posted on 2014-09-29, 10:16authored byMarc Donnchadh Scully
Johanne Devlin Trew’s
recent
book on migration from Northern Ireland is that increasingly rare thing
in Irish diaspora studies: research that addresses a genuinely glaring gap in the literature. As she
points out, there has been a relative silence with regard to migration and diaspora
in relation to
Northern Ireland on the part of both policy
-
makers and academics.
The neglect of the ‘Northern
diaspora’ on the political stage
since the outbreak of the Troubles
ma
y be considered
understandable,
and Trew goes into some details as to the l
ikely political motivations involve
d.
T
he
academic neglect of the topic is rather harder to fathom. Trew attributes this
to
compartmentalisation in social scientific research on the North,
and a ‘partitionist’ approach in the
study of 20
th
century Irish mi
gration (p.6). She argues that the complications
arising from dealing
with data from two national jurisdictions has led to a concentration in the literature on migration
from the Republic, with the consequence that authorities in the North could label emig
ration as ‘a
Southern problem’, and that pre
-
1922 Irish migration is now wrongly seen through a partitionist
lens.
History
Citation
Book review of Leaving the North : migration and memory, Northern Ireland 1921–2011 by Johanne Devlin Trew, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013, SBN 978184631940, In Irish Studies Review, 2014, pp. 1-3
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF ARTS, HUMANITIES AND LAW/School of History
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Published in
Book review of Leaving the North : migration and memory
Publisher
Taylor & Francis for British Association for Irish Studies
The file associated with this record is embargoed until 18 months after the date of publication. The final published version may be available through the links above.