In January 2015 I took up my first permanent academic job as a lecturer in contemporary British history at Queen’s University Belfast. A few months earlier I had made the trip over from Birmingham, where I had grown up, to house hunt. The taxi from George Best airport dropped me in the Ormeau Road area in the south of the city. “You’ll like it around here”, the driver told me. “It’s very mixed”.
As I shuffled from house viewing to house viewing, I struggled to work out what he meant. To my eyes, the neighbourhood – like the other parts of the city I had seen – appeared to be almost completely white. It was only much later that I understood what “mixed” means in the Northern Irish, as opposed to the British, vernacular. It means that there are Catholics and Protestants living alongside each other.
This was a strange experience. As I have written about elsewhere, I had spent my formative years in the Balsall Heath district of Birmingham, one of the most ethnically “mixed” areas in Britain. Most of my friends’ parents came from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean or the Middle East. If they were white like me, many of them had Irish heritage.
I arrived in Belfast with a family connection to the city. My mother had grown up there in the 1950s and 60s, but had left in her late teens with the worsening of the Troubles. By a bizarre quirk of fate, her father had also worked at Queen’s. He was Kenneth Connell, the social historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland.
Kenneth described himself as being of “Irish peasant stock”; his own parents, James and Susannah, had migrated to England from Clonakilty in County Cork in the 1910s. When Kenneth was appointed to Queen’s in 1952, it was to a lectureship in economic and social history, one of the first of its kind on the island.
For years I didn’t tell my new colleagues about Kenneth. He had died by suicide in 1973, twelve years before I was born. His death was an uncomfortable part of my family’s story. In any case, I was in my late-20s when I joined Queen’s, and keen to be judged on my own merits.
Despite the family connection to Belfast, to begin with I assumed that it wouldn’t be long before I would make my way back across the Irish sea, to a post in Britain and to my friends, family and most of my archives. I was trying to finish my first book, a study of the Handsworth district of Birmingham. But although I came close to leaving on a number of occasions, it never quite worked out.
The longer I have been in the city, the closer I have felt to my Irish heritage. When my twins were born in 2020, thanks to the terms of the Good Friday agreement I was able to get them Irish passports.
Rather than shy away from my grandfather’s story, I researched it and wrote about it in the epilogue to my most recent book on the history of multicultural Britain. I wanted to include the Irish and other white groups in the story of the making of multicultural Britain. Where better place to start than with my own family?
In the eleven years that I have been in Belfast, the city has changed. Ethnic diversity has become an increasingly visible feature. In Northern Ireland as a whole, more than 6 per cent of people have identities other than Irish or British. The second most spoken language is Polish. In the south of Ireland, meanwhile, 20 per cent of people have been born overseas.
Across the island, emigration has for centuries been an integral part of the national story. To this day, most people know someone who has left for Britain, the U.S., Australia or beyond. But now, increasing numbers of people migrate to Ireland. And in the north and the south, the subject has become a major political issue.
Recently, alongside my colleagues Jack Crangle and Laura Kelly, I was awarded funds for a new project to explore the history of immigration to the island. We plan to look at the experiences of students in the cities of Galway, Cork, Dublin and Belfast, of the English and other European migrants who gravitated to Ireland in search of a more simple lifestyle, and the more recent migrants who, for a wide variety of reasons, now call Ireland home.
This is now a highly contentious issue. In the last three years there has been anti migrant rioting in Dublin, Belfast and Ballymena. A far-right, ethnocentric vision of Irish nationalism has emerged as a serious political presence.
In our project, our focus is on foregrounding the experiences of marginalised groups across the island. Our central methodology will be oral history.
This would have been an alien approach to my grandfather. But having lived and worked in Belfast for over a decade, and having become a father to two Irish children, it feels poignant to be embarking on what might be a small contribution to Kenneth’s ambition of rescuing Irish history “from the possessive parochialism of its political historians”.
I’m off to read some Irish history.
Kieran Connell is a Reader in Contemporary British History at Queen’s University Belfast. His most recent book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History (Hurst), was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.