Leaving the North is the first book that provides a comprehensive survey of Northern Ireland migration since 1921. Based largely on the personal memories of emigrants who left Northern Ireland from the 1920s to the 2000s, approximately half of whom eventually returned, the book traces their multigenerational experiences of leaving Northern Ireland and adapting to life abroad, with some later returning to a society still mired in conflict. Contextualised by a review of the statistical and policy record, the emigrants' stories reveal that contrary to its well-worn image as an inward-looking...

This book provides scholarly perspectives on a range of timely concerns in Irish diaspora studies. It offers a focal point for fresh interchanges and theoretical insights on questions of identity, Irishness, historiography and the academy's role in all of these. In doing so, it chimes with the significant public debates on Irish and Irish emigrant identities that have emerged from Ireland's The Gathering initiative (2013) and that continue to reverberate throughout the Decade of Centenaries (2012-2023) in Ireland, North and South. In ten chapters of new research on key areas of concern in...