A review of 'Arrangements for the Integration of Irish Immigrants in England and Wales. By Anthony E.C.W. Spencer, edited by Mary E. Daly' (Pre-published version)

Abstract

This report, completed in 1960 but kept from the public domain until the publication of the present volume by the Irish Manuscripts Commission, was the product of the conjunction of two forces – Catholic church concern for the faith of Catholic migrants in Protestant countries, and the emergence of the relatively new discipline of sociology. Three Catholic welfare bodies were involved: the International Catholic Migration Commission which commissioned the report; the Newman Association of Great Britain, whose Catholic graduate members, particularly Anthony Spencer, were involved in the necessary research and analysis; and the Dublin-based Catholic Social Welfare Bureau (C.S.W.B.) founded by John Charles McQuaid, which took exception to the report and was instrumental in its being shelved. Mary Daly’s Introduction to the report teases out the complicated relations between these three bodies, and explores the conflicting approaches to Catholic immigration on the part of the English and Irish Catholic hierarchies. It also traces the tensions between Irish church-centred bodies like the C.S.W.B. (to some extent a mouthpiece of McQuaid) and Catholic sociologists whose deeply held pastoral concerns were counterbalanced by an empirical approach to research. This conflict is further clarified throughout the present publication, where passages to which McQuaid and the C.S.W.B. objected are reproduced in italics, allowing the reader to identify the two rival perspectives simultaneously.