Irish Migrants in New Communities
Seeking the Fair Land?
Contributions by Noémie Beck, Malcolm Campbell, Bridget Connelly, Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Tara Manning, Gerard Moran, Kate OMalley, James B. Swan, Patricia B. Swan, Jay Tunney, James Patrick Walsh, Lachlan Whalen Edited by Mícheál Ó hAodha, Máirtín Ó Catháin
Publication date:
16 May 2014Length of book:
172 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
236x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739173824
Irish migrants in new communities: Seeking the Fair Land? comprises the second collection of essays by these editors exploring fresh aspects and perspectives on the subject of the Irish diaspora. This volume, edited by Máirtín Ó Catháin and Mícheál Ó hAodha, develops many of the oral history themes of the first book and concentrates more on issues surrounding the adaptation of migrants to new or host environments and cultures. These new places often have a jarring effect, as well as a welcoming air, and the Irish bring their own interpretations, hostilities, and suspicions, all of which are explored in a fascinating and original number of new perspectives.
Máirtín Ó Catháin and Mícheál Ó hAodha's Irish Migrants in New Communities: Seeking the Fair Land? is an eclectic collection of fascinating essays on a varied and sometimes motley crew of Irish emigrants, castaways, missionaries, and external and internal 'exiles,' ranging from Terence Connell, 'King of the Horrifories' in New Guinea, to Irish-American labor leader Michael Mooney, nearly lynched by Colorado's right-wing vigilantes, to Bobby Sands in his lesser-known role as Long Kesh guitarist and song-writer. This is a book of stories about people sometimes forgotten by their own descendants, and often betrayed and traduced by History's 'winners,' but now recovered to edify a new generation of Irishmen and -women who are forced once more, by their economic and political overlords, to 'seek the fair land' outside Ireland.