Between Here and Home: The Irish Diasporic Duality in England
- Berni Raeside-Bell
- Nov 11
- 3 min read
Introduction
This piece began life as part of my MA in Fashion Knitwear at Nottingham Trent University, where we were encouraged to research a theme that spoke deeply to who we are and where we come from. My chosen thread was Culture and Identity — an exploration of how belonging is shaped, expressed, and sometimes divided across places and generations.
In developing this project, I found myself drawn to my roots, and the Irish diaspora in England — to that familiar tension between here and home, to the quiet resilience woven through stories of migration, memory, and selfhood. What follows is a reflection on that diasporic duality: the way identity stretches between two landscapes, two languages, and two ways of belonging, yet remains whole.
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There’s a peculiar rhythm to living between two places — a soft tug that never quite settles. For many of the Irish living in England, like myself, this feeling isn’t new. It’s what Mark Scully calls a “negotiation of authenticity” — a daily balancing act between what feels like home and what is home.
For over two centuries, the Irish have made lives in English towns and cities — in Nottingham, Liverpool, London, and beyond. Murphy’s (1994) study of early nineteenth-century settlement in Nottingham shows how those first arrivals sought work and belonging amid unfamiliar streets. Yet, as D’Angelo and Kaye’s (2024) census report reminds us, the Irish in Britain remain a distinct and self-identifying community even now. Home, it seems, was never a matter of geography alone.
Scully writes that Irishness in England is often performed — through voice, humour, storytelling — but also through quiet resistance to being fully absorbed. It’s the way accent softens but never disappears, or how tea becomes a ritual act of remembrance. There’s pride in that persistence.
The memory of exclusion still lingers. The notorious signs — “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” — recalled by readers in The Irish Times (Mellett, 2024) and by Alexandra Day (2023) in Rebel News are part of the shared story too. They remind us that being Irish in England was once to live visibly on the margins, forging identity in the shadow of prejudice.
Yet, identity endures not only through resistance but through creation. In Nottingham, figures like Gerry Molumby, Pat Murphy, and musician Marty Toner keep Irish culture alive in festivals and song. Their work speaks to a living heritage — one that bridges generations and reimagines Irishness in an English context. As Ó Conchubhair (2022) suggests, there’s a politics in language and art, a quiet assertion of belonging through cultural expression.
For many Irish women, as Casey and Maye-Banbury (2017) show, that duality plays out in everyday choices — in homes built, children raised, and stories told. Ni Maolalaidh and Stephenson (2014) capture this beautifully: how Irish mothers in England help their children shape identities that are neither wholly Irish nor wholly English, but something tenderly in between.
Perhaps that’s the truest form of diaspora — not displacement, but layering. To be both rooted and reaching, to carry the sound of one place into another. As Scully reminds us, authenticity in the diaspora “is not about purity of origin but about the credibility of belonging.”
In the end, Irishness in England is a woven thing — threads of memory, language, and love, held together across the Irish Sea. It’s not a contradiction, but a craft — a duality that makes the fabric of identity all the richer.
Link to full references, bibliography and list of illustrations:
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