ON EVERY TIDE

Sweeping history of Irish migration and the many forms Irishness took in new lands.

As longtime Irish history professor Connolly observes, the numbers of Irish who left the island in the 19th century were huge: a mere 14,000 in 1816-1817, but 244,000 between 1831 and 1835, numbers that would further swell to millions with the Potato Famine. Some went to Australia, some to Canada, but most to America, for, as Connolly writes, “the mass movement of people was possible only because of the inexhaustible demand for settlers and workers in the expanding economy of the United States.” Whereas in Australia and Canada, Irish immigrants tended to spread out into provincial towns as well as major cities, the largest waves to America landed in cities on the East Coast, both because that’s where the jobs were and because most immigrants lacked the financial resources to go further. Consequently, in Australia and Canada, there were fewer purely Irish enclaves than in America. In the latter, though, postwar suburbanization was a powerful vehicle for changing the face of Irishness. “The move to the suburbs,” writes Connolly, “already meant that, for growing numbers, neighborhood life no longer revolved around the parish church and the clubs and societies linked to it,” making Catholicism a less central symbol of identity than in years past. The author shows how Protestant Irish were heavily represented in the immigration rolls. Combined with rising affluence and a splintering of the old community was an increasing pattern among both Protestants and Catholics to marry outside their ethnic group, also common in other diaspora communities elsewhere in the world. Working the statistics—Connolly observes that, for example, England’s Irish communities grew markedly during World War II both because of jobs and because travel across the oceans was perilous—and popular culture and social history alike, the author delivers a complex but accessible narrative.

A masterwork of Irish diaspora history and immigration studies generally.