Explore the vast range of titles available.

Enda Delaney argues that migration to Britain was qualitatively different from that to North America and that transience was the overriding characteristic of Irish migrant experience in the twentieth century. He provides an analysis of reasons for large-scale migration, in the process answering the important question of why so many people left Ireland. Demography, State and Society focuses on a number of vital themes, many rarely mentioned in previous studies: state policy in Ireland, official responses to migration in Britain, gender dimensions, individual migrant experience, patterns of settlement in Britain, and the crucial phenomenon of return migration. It offers much that will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers in Irish migration as well as those in the wider fields of modern British and Irish history and migration studies.

How might the history of Ireland's revolution be reassessed if viewed within a transnational, comparative or global framework? Drawing attention to recent writing on the subject, this introduction considers the conceptual and historiographical issues at stake in reframing the history of the Irish Revolution, as well as considering potential limitations to these approaches. We assess what topics in particular lend themselves to a fresh perspective focusing on Irish nationalism, while also indicating areas where there is considerable scope for new lines of inquiry. In this era of intensive commemoration of the events that unfolded between 1912 and 1923, this special issue serves to remind us that the history of the revolution should not be confined to the island of Ireland. We argue that thinking transnationally and comparatively can promote a more inclusive and diverse global history of Irish Revolution.

Enda Delaney argues that migration to Britain was qualitatively different from that to North America and that transience was the overriding characteristic of Irish migrant experience in the twentieth century. He provides an analysis of reasons for large-scale migration, in the process answering the important question of why so many people left Ireland.

This article investigates anticommunism in Ireland during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It focuses in particular on the campaigns waged by the right-wing Catholic organisations, Maria Duce and the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association, opposing the influence of American cinema, which it was alleged was dominated by Communists. The central argument is that Ireland's ‘red scare’ was an ephemeral phenomenon, fuelled by American anticommunism, which was then at its height, and the cultural Cold War in Europe. Combined with these broader fears it reveal how anticommunism was shaped by domestic political and cultural contexts, especially concerns about the impact of external influences on Irish minds, in the omnipresent form of American cinema. Hollywood films offered visions of modernity that undermined traditional Irish nationalist values of simple living, an innate distaste of materialism, and an unflinching moral code, informed by Catholic teachings. In independent Ireland, far from the front line of confrontation with the red menace, the ideological dimensions made themselves felt, but were not perceived to be a sufficient threat as to dominate public life, as was the case in the United States.

In the mid-1940s a Catholic lay organisation, Maria Duce, emerged in Ireland which vigorously promulgated the idiosyncratic writings of Revd Denis Fahey, a Holy Ghost priest. Amongst other activities, Maria Duce campaigned in the late 1940s for an amendment of the Irish constitution of 1937 by which the Roman Catholic Church would be recognised as the ‘one true Church’ rather than the ‘special position’ enshrined in article 44 of the constitution. The origins and development of Maria Duce are charted in some detail and particular attention is paid to Fahey's role in the group. The campaign to amend article 44, which ultimately led to the demise of the organisation in 1954, is examined, as is the lack of widespread support for the activities of Maria Duce in post-war Ireland.

Christina Pamment (b. 1929) from Groom, county Limerick, left Ireland in 1946 just after her seventeenth birthday. She travelled to near Egham in Surrey where she started work as a domestic in a local hospital after replying to a newspaper advertisement. On turning eighteen years of age, she was accepted for nurse training at a hospital in Shooter’s Hill, south-east London. A short time later, she met another Irish migrant who was employed as a labourer and they became engaged to be married. In 1948 she broke off this engagement to marry a much older English widower. Notwithstanding considerable opposition

The historical study of migration from Ireland is striking in that little or no heed is paid to the vast and burgeoning literature on possible theoretical frameworks which attempt to explain and understand this phenomenon in many analyses – both historical and contemporary – of Irish migration. Even though Irish migration would appear on first inspection to conform to general models of migration which view the movement of people as part of the natural process whereby labour is directed to those areas or regions that require large numbers of people to sustain economic growth, this is far from the complete

The interwar years were marked by a fundamental change in the nature of international migration. The rate of overseas emigration from Europe to the Americas declined sharply throughout the 1920s, after an initial postwar boom.¹ Restrictions on both emigration and immigration were introduced by a number of states, most notably in the form of the imposition of national quotas on immigrants by the United States in 1921 and 1924, which favoured migrants from northwestern Europe.² In Hungary, the Soviet Union and Germany the freedom to emigrate was restricted in the 1920s.³ In Italy, notwithstanding a policy to promote emigration in