'Settling back'? A biographical and life-course perspective on Ireland's recent return migration

This paper uses a biographical and life-course perspective to explore some of the key narratives of return among return migrants to Ireland, focusing in particular on the themes of family, child-rearing, relationship breakdown and ‘settling down’. The ways in which return migrants use the concept of life-course transitions in order to make sense of and narrate their migration stories is explored. I argue that their narratives reflect a normative association of life stage with place, and that return migration reflects the ways in which key events in the individual life course transitions and family life cycles of 1980s emigrants have intersected with processes of economic and social transformation in Ireland. This occurs within the context of heteronormative and kinship-based ideals of Irish culture and of powerful myths of return. The data used in the paper is taken from the Narratives of Migration and Return research project, a north south cross-border project which assembled an oral archive of 92 return migrant life narratives. In the paper, I draw on 33 of the interviews conducted in the south, which focused on the cohort of return migrants who had emigrated in the 1980s

Complicating host-newcomer dualisms: Irish return migrants as home-comers or newcomers?

Popular discourses of contemporary Irish society are often structured on the basis of dualisms which oppose a perceived native/Irish/host community to an imagined foreign/non-Irish/newcomer community. This paper uses the example of Irish return migration to challenge these pervasive dualisms and to highlight the blurred nature of boundaries between host and newcomer. The paper draws on life narrative interviews with recent return migrants to reveal the ways in which they constantly move between the shifting positions of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. Migrant narratives of home and return are conceptualised in terms of the ways in which home is inhabited and remembered differently with migration, and as a result is continuously being reprocessed. It is argued that neither home nor belonging are static constructs, and that return migrants constantly re-make and reproduce home and belonging. In this way, they ‘bring home’ to non-migrants the inherent instability of accepted concepts of place, identity and belonging, and in doing so, unsettle powerful imagined insider outsider dualisms

To name or not to name: reflections on the use of anonymity in an oral archive of migrant life narratives

This paper draws on an oral archive project on narratives of return migration in contemporary Ireland, as the basis for a discussion on the potential of life narrative research to destabilize meta-narratives and to contribute to the mapping of transformative geographies. It is argued that this kind of research requires the creation of safe spaces within which participants can tell their stories and articulate counter-narratives. At the same time, it is important to make their voices available to a wide audience and to recognize their authorial roles. There are contrasting perspectives in oral history and life narrative research on the use of anonymity to protect participants' identities, which reflect different disciplinary traditions and practices. The paper reflects on these different perspectives and on the process of designing a research project that draws on multiple methodological influences. It concludes that it is possible to facilitate access to these voices, while at the same time providing safe conditions for the articulation of counter-narratives, by providing anonymity where possible and desirable in agreement with the participant

Cartlanna Sheosaimh Ui Eanai : The Joe Heaney archives

The Joe Heaney Archives (http://www.joeheaney.org) is a digital resource focusing on a single individual's repertoire of song and narrative, now surviving through recordings made of the man during his lifetime (1919-1984). The archives represent an edited sample of that repertoire, based on decisions made by the team who assembled the site. The work received funding from the Irish Research Council in 2009-10, and it was also supported in various ways by the National University of Ireland, Galway and by the University of Washington, Seattle. The site is bilingual, available in both Irish and English. The team decided to prioritize the Irish site as a reminder of the daily use of the Irish language as a vernacular in the home region of the singer.Not

The 'green green grass of home'? Return migration to rural Ireland

There have been calls recently to challenge some of the orthodoxies of counterurbanisation. This paper contributes to this by highlighting the complexity of rural in-migration processes, through a focus on rural return migration. There has been a significant increase in return migration to the Republic of Ireland (ROI) since 1996. The paper is based on the life narratives of some of the 1980s generation of emigrants who have recently returned to live in Ireland. It focuses on those Irish return migrants who spent a substantial part of their lives in the large urban centres of Britain and the US, and are currently living in rural Ireland. Their narratives of return are explored in terms of discourses of rurality, in particular through notions of a rural idyll and belonging/not belonging. It is argued that return migrants draw on classic counterurbanisation discourses in their narratives of return, but that these are interwoven with notions of family/kinship. Furthermore, the idyllisation of rural life is complicated by aspects of the specificity of the position of the return migrant. It is suggested that rural return migrants are positioned somewhere between locals and incomers, reflecting the complexity of Irish rural repopulation processes, and that the phenomenon of rural return complicates accepted understandings of counterurbanisation

'Girls just like to be friends with people: gendered experiences of migration among children and young people in returning Irish families

The gendered nature of children and young people's experiences of migration are explored in this paper, drawing on research with children in Irish return migrant families. The paper focuses on the ways in which gender dynamics both reinforce and complicate the children's complex social positionings in Irish society. It explores the gendered nature of the children's and young people's everyday lives, relationships with peers and negotiations of identity, through a specific focus on the role of sport, friendship and local gender norms in their lives. I suggest that gender articulates with other axes of sameness/difference in complex ways, shaping the opportunities for social participation and cultural belonging in different ways for migrant boys and girls

"You're not a man at all!": Masculinity, Responsibility and Staying on the Land in Contemporary Ireland

Rural Ireland, and in particular the agricultural sector, is undergoing significant restructuring, within the context of a rapidly urbanising society that has been radically transformed economically and socially in the past ten to twenty years. The decade since the mid-1990s in Ireland has witnessed an economic transformation, the reversal of emigration and unemployment, rapid urbanisation and suburbanisation, and the continued concentration of population in the urbanised East (Central Statistics Office, 2003). The importance of agriculture as an employer has declined and the rural economy has become more diversified (Frawley and O'Meara, 2004). Young farmers are at the centre of these rural restructuring processes, making decisions to become farmers or not in the context of competing pressures. The economic and social landscape of farming is undergoing transformation, in which the viability of farming as an occupation and as a lifestyle in modem Ireland is being reduced. This means that some of the central pillars upon which Irish farm masculinities have been built are under threat, which has implications for the construction of masculine identities. However, at the same time, family farming carries with it certain responsibilities and retains a very strong socio-cultural meaning and importance, bound up closely with masculine identities. These competing pressures are in tension with one another and are lived out through the lives of farmers and their families. They are particularly apparent in the lives of young farmers and farm successors, who are the individuals who are facing or have recently faced, decisions regarding farm succession, inheritance or transfer of holdings, and their own futures

The right words : conflict and resolution in an oral Gaelic song text

The community in question is that of Tory Island, a predominantly Gaelic-speaking island off the northwest coast of Ireland, where a lively song tradition has been maintained down to the present. It is three miles long and one and a half miles wide at its widest point and remains one of the most strongly Gaelic-speaking parts of Donegal, with a strong tradition of narrative, music, and dance as well as song. In the late 1970s the islanders were under severe threat of evacuation, but this threat was resisted by some and the island still supports a population of about 160, although this is much reduced from former times. Those who left during the crisis period reside in various locations on the mainland, particularly in local authority housing estates in Falcarragh, the nearest large village on the mainland.Issue title "Slavica." Note: E-companion at www.oraltradition.org at time of printing

"You're not a man at all!": Masculinity, Responsibility and Staying on the Land in Contemporary Ireland

Rural Ireland, and in particular the agricultural sector, is undergoing significant restructuring, within the context of a rapidly urbanising society that has been radically transformed economically and socially in the past ten to twenty years. The decade since the mid-1990s in Ireland has witnessed an economic transformation, the reversal of emigration and unemployment, rapid urbanisation and suburbanisation, and the continued concentration of population in the urbanised East (Central Statistics Office, 2003). The importance of agriculture as an employer has declined and the rural economy has become more diversified (Frawley and O'Meara, 2004). Young farmers are at the centre of these rural restructuring processes, making decisions to become farmers or not in the context of competing pressures. The economic and social landscape of farming is undergoing transformation, in which the viability of farming as an occupation and as a lifestyle in modem Ireland is being reduced. This means that some of the central pillars upon which Irish farm masculinities have been built are under threat, which has implications for the construction of masculine identities. However, at the same time, family farming carries with it certain responsibilities and retains a very strong socio-cultural meaning and importance, bound up closely with masculine identities. These competing pressures are in tension with one another and are lived out through the lives of farmers and their families. They are particularly apparent in the lives of young farmers and farm successors, who are the individuals who are facing or have recently faced, decisions regarding farm succession, inheritance or transfer of holdings, and their own futures