Water metaphors have always been used in discussing Irish emigration: a flood, a tide, a wave, a tsunami of people have left; there is a ‘leakage’ problem; Ireland is a ‘leaky ship’; something must be done to ‘stem the flow’. Long after boats have ceased to be the primary method for leaving Ireland, we still talk of people ‘leaving our shores’. Sometimes, more sinisterly, these have morphed into images of blood: Ireland's population is ‘haemorrhaging’ young people; the ‘life force’ is draining away; we must stem the flow. It is as if Ireland's population is conceived of as so ‘fluid’ that metaphorical references are the only adequate ones to express our feelings about the loss of citizens. Ireland's population, in this metaphorical vein, has been slowly depleting since the Famine when the crisis reached its apogee in this watery, cultural imagination. Families, the potential anchor to all these turbulent population changes, have been eroded by the waves of emigration, and women, the life-givers, the soul of the family in traditional, nationalist rhetoric, abandoned ship in staggering numbers in search of new opportunities abroad.

This book looks at the impact women's migration had on Ireland in the crucial years of initial independence, from the partition of the island and the founding of the Free State to the declaration of a Republic. This period saw Ireland move from internal political instability in the 1920s to a more internationally focused country in the 1950s. However, emigration remained a constant feature and women's experiences have often been forgotten. The inevitability of emigration was a familiar trope in this period. By the 1940s, commentary in the Irish Catholic that young people of every class in Ireland over the previous century ‘have regarded emigration as their natural destiny’ resulting in ‘too high a proportion of old people and that we, as a people, are committing national suicide’ was a commonly held view. The idea of race suicide was returned to repeatedly, and is a significant factor in what Liam Kennedy has termed ‘MOPE’ syndrome, or ‘Most Oppressed People Ever’, although, as Delaney among others has argued, Ireland was not unique in terms of the experience of mass migration and rural depopulation.