About the Project

Ireland has traditionally been an emigrant country however, the 1990s saw the emergence of a very different Ireland. In that decade, almost half a million new jobs were added to the Irish economy heralding high levels of immigration in the latter years of the decade. In the period 1995-2000, approximately a quarter of a million persons migrated to Ireland, of whom about half were returning Irish. The aggregate figure for immigrants (including Irish returnees) in this five-year period represents approximately 7% of the 1996 population (3.6 million). This situation of substantial net immigration is set to continue for several years to come, although the actual figures will be influenced by international and internal economic developments.

Research Process

• A number of questions had to be addressed in setting up this project
• What is the purpose of this on-line archive?
• Who was to be included in the project?
• How were we to go about inviting potential participants to take part?
• What ethical issues does a project such as this one raise?
• What does a project like this offer to potential participants?
• What considerations should influence the design of the interview guide, setting up the interviews and the interview process?
• What should be the focus of the web presentation? course

The aims of this project are:

• to record the personal experiences of those arriving in Ireland thereby constructing a ‘living’ record of in-migration at the beginning of the twenty-first century
• to locate the myriads experiences of ‘new’ immigrants to Ireland within their individual and collective life stories
• to identify connections between the conditions of leaving their countries of origin and they subsequent routes to and experiences in Ireland
• to offer subjective and personal perspectives to debates on immigration to Ireland that often take place at an abstract level

Doing the Research

A number of ethical considerations pertain when recording the life narratives of individuals who may be vulnerable to deportation or non-renewal of work permits or visas

In order to access 'new' immigrants in the Cork area we approached the local NGO, which works with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. We also gave a presentation to Filipino nurses attending an induction course at Cork University Hospital.

Our contact with the NGO enabled us to meet with potential contributors a number of times before the actual interview took place.

Asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants are, in different ways, subjected to repeated completing of forms, 'official interviews' and 'assessment', so it was important that this research did not replicate these experiences. It was necessary therefore to be highly sensitive to how the interview was set up, the setting and to make the interview process itself as enjoyable as possible.

We decided that to keep background information and demographic details to a minimum. Contributors were invited to give us the following information if they felt happy to do so:

Country of origin

Approximate age

Date of arrival in Ireland

Where they arrived in Ireland

Outcomes

• These life narratives form an important source of personal experiences of arrival and settlement in Ireland
• The project has designed an Immigrant Life Narrative Interview Guide that forms a basis for further research in this area
• These subjective accounts of immigration provide a necessary antidote to ‘official’ discourses of immigration
• The life narratives included here offer new perspectives on Irish society and culture
• These narratives represent a rich source for teaching and training purposes

Technical details of interview collection, editing and publishing on the web

The audio files are recorded by mini disk recorders (Sony digital recording mz-r37). An analogue copy is made of the interview and deposited in the archive for transcribing purposes at a later stage. A copy of this tape is sent to the interviewees.

The transfer of the interview onto the PC is through a mini jack to mini jack lead with a mini jack to full converter for the PC end.  One copy of the  .wav file is divided into 1hr 05/10min sections and written to CD ROM in .wav and (Audio) .cda formats using WinOnCD 3.7. These are deposited in the archive. The other copy of the .wav file is edited using the editing software Sound Forge, the files are then compressed and saved as Real Audio files, generating .rm files. These are published to the ICMS server, by Real Producer 7.0 / 8.0. 

The webpages are created, edited and managed through Microsoft Frontpage.

After an initial period, a large part of the processing; streaming and creation of .cda and .wav format CD Roms for the Archive was outsourced to Audio Visual, NUI Cork. The costs were eventually prohibitive, as the work is time consuming and very involved. The work is once again being done in- house .

The photographs of narrators are taken at the time of the interview with Yashica Zoomate (38-105mm) cameras. Contributors can also send in a photograph of their choice. Photographs are then scanned using a HP 5100c scanner. The resolution is that of the scanner default (150Dpi).  If the photographs are personal photographs to be returned a .tif format of the picture created, otherwise images are saved in .jpg format to save on memory.