Fortune Favours the Imirce Project Ahead of St. Patrick's Day 2025

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“The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.” Mary Robinson

Since its launch in March 2024, the Imirce project in the University of Galway Library has been growing from strength to strength, and picking up supporters left and right. Building on the strong foundation made by the historian Kerby A. Miller, the project is dedicated to preserving, interpreting and sharing the lived experiences of Irish emigrants who travelled west to North America across multiple centuries. As this history and legacy is shared it is natural that the project relies on the generosity, collaboration and trust of multiple stakeholders to ensure its successful continuation and we already have lots to share and give thanks for in the early months of 2025.


Support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York

On 9 March 2025, the University of Galway announced that the project has been awarded a grant of $300,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Carnegie Corporation is a philanthropic foundation devoted to reducing political polarization through support for education, democracy, and peace. Their generous support will enable the expansion of the digital archive, the development of teaching resources and the enhancement of data visualisation, while allowing the project team to conduct research on aspects of the collection. 

On a recent trip to New York, project leads Breandán MacSuibhne (Professor of Modern Irish History) and Dan Carey (Professor of English), along with Karen Sorensen (Associate Director of Development) paid a visit to the Carnegie Corporation team to discuss the next steps for the project and thank them for their support. You can read more about the organisation and the grant here. 

Over the same visit, the visitors from Galway were the guests of honour at an event at the Irish Consulate in New York. The Consulate hosted a morning event to celebrate the enduring links between Ireland and the USA, under the banner of “Emigrants & Exiles: What They Wrote Home.” Breandan and Dan gave the audience a taste of the Imirce project and the remarkable archival texts collated and released online for the benefit of all scholars, academic and amateur alike. Then Siobhán McSweeney, of Derry Girls fame and much more besides, gave dramatic readings, giving voice to two of the letters from the collection that describe the early days of settling into life in New York and Jersey City for young Irish women Celia Grimes (1870) and Katie Murphy (1927).  

Celebrating Imirce in Galway

On 13 March, members of the University community and Imirce archives donors gathered for a celebratory event in the Aula Maxima in the University of Galway Quadrangle. This gathering was an opportunity to share recent additions to the online repository, updates to the website itself, and the aspirations for the next year. 


Breandán MacSuibhne and Dan Carey opened the proceedings with reflections on the project’s beginnings with Kerby A. Miller and highlights from their recent engagements with supportive stakeholders across the Atlantic. They also meditated on the essential medium of the letter as an archival record. These documents capture the minutiae of day-to-day life for the benefit of modern readers to drop back in time, to witness the challenges and triumphs of generations of Irish people who form an important part of the fabric of the North American continent today.

Following this, Marie-Louise Rouget (Digital Archivist, Imirce) profiled some of the newest donor collections that have been released online, as well as the addition of a new record type to Imirce - ‘Life stories’. While letters are a well understood medium, ‘Life stories’ here refers to a variety of narrative nonfiction that Kerby Miller collected for his research, including memoirs, journals, diaries, recorded oral history interviews, biographies, autobiographies and more. These texts provide deeper details about the emigrant experience, from the often-perilous voyage across the Atlantic, to the hops-skips-and-jumps across multiple North American territories that emigrants would make to find a place to call home. Among these life stories are also the accounts of descendants of Irish emigrants; the accounts of people who are first generation American or Canadian, born to Irish parents who are often raised with tales of “Ould Ireland” looming large in their family’s collective identity. It is in these longer texts that visitors to the Imirce website will find further details to recreate and understand the times that these emigrants, their families and friends lived through. Marie-Louise also gave a demo of the Imirce website to highlight some of the technical changes that make the repository even more accessible to users with diverse research interests.

Catriona Cannon (Head of Heritage Collections and Digitisation) closed off the evening with a call to those in the room to find inspiration in the stories of Irish emigrants for creative projects, from visual arts and music to theatre and so much more. In the last year Imirce has already been a source of inspiration for MA Fine Arts students at Falmouth University who put together an exhibition to explore the “multifaceted nature of migration and its enduring impact on individuals and communities.” Conceived of in the United Kingdom, by students from the Irish disapora, and mounted at the British School of Bucharest in Romania, the exhibition represented the many layers and perspectives around the concept of home and a sense of belonging – a question that is especially pertinent today as migration features prominently in international politics. In the 21st century, it is essential that archives and heritage collections lend meaning to the past and present by increasing both knowledge and understanding in both aspects. Through art, there is great opportunity to reignite complex stories and subjective experiences from the past for the benefit of modern audiences.

Also during the programme, Marianne Ní Chinnéide (Drama and Theatre Studies), along with four MA Drama and Theatre Studies students read a selection of letters from the Kerby A. Miller Collection, as well as new accessions from the Mary Flynn Collection and the John Tiernan Collection. When hearing the words of the authors read aloud, the distance between the present and past shortens as the contents of the letters drop the listener directly into the time and space of their writing. Described in their own words, captured in these unique time capsules, their memory and experiences continue to live on. Many thanks to Marianne, Ian, Catherine, Naja and Teresa for their stirring performances.


For even more about the project, in Irish, here is a news report from Nuacht TG4, released on 13 March 2024.

The call for material contributions is ongoing. Imirce donors may choose to donate physically towards the University’s permanent collections, or opt to donate a digital surrogate (a digitised copy) of a letter or life story manuscript. You will more details about making a donation here: imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/contribute


The project team extends sincere thanks to the following donors who have contributed material towards the Imirce project in the last year: 

Author 

Marie-Louise Rouget is the Project Digital Archivist for the Kerby Miller Collection. In 2023, she published her graduate research, titled 'Grave Concerns: the state of public cemetery records management in South Africa'. 

Related Links 

Blog Post: Imirce Collection Day for Donors - Irish emigrant letters
Blog Post: Imirce Digital Collection of Irish Emigrant Letters - RTÉ Doc On One
Blog post: Port-Tales – An artistic response to Irish emigrant stories from the Imirce digital collection
Blog Post: Imirce is LIVE - Thousands of Irish emigrant letters now available online
Blog Post: The O’Callaghans of Fallagh — and the Kerby Miller Collection
Blog Post: A Digital-First Approach for Kerby Miller Collection
Blog Post: Bulk Rename Utility - The Digital Archivist's Lifeline
Blog Post: Curating a Digital-First Collection: Prof. Kerby Miller's Collection of Irish Emigrant Letters
University of Galway Library   
University of Galway Library Archives

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