Migration from Northern Ireland: narratives of exile, identity and belonging

Project start date: 2005-10

Project end date: 2008-12

The NMR database and oral archive is comprised of over 90 life narrative interviews conducted with returned and non-returned migrants from Northern Ireland gathered during the course of two recent studies on contemporary migration (2004-2008). The first of these, Narratives of Migration and Return (2004-2006), was an all-Ireland study about return migration funded by the HEA North South Programme for Collaborative Research, Strand 1, with research partners at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS), Omagh, University College Cork, and the University of Limerick. There was a dedicated researcher/interviewer in NMR-North covering the nine counties of Ulster and two other researchers for the rest of the island in NMR-South based in Cork. Following on from NMR-North, a second study, Northern Ireland Emigrant Narratives (NIEN) (2006-2008), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and based at QUB and CMS, aimed at collecting interviews with Northern Ireland (NI) emigrants living abroad, focusing on Britain and Canada, the major destinations of NI emigrants in the 20th century. The study participants represent a range of geographic origins within Ulster, class backgrounds and religious denominations. Participants were largely self-selected responding to advertisements placed in a variety of media. The life narrative interviews have been fully keyword indexed and loaded into the NMR SQL database and oral archive which has an innovative design that allows searchable access to individual audio tracks (2-3 minute range) in the corpus of almost 300 hours of audio.