Migration and nursing in Ireland: An internationalist history

Recent research and policy interest has focused on the changing composition of the nursing workforce in the Republic of Ireland, which has seen an increase in the number and importance of overseas-trained nurses. This is the most recent episode of the importance of migration in the history of nursing in Ireland which stretches back to the emergence of nursing in Ireland in the early 19 century. Delineating the intersecting histories of Irish nursing and migration, this article situates Irish nursing history within an internationalist framework involving the movement of people, ideas and practices across borders. The relevance of an internationalist analysis is demonstrated through an examination of the close connections between the British and Irish nursing institutions and labour forces and the significance of Catholic religious orders and religious migration in the development of nursing in Ireland and overseas. This analysis of the history of Irish nursing from the early nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century draws particular attention to the significance of female religious migration as a previously neglected chapter in the history of the international nurse migration in the Irish context, and it highlights the existence of the ‘global nursing care chain’ (Yeates, 2004, 2006, 2009) that linked Ireland to the international economy and to the development of nursing services at home and abroad. _____________________________________________________________________ Introduction Recent changes in the nursing workforce in the Irish Republic and elsewhere in the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds have focussed attention on the importance of migrant healthcare workers in the operation and development of healthcare systems. Ireland is one example of a growing number of countries which are dependent on nonnationals for the operation of their healthcare systems (Bach, 2003; Buchan, Kingma and Lorenzo, 2005; Kingma, 2006; Yeates, 2006). International academic and policy interest in this issue has resurged at various times: prior to the early 2000s, it was expressed in the 1970s (Mejia, 1976). The inter-connections and inter-dependencies engendered by global dynamics predate this recent historical period, however, and it is these issues that this article addresses. It does so through a consideration of the history of nursing migration in the Irish context from the early nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. During this period, the development of the nursing labour force was infused by extensive and sustained internationalism. This internationalism is examined through the migrations of intending and qualified nurses into and out of Ireland. This migration, I argue, amounted to more than the sum of travel and work choices on the part of individual