Irish emigrants returning home in the past decade generally welcome the growing multicultural nature of Irish society and empathise with new arrivals here, according to a researcher involved in establishing an oral archive of returning emigrants' experiences.
Dr Caitríona Ní Laoire said: "One of the things that these returning emigrants speak about is the growing multiculturalism here and generally they welcome it and they empathise with these immigrants having been new arrivals themselves elsewhere."
Titled Narratives of Migration and Return, the archive was funded by the Higher Education Authority North-South Programme.University College Cork, the Centre for Migration Studies in Omagh, Queen's University Belfast and the department of sociology at the University of Limerick were also involved in the project.
Dr Ní Laoire, along with Liam Coakley of UCC's geography department and Johanne Devlin Trew of the Centre for Migration Studies, Omagh, and School of History at Queen's, spoke to 92 returned emigrants.
According to Dr Ní Laoire, specific groups of emigrants such as nurses, construction workers, graduates and those working in information technology were targeted for extensive recorded interviews so as to provide as broad a range of returned experiences as possible.
