Breaking the silence - questions of staying and going in 1950s Ireland

This article discusses issues of migration, history, memory and Irish society as they relate to a project based on life narratives at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, University College Cork. The project, entitled Breaking the Silence – staying ‘at home’ in an emigrant society digitally recorded the life narratives of Irish women and men who stayed in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century and used new technologies to publish those with appropriate copyright in Real Audio format on the Internet. These life narratives offer important insights into how the experience of emigration in Ireland during the 1950s has been incorporated into the rapid social change of the latter half of the twentieth century. Initial themes emerging from analysis of six narratives are discussed in this article.