Imirce collection of Irish emigrant stories in the Media

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The Imirce project will be featured in the latest season of The History Show with Myles Dungan for RTÉ. The forthcoming episode features a panel of interviews discussing the work of historian Kerby A. Miller and the Imirce digital project that aims to preserve and make available the stories of Irish emigrants who went to North America. Dating across multiple centuries (ca. 1680 to 1990), the collected letters and life stories published to Imirce showcase the Irish emigrants’ place in the formative history of the United States and Canada, and the societal ripple effects of emigration for the Irish who remained.

The interviewees include Dan Carey (Professor of English), Marie-Louise Rouget (Digital Archivist and Imirce Project Manager), Helen Hayes Sweeney (History PhD candidate) and Breandán Mac Suibhne (Professor of Modern Irish History) from the University of Galway.

The Imirce episode will be released on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 7 September at 6pm. Following the initial broadcast, the episode can be found in all good podcast apps in The History Show feed, or listed on the RTÉ website.

Imirce has also been featured in the latest Autumn edition of Irish Roots magazine, released in late August 2025. An extract from the article, written by Marie-Louise Rouget (Digital Archivist and Imirce Project Manager), is included below, with links to the material online included:

One of the prevalent undercurrents across the letters is the emotional toll of emigration. As Miller describes in Emigrants and Exiles (Oxford, 1986), for many families “the departure for North America of a relative or neighbor represented as final a parting as a descent into the grave.” The early days for emigrants are especially difficult, and the letter authors often reflect on their desperate homesickness when writing to those who know them best. In this light, the “home letter” becomes essential for coping. In 1884, Cathy Greene, a maid in Brooklyn, wrote to her mother in Co. Kilkenny laying out her anxieties about receiving no recent news by writing:   

“What on earth is the matter with you all, that none of ye would think of writing to me. The fact is I am hearth sick fretting. I cannot sleep the night and if I chance to sleep I wake up with the most frightful dreams to think its now going, and gone into the third month since you wrote to me I feel as if I'm dead to the world.”

Only two months into her new life in America, Maggie Black (née Hall) also wrote to her mother from Chicago in July 1890 about her longing for home, but with resolve to overcome the feeling. She writes:  

“I do not Know why but I got thinking of ye all and the distance that lay between us, and I had no home letter so I got into low spirits, but I feel all right again. And fretting won't put a plank across the Atlantic.”

For more about Imirce, visit the project website at imirce.universityofgalway.ie. To get in touch with the project team, email imirce@universityofgalway.ie.

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'.

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