This chapter develops two critical arguments, namely that existing approaches to Irish migrant identity within the historiography have failed to capture the complexity of Irish subjectivities in England; and that, where it has been employed as a record of migrant experience, oral historical research has been complicit in this failure, due largely to the ‘reiy’ approach which scholars have typically employed to reconstruct the Irish migrant experience in the twentieth century. To address these limitations, the chapter outlines an alternative approach based on Popular Memory Theory, the core framework employed in the book, before giving an account of the book’s core themes, dynamics, contents and approach to sources.