Remembering Their History: Memories of Irish Migratory Agricultural Workers in Scotland
Remembering Their History: Memories of Irish Migratory Agricultural Workers in Scotland

Summary/Abstract: Autobiographical accounts are important constructs of the past and past experiences. They account and present what happened in the past. The written document presents select events, which its author considered was important and played a central role in their personal history, development and identity. The cross-examination of a number of accounts which draw on personal experience shows how groups chose to remember, and also to suppress or forget aspects of their past history. This collective memory is especially important for minority groups of ethnic workers, especially those which occupied a marginal role in society and found it difficult to become integrated into their host society. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the case of Irish migratory workers who travelled from the west of Ireland to undertake seasonal agricultural work in Scotland each year during the period from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Such workers spent only a few months of the year in Scotland, and were seen as figures that formed part of an “underworld” that was not always easy to locate. This paper examines aspects of the migration and employment conditions of the Irish seasonal migratory workers in autobiographies and autobiographical novels. It discusses the way in which these works created a memory of the migration through their authorship, in the published text as a material object, which can transfer memory and through the reader of the published text. It assesses the memory which was left of the migratory work by one of the groups of seasonal workers, the potato workers, and questions how representative was the record of their experiences of the migratory work.

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