Somewhere bigger and brighter? Ambivalence and desire in memories of leaving the north of Ireland during the Troubles

Abstract

This article examines oral history interviews of migrants from Northern Ireland to Britain, specifically a group of ten people who left the North during the Troubles. It reads their interviews for, on the one hand, accounts of migration as liberatory or as generative of new subjectivities and new possibilities; and on the other hand, expressions of nostalgia, ambivalence or uncertainty which exist alongside those more optimistic narratives. In doing so, it highlights a specific form of dichotomised composure within this selection of oral histories and argues that the specificities of this composure are suggestive of some of the discourses that operate around the relationship between Northern Ireland and Britain, as well as of the contested memory of the Troubles. They also reveal aspects of the complicated history of multiculturalism in Britain, and of various forms of social repression in the North, showing how our interviewees navigated their movement between those two places.