immigration

immigration constitutes a central theme in the history of Ireland. Early movements of population, up to and including the arrival of the Celts, are obscure, but the assumption is of successive waves of newcomers, reinforcing existing populations and modifying existing cultures. The scale and impact of Viking settlement from the 9th century is better documented. The Anglo‐Norman invasion is now recognized as initiating more than a military and political conquest. Coming at the peak of a great wave of European economic and demographic expansion, it also brought a significant movement of English and Welsh settlers into parts of Ireland (see Anglo‐Norman colonization and settlement). The 16th and 17th centuries saw a much larger inward flow. Formal schemes for colonization and plantation, in Munster, Ulster, and elsewhere, were reinforced and eventually overshadowed by large‐scale spontaneous migration, as a thinly populated and underdeveloped hinterland, particularly in Ulster, was opened up for settlement and exploitation. Given the resistance to the Reformation of both native Irish and Old English, statistics of religion provide a rough guide to the scale of the influx, suggesting that by the early 18th century somewhere over a quarter of the population were descendants of English and Scottish migrants who had arrived within the previous 200 years.

Other inward movements were more modest. Settlement by Huguenots and Palatines in the late 17th and early 18th centuries brought a touch of continental European cultural influence, but failed in its main aim of significantly reinforcing Protestant numbers. Immigration from eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries significantly increased Ireland's Jewish community, and also produced some ugly manifestations of anti‐Semitism. The other distinctive immigrant group from this period were Italians. Over‐whelmingly drawn from the Lazio region, and in particular from the town of Casalattico, these arrived from the 1880s, establishing themselves principally in the catering trade. More recent, and rather different in character, has been the appearance of German and Dutch natives seeking in Ireland a less industrialized and cleaner environment. Ireland also received some eddies from the mid‐20th‐century immigration from India to Great Britain. By the 1980s there were some 1,000 Indians in Northern Ireland and 600 in the Irish Republic, working mainly in the retail drapery trade and, more recently, in catering.