Archive for May, 2007
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Cannes features Irish migrants on film
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007A story of Irish immigrants in Kilburn will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. “Kings” was adapted from Jimmy Murphy’s play “The Kings of the Kilburn High Road” by Irish filmmaker Tom Collins. The film tells the tale of six men who move to London for work in the 1970s; they are reunited for a funeral thirty years later.
The filmmaker said in the London Evening Standard:
“Our aim was to make a ‘ foreign’ film in England because I’m no longer sure England as we knew it exists. Our characters still talk in Irish in an attempt to accentuate their personal and national bond and their language is, to them, their last act of solidarity.
“This is an untold story of immigration and loneliness which continues today with migrants from Lithuania, Poland and China.”
The story is told in Irish. Micheál O Meallaigh, Senior Commissioning Editor of TG4, told the Derry Journal: “This is a story told for the first time in our own language but it is also particularly relevant to the growing immigrant population who will be exposed to the same pressures and alienation that the emigrant Irish experienced in foreign territories.�
See the film distributor’s website.
Diaspora now the ‘buyaspora’?
Monday, May 21st, 2007“The Irish diaspora has become the Irish buyaspora”, Alastair Adair, a professor of real estate at the University of Ulster, has told the Chicago Tribune. Professor Adair was commenting on the career of Garrett Kelleher, the returned emigrant who is building North America’s tallest skyscraper.
Professor Adair also noted that last year, Irish real estate investors poured $18 billion into property deals, mainly in Europe and the US East Coast.
He added, “It’s a new era in which Irish developers are seeking a global profile by identifying opportunities to own iconic buildings. ”
As for Mr Kelleher, the 45-year-old real estate developer began his construction career in London as a labourer, before moving to New York and then Chicago; he returned home in 1995 with a “substantial amount” of money. He started his Dublin company, Shelbourne Development Ltd, that year, and is now worth about $1 billion.
He is currently building the 150-story Spire in Chicago, a $1.5-billion project. He expects half the buyers to be foreign.
Read the full article on the Chicago Tribune website.
Northampton remembers Lucia at Bloomsday
Monday, May 21st, 2007An Irishman living in Northampton will lead a commemoration of Bloomsday at the grave of Lucia Joyce in Kingsthorpe cemetary in Northamption. Lucia Joyce, the daughter of exiled Irish writer James Joyce, spent many years in a mental hospital before her death in 1982. This will be the fourth Bloomsday the Irish Community Arts Project will spend at Lucia’s grave.
Organiser Peter Mulligan told the Irish Times,
The concept is that the Joyce family, like a lot of Irish people in Northampton, left Ireland for a better life elsewhere and we see Lucia as a focus for that. We relate her life to the Irish diaspora of which she was a part…
She’s buried among East Europeans, Serbs and Yugoslavs because she was born in Trieste. The nice thing is that she’s near the grave of (emigrant writer) Donall Mac Amhlaigh, who lived all his life here working on the M1, M6 and Milton Keynes.
For more information, contact the project.
US Senate makes deal on undocumented
Friday, May 18th, 2007Irish immigration advocates in the US have welcomed the agreement hammered out yesterday by Democratic and Republican senators, which would provide a channel for the 12 million undocumented immigrants to achieve legal status.
The proposals would allow for the vast majority of today’s undocumented to register, pay a fine of €5,000, and undergo security screenings; in return, they will get work authorisation, travel permission, and protection from deportation.
On the negative side, the bill includes a “touchback” provision, that would require undocumented immigrants to make a costly trip back to their home country to apply for adjustment. In addition, the deal will create a large number of workers with only temporary visas, which could lead to increasing numbers of undocumented in the future.
Perhaps the most dramatic change is the institution of a points system and the elimination of family ties as the foundation of immigration.
Sheila Gleeson of the Coalition of Irish Immigration Centers calls the deal “a major step forward”, and says that Senators Kennedy, Menendez, Feinstein, and Salazar are to be commended for getting this compromise hammered out”.
The bill will be debated in the Senate next week; once the Senate process is completed, the House of Representatives will take on the issue.
History of European Family conference: June 2007
Thursday, May 17th, 2007Diaspora is a major theme that will be discussed in the “History of the European Family Conference”, at University of Limerick on June 20-21, 2007.
Trinity College Professor David Fitzpatrick, author of “Oceans of Consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia” will be a plenary speaker. His talk is entitled “Far-flung families: How post-Famine Irish reconciled mass migration with family values”.
Other migration-related panels include “Diaspora and family business”, “Diaspora and ethnicity”, and “Globalisation and contemporary affairs”.
See the full programme at the University of Limerick’s History Department website.
BAIS conference: September 2007
Thursday, May 17th, 2007Returning Irish migrants will be the focus of a panel at the 2007 conference of the British Association for Irish Studies. The interdisciplinary BAIS conference takes place at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool in September; the theme is ‘New Irelands”.
One panel will focus on “Return Migrants and Clashing Identities”. The following scholars will speak:
- Sara Hannafin, NUI Galway: The Idea of Ireland as ‘home’: Place, Identity and Second Generation Return Migration
- Sarah O’Brien, University of Limerick: A Second Exile: The Contested Identity of Irish Migrants in New Ireland
- David Ralph, University of Edinburgh: Reconceptualising Home and Belonging: Irish Transnational Return Migrants from the USA, 1996-2006
Another paper that will be of interest to migration scholars will be On Not Being Irish by Sarah Morgan of ESR2 Project and Bronwen Walter of Anglia Ruskin University.
See more information at the BAIS website.
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