Since the 1970s, case-studies have highlighted specific local contexts which informed variegated Irish migrant experience across nineteenth-century Britain. This article scrutinises how the Catholic Irish in Preston navigated their host society. Especially in public and organisational expressions of religion and politics, the Preston Irish were unusually closely connected to their host community. Preston's unusual confessional demographics and multifaceted political contestation offered the Catholic Irish opportunities for meaningful interventions in local society. Situating this case-study comparatively, this article posits four key interlinking factors shaping migrants' experiences of a nineteenth-century town: its size, broader immigration patterns, confessional composition, and labour politics.
Signalling the longevity of their struggle, Irish republicans active since 1969 frequently highlight family connections among previous generations of militant activists. First, this article interrogates how activists without republican lineage narrate their mobilisation and position themselves within the movement. Republicans without familial access to the movement, it is argued, frame their own commitment as uniquely independent, intense, and reflective. The article's second section examines the contentious, metaphorical formulation of "family" within Irish republicanism since the peace process of the 1990s. To maintain internal unity amid strategic reorientation, the Provisional movement leadership invoked a "republican family" within which misgivings and dissent could be contained and overcome. Conversely, Sinn Féin's republican critics rejected the Provisionals' attempts to delimit the "family." Simultaneously, senior Sinn Féin representatives strategically warned the London and Dublin governments of the volatility of the "family": sustaining the peace process, they claimed, required state actors to accommodate an enduringly truculent republican rank-and-file. Drawing upon republican oral histories and written autobiography, this article elucidates how republican familiesboth literal and metaphorical -have alternately cohered and stabilised the movement. It illuminates a continual contest for intergenerational political legitimacy, and for the right to determine the principles and programme of the republican "family."
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