2381/29122
Marc Donnchadh Scully
Marc Donnchadh
Scully
Book review of Leaving the North : migration and memory, Northern Ireland 1921–2011 by Johanne Devlin Trew
University of Leicester
2014
IR content
2014-09-29 10:16:42
Journal contribution
https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Book_review_of_Leaving_the_North_migration_and_memory_Northern_Ireland_1921_2011_by_Johanne_Devlin_Trew/10173185
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.