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.

Enda Delaney is Reader in Modern History at the University of Edinburgh.

Enda Delaney's profile page

"This is one of the most significant works to date of the history of Irish migration in any period or place. It fills a yawning gap in the historiography with a lucid, intelligent and wide-ranging analysis of some of the most important but little-studied aspects of one of Europe's most important population movements." Donald M. MacRaild, University of Northumbria at Newcastle

"Exhaustive, well written, thoroughly researched, and wider-ranging than might be inferred from the title." International History Review

"This substantive study of Irish migration to Britain during the middle decades of the twentieth century succeeds in filling an important gap in the Irish experience...Delaney has produced an indispensable contribution to the ongoing debate in Irish diaspora studies." History