Emigration of southern Irish Protestants in the 1920s

On Friday 8th April, Dr Andy Bielenberg of University College Cork will be delivering a paper at the Maynooth University History Forum entitled The emigration of southern Irish Protestants during the War of Independence and the Civil War. The talk will begin at 8pm.

This paper examines the impact of the Irish revolution on the southern Irish Protestant community, with a particular focus on the factors contributing the major decline of the Protestant population between 1911 and 1926. It examines the various factors to which the decline have been attributed, including the First World War, British military withdrawal, economic emigration, the decline of landed estates, regime change, various demographic factors, and what could be termed ‘conflict migration’ between 1919-1923. The paper will also assess why this issue has been so controversial within Irish historiography in the last decades.

The talk will be held at Maynooth University, Rhetoric House, South Campus (Old Campus) this Friday. Admission is €5. All members of the public are welcome to attend.

About the speaker:

Dr Andy Bielenberg has lectured and published on Irish economic and social history for over two decades at the School of History, University College Cork. He has written an article ‘Exodus; the emigration of southern Irish Protestants during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War, which is published in the journal Past and Present no 218, Feb (2013) and received praise for his more recent article on ‘Economy in independent Ireland’ in The Princeton History of Modern Ireland (2016). This paper is largely based on a contribution to the forthcoming Atlas of the Irish Revolution which will be published by Cork university Press.