“New Strands in the Fabric of the Nation – English Migrants to Irish Citizens?”
Vikki Barry Brown, Queen Mary University of London
English people in Ireland form a significant but under-researched group set within a complex and entangled historical relationship between the two countries. Through colonialism, the presence of English people in Ireland could be viewed as simultaneously contested and banal. The Irish State, established in opposition to British rule to an extent constructed Irish identity as white and Catholic, shaping enduring assumptions around who ‘gets’ to be Irish.
In the three years following the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, applications for Irish citizenship by British nationals residing in Ireland, rose year upon year, despite those citizens being somewhat protected by the reciprocal rights afforded to British and Irish nationals under the Common Travel Area (CTA), unlike British Citizens in the remainder of the EU27. These applications may symbolise attempts by British citizens to retain EU membership that would be otherwise lost following Brexit, but is that the whole story? Drawing on research gathered as part of my PhD ‘Being English in Ireland’ which explores the lives of English migrants to Ireland since 1960, this paper will consider how these individuals negotiate their identity through the examination of their motivations and experiences as new and soon-to-be Irish citizens.
‘“A Society of Blatant Inequalities’: Identifying Injustice in Rocky Road to Dublin (Peter Lennon, 1967)”
Seán Crosson, NUI Galway
For much of the twentieth century, Ireland on screen was defined to an overwhelming extent by foreign directors and perspectives. Within the oppressive context of early twentieth Ireland, film was viewed with suspicion by the establishment, evident in the restrictive Censorship of Films Act enacted in 1923 under the auspices of the Ministry of Home Affairs (a precursor to the Department of Justice), and one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly independent Dáil Éireann (parliament) of the Irish Free State. As a result, the employment of film as a critical tool to examine Irish society and identify injustice was slow to develop. Rather, film was an important part of the popular cultural context that sustained prevailing conceptions of Irishness and the position of moral authorities (above all the Catholic Church) within Irish society, evident in particular in the sympathetic portrayals found repeatedly of the Irish priest, one of the most recognisable Irish stereotypes in the cinema. This paper examines Irish cinema in the first half of the twentieth century in light of the existence of Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’ (Smith 2001) that contributed to ongoing injustices highlighted in Peter Lennon’s ground-breaking 1968 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin, a key text in identifying the “society of blatant inequalities”” that prevailed in Ireland.