This is a book about the Irish Question, or more specifically about Irish Questions. The term has become something of a catch-all, a convenient way to encompass numerous issues and developments which pertain to the political, social, and economic history of modern Ireland.The Irish Question has of course changed: one of the main aims of this book is to explore the complicated and shifting natur…
etween seven and eight million men and women left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century.1 For a country whose popula-tion has never been more than eight and a half million, that is a mind-boggling statistic, and one that might easily obscure individual emigrant lives. Historians have therefore tended to tackle Irish emigration in two di…