Britain's Irish

Irish Migration to Great Britain

Figure 1 is a simplified representation of the number of Irish-born recorded in Great Britain from 1841, the first time a place-of-birth question was included in British censuses, up until 2001. Two trends are immediately obvious:

• The twin peaks of Irish migration to Great Britain are those who arrived after the Famine and those who arrived after World War II.
• Irish migration to Scotland declined through the 20th century, and England became increasingly important as the primary site of settlement.

In addition to these broad statistics, during the 19th century in particular, large numbers of Irish migrated annually for seasonal work. As many as 100,000 people may have been involved in this seasonal tradition; work gangs of Irish, made up of men, women, and children, were a familiar sight across Great Britain. Working parties, often organized along extended-family lines, would spend up to 6 months working on farms, employed primarily in the labor-intensive agricultural work. These migrant workers, known as “Spalpeens” and “Tatie Hookers,” were an important part of western Ireland's economy. Their seasonal earnings sustained communities in Ireland's northwest areas up until the 1970s. This is a key feature distinguishing Britain's Irish from the Irish in North America, the Antipodes, Africa, and elsewhere in the world; for many, migration was temporary. Moreover, this large and mobile community was not recorded in the census. More fundamentally, censuses in Great Britain prior to 2001 recorded only the Irish-born, not the descendants of Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, the graph's twin peaks provide an easily grasped impression of the numerical and temporal scale of migration from the island of Ireland to Great Britain.

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