Éireann and I is a collaborative project that sources, contextualizes, and chronicles the experience of Black migrants in Ireland.

This project is part of a growing movement of grassroots efforts from marginalized communities to collect and make accessible our own experiences outside of traditional archival institutions. The traditional archive is a colonial institution that has often functioned to exclude or write-out marginalized others from history –  where we are included our narratives are shaped by people who do not share our experiences. As a direct response, we are positioning this repository as an alternative space for our communities to explore memory and history as shared collective experiences.

The Black diaspora in Ireland makes up a fairly small percentage of the larger diaspora worldwide, but over the last few decades, people here have documented friends, families, and communities while navigating Black postcolonial identities in a state that is still defining its own postcolonial identity. In Ireland, many of us have been both mobilized and displaced by processes of migration, marginalisation, and institutionalisation. We navigate the facets of Blackness, citizenship, and identity either in combination or separately while creating and nourishing our own families, communities, cultures. The material you see here has been sourced through collaboration with individuals, groups, and communities and serves to answer the question “what do our experiences look like when collected, contextualised, and preserved by and for ourselves?”

Image courtesy of Éireann and I and Larry Ovie.