“A study of transnational families during the pandemic” is being led by Dr Marc Scully, Lecturer in Psychology at Mary Immaculate College (MIC), Limerick, who is working with Dr Sara Hannafin of the Geography Department at MIC and Dr Niamh McNamara, Associate Professor in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University.
We asked the three researchers the questions below. Marc and Niamh answered together, while Sara gave her own answers.
The survey will close on 8 January and can be completed here.
Please give us an overview of the project.
Marc and Niamh: The intention of the project is to explore the impact of the travel restrictions caused by the Covid–19 pandemic on families who are in some way distributed between Ireland and Britain, and for whom family life would previously have involved regular travel between the two. Our main focus here is transnationalism – the extent to which a life is lived across international borders, whether that’s physically, emotionally, psychologically or financially. So this might refer to a wide variety of families. Such families may have come to depend somewhat on versions of transnational life that were previously relatively straightforward due to the ease of travel between the two countries, but have suddenly become a lot more complex since travel restrictions were first introduced in March.
The project draws on all three of our areas of expertise and previous research. Marc has previously researched transnational identities among the Irish in Britain, Sara has previously researched second–generation ‘return’ migration from Britain to Ireland, and Niamh’s work looks at the ways in which social group memberships impact individual health and well–being.
Sara: From a personal point of view, I am interested in all aspects of the Irish in Britain story. My extended family is scattered across Britain and Ireland in what feels like a web of connection. I grew up in south–east London to parents from Sligo and Kerry and it is here that my Limerick–born children expect to spend Christmas with their Irish Granny and their London cousins.
Why is it important to explore the experience of the families of those travelling between Britain and Ireland?
Marc and Niamh: There has been something of a tendency in Irish migration studies to focus solely on the migrant themselves, or else, more rarely on those ‘left behind’. For this research, we felt that we needed to focus on the family (defined broadly!) and family dynamics as our unit of study in order to get a fuller picture of the disruption caused by the pandemic and travel restrictions. We would argue that if, say, you’re a grandparent who has yet to meet their grandchildren, or someone who has been communicating with their partner via Zoom since March, or siblings attempting to manage care of elderly parents when one sibling now can not travel home, your life has been no less disrupted by travel restrictions just because you’re not an emigrant yourself.
Social psychologists suggest that alongside our personal identity (our sense of ourselves as unique individuals), we also have multiple social identities, each associated with a group to which we belong (e.g. a family, community, professional group or a sports club). Feeling a sense of belonging to these groups (and defining ourselves in terms of these groups) has very important implications for our mental and physical health. This is because our groups provide a range of important practical and psychological resources to us, including but not limited to, social support, self–esteem and a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Together these factors equip group members with individual and collective resilience to the challenges they face, thereby reducing chronic and acute forms of stress and improving well–being.
In light of this, we felt a focus on either the individual migrant or those ‘left behind’ would neglect this important collective experience of migration. Family is obviously an important social group for many people and feeling cut off from this group is likely to contribute to heightened feelings of isolation and loneliness, which in turn have very serious implications for psychological health.
What are the benefits of this research?
Sara: To raise awareness of the amount of travel that goes on between Ireland and Britain and from Ireland to elsewhere which is not ‘holiday’, but could be seen as essential travel in that it enables transnational families to maintain relationships and support each other.
Although politicians have now realised that lots of Irish people might want to come home for Christmas, all the talk in the summer was of sacrificing your two weeks in Portugal for the greater good and no mention of the family reunions which were also put on hold.
Marc and Niamh: We wanted to provide a more realistic picture of what travel in and out of Ireland actually looks like and its centrality in the lives of many families across Britain and Ireland. Similarly, we hope that the research will inform the approach of the Irish government’s Global Irish Unit, NGOs and community organisations that deal with migrants, such as those under the umbrella of Irish in Britain. One of our concerns is that the disruption caused to people’s support networks by travel restrictions may create a new category of vulnerable migrant, particularly with regard to psychological health and wellbeing: this is something that we feel migrant support organisations need to be aware of.
How has travel between Britain and Ireland changed in recent decades before the pandemic?
Sara: In my lifetime it feels as if the two places have got closer and closer. Shared EU passports, growth of airports in the west of Ireland, Ryanair, instant communication, whereas I remember the coach from Victoria to Charlestown via Holyhead, writing letters,
the novelty of a phone call, the rarity of a visit.
Brexit has cast a shadow on this closeness, although it looks as if travel between Ireland and Britain will not be disrupted. The pandemic has perhaps made us realise what had been increasingly taken for granted and left some feeling like a 1950s (or earlier)
migrant, a long way from home.
Marc and Niamh: Particularly since the 2008 recession, there has been a phenomenon where people would have their family lives in one country and their work lives in another, and would travel between the two, normally on a weekly basis. This has obviously been enabled by the availability of cheap flights, and the wide variety of routes between Ireland and Britain – we tend to talk about the ‘Ryanair Generation’, but arguably the network of Aer Lingus regional routes which have linked smaller regional airports in Britain to their equivalents in Ireland have been just as important.
One of the working theories we have about travel that has informed this project, is that the relative ease of travelling between the two countries has led to people maintaining transnational support networks, perhaps at the expense of building up support networks where they live. It is arguable that previous generations of migrants had no choice but to build up local support networks due to the expense and difficulty of getting home, whereas for many more recent migrants, it’s been relatively (we stress ‘relatively’!) straightforward to pop home for the weekend if you’re missing your family and friends.
Of course, this safety valve of being able to get home if you feel you need to has suddenly been taken away and one of the things we want to investigate through the survey is the impact of that on people’s sense of identity and belonging, as well as on their psychological health and well–being. It is also worth saying that the patterns of air travel that had built up in the last decade or so were probably unsustainable for environmental reasons.
What information do you need for the survey?
You can take the survey here. It is open to anyone who belongs to a family that is in some way divided between Britain and Ireland. So that would cover Irish migrants in Britain and their family members, as well as British migrants in Ireland and their families.
The survey is anonymous – anyone taking it will be asked some basic demographic details, their migration history, and details of their travel patterns between Ireland and Britain, and some questions on their experiences during the pandemic, particularly how their family lives and sense of belonging and identity have been affected. The deadline is 8 January.