London and the Irish Community in Britain in Dónall Mac Amhlaigh's Exiles

Deoraithe/Exiles (1986/trans.2020 by Mícheál Ó hAodha) was Dónall Mac Amhlaigh’s last novel, centred on the theme of Irish migration to Britain, and rooted deeply in his own personal experiences. The novel, set in 1950, is ambivalent about migration itself, although Mac Amhlaigh is critical of the conditions in Ireland that have historically driven young people to leave. I focus on two of the three protagonists in Deoraithe/Exiles: Nano, who first moves to Britain at the beginning of the book, and Trevor, who returns on the same boat after visiting his wife and family in Galway. The characters who have emigrated to Britain accept the opportunities and freedom they gain, whilst still suffering the anxiety of forging a new identity in exile. Liam Harte recognises as ‘[o]ne of the central tropes in literary representations of the Irish in England […] the dialectical tension between adherence to a fixed originary identity and the evolution of a flexible, contingent migrant identity.’ The two characters exemplify this trope, each inhabiting one of the two methods of forging identity in their exile. Rather than offering a critique of migration, this thesis argues that Mac Amhlaigh presents his understanding of this tension, reflecting on his own experience of emigration, to develop the argument that embracing a ‘flexible, contingent migrant identity’ is the more fulfilling path for the Irish in Britain.