disaffected’ (a representation compounded by the politics of race), Gerrard suggests the need to examine the social history of educational agency and initiative. Taking this up, this chapter then introduces the two social histories of radical education that are the focus of this book: the Socialist Sunday School (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary School (est. 1967) movements.

This chapter explores the ways in which migrant children and young people construct different senses of belonging in and across multiple scales and as part of their negotiation of their social and cultural identities as migrants and as children/young people. It argues that assumptions that different groups of migrant children and young people do or do not 'belong' in Ireland are simplistic and misleading. The chapter suggests that the lived realities of migrant children and young people in Ireland reveal more multifaceted, complex, sometimes paradoxical senses of belonging to local and transnational communities and de-territorialized groups of people. Global consumer culture can provide a powerful point of connection between children and young people with apparently different cultural backgrounds, placing them within shared frames of reference and facilitating senses of belonging with peers.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book offers an insight into the complicated patterns of migration to and from Ireland, and on the ways in which these patterns both mirror and differ from broader patterns of the movement of people. It highlights the range of institutions that enable, facilitate or obstruct migration and/or processes of incorporation, thus allowing for a scalar analysis of migration in place. The book shows the potential of a place-based approach to migration. It focuses on the wide range of female migrants to Ireland: returning Irish, migrants from the EU and West and North Africa, as well as North America and Australasia. The book also highlights the diverse ways in which migrants enter Ireland: as EU nationals, as labour migrants, or as refugees or asylum seekers.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

Reforming Politics and Reform as Politics

The commissioner of excise asked his subordinates to gather information about the liquor Indians preferred most in the Presidency of Fort St George in 1905. He also wrote to laboratories to clarify whether toddy was indeed ‘a completely innocuous liquor containing a large proportion of food material’. Major Charles H. Bedford's report concluded that most of the toddy being consumed in the province was at an advanced fermentation stage. Samples sent for laboratory testing had revealed a high proportion of fusel oil – a known cause of indigestion, dysentery and rheumatism. With the hydrometer's use in testing the proof strength of alcoholic drinks in mid-eighteenth-century England, utilising technology to regulate alcohol had become an exercise in building public trust. The hydrometer's subsequent use to test and establish the proof strengths of different country liquors in India was comparable but much more significant in its impact. It demonstrates the colonial state's determination to penetrate an indigenous industry in order to bring it into alignment with Western scientific technologies, processes and practices. Remarkably, the Congress leadership would similarly show interest in ascertaining toddy's nutritional properties. As the president of the Prohibition League of India (PLI), Rajaji wrote to the heads of the Tropical School of Medicine in Calcutta and the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor in 1931. He sought to verify that ‘to drink beer in order to ensure efficient enzyme action in the body (was) as unnecessary as to drink toddy in order to ensure a sufficient supply of Vitamin B’.