Like oil lamps we put them out the back,

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights

better than, newer than and then

a time came, this time and now

we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.

These lines from Eavan Boland's poem, The Emigrant Irish, are an eloquent reminder of the communal forgetting of the migrant generations who have left Ireland down through the centuries. The poem calls for Irish people at home to regenerate the narratives of cultural meaning inscribed by the migrant experience, to "imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,/that their possessions may become our power".

If such an act of imagination is as necessary now, at a time when Ireland's new-found affluence repels migrants from elsewhere, as it was when the poem appeared 13 years ago, it may also be less likely to happen. As Fintan O'Toole recently observed, one of the by-products of Ireland's current economic success is a cultural amnesia about certain shameful aspects of its history, such as the reality of emigration to Britain. But cultural maturity requires a nation to confront the miseries as well as the glories of its past, and the "dread, makeshift example" of the Irish in Britain needs to be acknowledged, especially by a generation whose prosperity rests in part on the privations of those who have gone before.

But how are we to imagine this migrant experience? Where has it been chronicled and by whom? The most obvious place to begin is in the history books. In the last decade or so, many of the received views of the Irish in Britain have been challenged by a wave of research. In place of the old notion of the immigrant Irish as a poor, unskilled, outcast community much given to violence and drunkenness, a picture emerges of a diverse and dynamic people divided along religious, political and economic lines.

Yet the historians cannot tell the whole story. As the writer Donall Mac Amhlaigh reminds us: "Historians have written books about the Irish in Britain without ever really knowing the Irish immigrant labouring class. They can quote you the number of people who came to Skipton Hiring Fair, but they can't tell you what those workers felt and what they thought." It is to autobiographers like Mac Amhlaigh that we must turn for insights into the interior worlds of Irish migrants in Britain, to hear their living responses to dislocation, to eavesdrop on the thoughts and dreams that sustained them in exile.

One of the more enduring perceptions of the Irish in 19th and 20th century Britain is that they were a reticent, unliterary people who cleaved more to the spade than the pen. This is a view given concise expression by the novelist, Joseph O'Connor:

"Emigration is as Irish as Cathleen Ni Houlihan's harp, yet it is only since the 1960s and the generation of Edna O'Brien that Irish writers have written about the subject at first hand. . . Where are the first-person texts of Irish emigrant life in the latter part of the last century and the earlier part of this? With one or two exceptions. . . they're not there. At the heart of the Irish emigrant experience there is a caution, a refusal to speak, a fear of the word."

While it is true that the vast majority of migrants left no written accounts of their experiences, O'Connor's equation of emigration with reticence is misleading, as is his claim that the creative migrant is a post-1960s phenomenon. There are, in fact, many more examples of immigrant autobiography than he suggests, including several from the 19th century, as I discovered in the course of my research for a forthcoming anthology of such writings.

These works, together with a small but significant body of autobiographies by second-generation Irish writers, comprise a largely submerged and neglected sub-category of Irish writing. It is through such memoirs that one encounters most closely, and in especially vivid form, the diverse experiences of the Irish community in Britain, from their domestic and working lives to their reflections on home and identity. It is this latter theme that I want to focus on here, as a way of drawing attention to a forgotten aspect of Ireland's literary diaspora.

The migrant stream from Ireland to Britain, which had flowed steadily since medieval times, swelled to a flood of Mississippian proportions in the 19th century under the combined impact of the Industrial Revolution and the Famine. The social and demographic effects of this great Irish influx were visible in countless towns and cities across Britain, as successive waves of navvies, spalpeens and starving paupers swept across the country. Though the Famine refugees themselves remain a voiceless mass, a number of their children did find literary utterance.

One such was Tom Barclay, born in Leicester in 1852 to west of Ireland parents who fled the 1848 potato blight. Barclay's Memoirs and Medleys: The Autobiography of a Bottle Washer is not just a moving account of one immigrant family's struggle to survive the most abject poverty; it also offers vivid insights into the formation of a second-generation Irishman's cultural identity in Victorian England.

With engaging candour, Barclay charts the phases of his identity formation, from his early indoctrination in Catholicism and Fenianism to his subsequent experience of anti-Irish prejudice, which caused him to perceive his Irishness as inferior and bred in him a desire to "become English". In adulthood, Barclay's sublimated ethnicity forcefully reasserted itself after he became obsessed with "the thought that I couldn't be really Irish without a knowledge of the Irish language". This conviction later gave way to a more pluralist conception of Irishness, however, and a tolerant openness towards "foreigners of whatever colour or creed".

Like many second-generation Irishmen, his attempts to live in Ireland ended in disillusionment. He was dismayed by the social conservatism of the Free State and railed against the restrictions imposed on literary and intellectual expression. Yet Ireland remained his imaginary homeland up until his death in 1933, his attenuated patriotism poignantly audible in his description of himself as "a would-be Irishman".

Later second-generation autobiographers testified to the cultural disorientation caused by the crossing of an Irish nationalist heritage with an English imperialist education. Pat O'Mara's The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy, for example, memorably evokes the emotional turmoil engendered by the conflicting ideologies of home and school in Edwardian Liverpool. He recalls how, at school, "the Empire and the sacredness of its preservation ran through every textbook like a leitmotif", whereas at home, his Irish parents "were unequivocal in their attitude - destroy England, no less".

The adult legacy of these childhood antagonisms was a set of incongruous allegiances: "The best I can say is that what I derived from my elementary English-Irish schooling was an intense love for the British Empire and an equally intense hatred for England as opposed to Ireland."

A similar tension between the forces of assimilation and separation is audible in the memoirs of Bill Naughton, whose family emigrated from Ballyhaunis to Bolton in 1914 when he was just four years old. In Saintly Billy, he recalls how the jingoism of school history lessons made him envy the "cool Englishness" of his classmates, until tumultuous events across the water rekindled a secret pride in his cultural origins:

"Any time when in school we were gathered to sing God Save the King, I would sing `God Save Ireland' to myself, and the big pictures of King George and Queen Mary in all their regalia were to me but the images of two figures in a waxwork show, and I would try to imagine Robert Emmet or Patrick Pearse, or think of James Connolly being carried out on a chair to be shot - these were my heroes. What made it all the more difficult for me was that it seemed I had to keep everything to myself: my misery and tribulations had to be masked with a smile and my Irish patriotism with a traitorous assent to what was going on around me."

Whereas second-generation autobiographers are frequently preoccupied with the difficulties of expressing their Irishness in a hostile cultural environment, the memoirs of many Irish-born migrants testify to a heightened awareness of their identity in Britain. Reflecting on her first summer as a trainee nurse in London in 1897, Annie Smithson wrote: "It was strange - yet perhaps not so strange after all - that now, when I was in England, I should have become much more Irish in heart than when at home." She, like countless other immigrants, never fully assimilated into the host community, gravitating instead towards those traditional centres of expatriate Irishness - church, social club, dancehall - to recreate a sense of home.

The memoirs of the post-war generation of immigrants in particular are strewn with sketches of transient workers whose consolations lay in "the welcoming pubs, the weekly wage packet and the comradeship of adversity". Such comradeship could take many forms. In wartime London, Irish Times journalist Donal Foley recalled hearing a group of disparate Irish voices, united by "the joy of remembered songs", singing "Oh Mary, this London" at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. A decade later, novelist Richard Power observed the animated fellowship of the Birmingham Irish, "drinking, working, eating, condemned to relentless proximity to one another". A short distance away in Northampton, building worker and part-time writer Donall Mac Amhlaigh - the unintegrated post-war migrant par excellence - revelled in the company of Irish-speaking Connemara men.

The autobiographies of post-1960s migrants tend to tell a different tale, however. Mac Amhlaigh's brutal loneliness gives way to the cool detachment of Edna O'Brien, for whom "leaving Ireland was no wrench at all . . . I had got away. That was my victory."

For the teenage Bob Geldof, England represented a "sense of real liberty", a glamorous alternative to the "rat trap" that was Dublin. It was a place where nothing seemed insurmountable, not even that traditional scourge of the immigrant Irish, racism: "Curiously, when I was first confronted by racism in England, I was not in the least offended," writes Geldof in Is That It?

"`No dogs, no Irish,' said the bedsit sign. Fine. It didn't even depress me. But I didn't have to live with the constant grind of it."

The times were also a-changin' for the young George O'Brien, now professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He relished the prospect of a fresh start in 1960s London: "Transported beyond the letdown that was Ireland, I could at last reject the roles that had failed me there. Now I could begin," he writes in Out of Our Minds. But his illusions were short-lived. O'Brien soon met a sneering Galwegian who made him realise that he was just another "banal" immigrant, "in it for the money":

"There was no visible me. I'd happened a million times before in all those lads and lassies from all those Lismores, all those suitcases hauled through Euston secured with binder twine, all those unavailing Pioneer pins and scapulars and miraculous medals, all gone for good and nothing to show for it."

Gone for good, yes, but, as I've tried to show here, some of those lads and lassies did leave a stain upon the silence. Although these individual voices cannot speak for the silent thousands, their autobiographies, however few and fragmentary, capture something of the fear, hope, pain and triumph of the Irish in Britain, and as such give us traces of truth to set alongside evidence from other sources.

Liam Harte is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill in London. He is currently compiling an anthology of auto-biographical prose by the Irish in Britain and is keen to hear from people who have unpublished manuscripts in their possession. He can be contacted at hartel@smuc.ac.uk or tel: 0044-208- 2404091.