As discussed above, prior to beginning the process of interviewing, or indeed recruiting participants, I made it a priority to regularly attend Irish community events, or events billed as being of Irish interest. By and large, I became aware of these events through subscribing to the mailing lists of Irish community organisations, or through advertisements in the Irish Post. Attending these events from an early stage in the research allowed me to build up a picture of contemporary discourses around public Irishness in England. This had the dual effect of informing my overall research question and the topics I wished to address in the interviews and group discussions as well as informing my subsequent analysis of the data.
The following is a chronological list of some of the major events I attended over the course of the research. I have omitted some minor events as well as ‘Irish activities’ I attended in more of a personal capacity, for example, watching televised Gaelic Games at the local Irish Centre. I have also omitted some repeated events, for example, I attended more than one match at the London GAA grounds in Ruislip.
6th November, 2006: A benefit concert for the Aisling Return to Ireland project at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London.
31st January, 2007: ‘The Irish Die Young’: a conference intended to highlight health issues among the Irish in Britain. Organised by the Federation of Irish Societies and co-sponsored by the Equalities and Human Rights Unit of the Department of Health, and Cara Housing Association.
11th March, 2007: Birmingham St. Patrick’s Festival 17th March, 2007: St. Patrick’s Day walking tour, London.
18th March, 2007: London St. Patrick’s Festival, including the London-Irish film festival 27th May, 2007: London v. Leitrim Gaelic Football match at the Emerald Grounds, Ruislip, London.
2nd September, 2007: London-Irish Festival, Roundwood Park, Harlesden, London.
21st September, 2007: “The Big Shindig”, a combined sport and music event held at the Galtymore dancehall, Cricklewood, London.
18th January, 2008: “Céilí Nights”: a social event based around Irish céilí dancing at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, London.
8th March, 2008: Irish Book Fair, Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith.
14th March, 2008: UK Premiere of ‘Kings’ at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Part of the London-Irish Film Festival.
15th March, 2008: Luton St. Patrick’s Festival
16th March, 2008: London St. Patrick’s Festival (on this occasion, I marched in the parade in order to get a different perspective on the day’s events – a fuller account is found in Chapter 6).
6th July, 2008: Music & Sports Day, Milton Keynes Irish Centre 11th November, 2008: London Irish Centre Open Day, Camden.
19th February, 2009: The relaunch of the NUI (National University of Ireland) London Graduates Club at the newly opened Irish club in Blackfriars.
14th March, 2009: St. Patrick’s Day parade, Milton Keynes 15th March, 2009: St. Patrick’s Festival, London
16th March, 2009: Talk entitled “the Craic was good in Cricklewood” delivered by Ultan Cowley, author of The Men Who Built Britain (2001) at the Birmingham Irish Club. Part of the Birmingham St. Patrick’s Festival.
4th July, 2009: Damhsa an Deoraí, an Irish-language film about the Galtymore dancehall at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Part of a wider programme of Irish films as part of the Kilburn festival.
The extent to which I was an active participant in these events varied. As mentioned above, these events were all open to the public, so that access was not an issue. However, it should be noted that as an Irish person, I felt quite culturally ‘at home’ at these events, and my presence was also unlikely to be questioned – something that may not have been the case had I lacked the cultural resources to position myself as an ‘insider’. Therefore, drawing on DeWalt & DeWalt’s (2002) typology of the degrees of participation of researchers carrying out observational work, I could be classified as engaging in ‘complete participation’, being a member of the group that I was simultaneously studying. Certainly, on occasions such as
‘Céilí Nights’, which I attended with a group of Irish and non-Irish friends, I was as concerned with the next dance and the next drink as anyone else in the room, while simultaneously maintaining an interest in how the evening was mutually performed as a representation of ‘traditional’ Irishness in London. However, as I will discuss in Section 4.4, insiderness is fluid, and there were many occasions on which I was more comfortable taking a bystander position. This is described in DeWalt & DeWalt’s typology as ‘passive participation’, where the researcher “does not interact with people” but rather “uses the site as an observation post” (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2002, p. 19). Having said this, my continued
‘insiderness’ with regard to Irishness served at times to deconstruct this passivity – a worked example of the difficulty of dividing those attending St. Patrick’s Day parades in particular into ‘participants’ and ‘observers’ can be found in Chapter 6.
I took field-notes while in the process of attending these events if practical, or immediately afterwards otherwise. I then wrote these notes up in full at the first opportunity. In earlier stages of the research, I made comprehensive (near voluminous) notes on everything that seemed in some way significant, while in later stages my observations were more focused, based on my emerging research questions and patterns I had noticed in previous observations. For example, having taken comprehensive notes on the St. Patrick’s Day
parades in 2007, my focus in 2008 and 2009 was more on noting moments of continuity and difference from the previous years and locations. Similarly, while my observations from events in 2007 and early 2008 helped to shape my thinking around the research question and the formulation of an interview schedule, having commenced interviewing in March 2008, I started to trace similarities between the themes emerging from my interview data and my observations from events. Thus, participant observation contributed to making this research a thoroughly iterative process.
4.3.2 Formulating interview & focus group questions
The formation of a schedule to guide the interviews and group discussions was influenced by both the research question and by themes I had noticed emerging from the participant observation and the ‘media dossier’ component of the research up to that point. For the interviews in particular, it was also my aim to encourage as free-flowing a narrative as possible. Having said that, there were a wide range of issues that I wanted to address, and so the interviews may be best described as ‘semi-structured’ rather than ‘unstructured’.
As already outlined, in formulating the interview schedule, it was my aim to access constructions of identity and claims on Irishness through eliciting narratives of ‘living Irishness’ in England. I avoided direct questions such as “what does your national identity mean to you?”, or “how do you conceptualise Irishness?” in favour of a range of more open-ended questions. This is not to say that participants would be unable to answer such questions, but having been posed in a theoretical, academic style, the answers to these questions would likely be framed in a similar style and would not reflect the personal, day-to-day construction of identities and identification that might be hoped for – consequently, the data may lack richness and validity. In common with Ní Laoire (2007) the question-set