Mary Gilmartin

Bettina Migge

Migrant mothers and the geographies of belonging

published or not. The documents may come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Introduction

The ebb and flow of migration research has moved from seeing women as dependent or "tied" migrants, to independent movers, to being one component of a mobile family unit [START_REF] Cooke | Trailing wife' or 'trailing mother'? The effect of parental status on the relationship between family migration and the labor-market participation of married women[END_REF][START_REF] Cooke | Migration in a Family Way[END_REF][START_REF] Kofman | Gendered global migrations[END_REF][START_REF] Kofman | Gendered labour migrations in Europe and emblematic migratory figures[END_REF]Morokvasic 1984). Within this, there are two distinct bodies of work that address the ways in which migration influences female subjectivity. The first highlights female empowerment as a consequence of migration, often because of the changes in economic and employment status of migrant women. The second highlights female subjugation, both as a consequence of their migration status and also because of cultural differences in the migrant destination (see International Migration Review 2006 and Lutz 2010 for reviews of this extensive and substantial literature). Each set of literature captures some of the complexity of migrant subjectivities, but neither provides sufficiently nuanced accounts of the multiple ways in which people understand and narrate identity, and how this changes in and through the process of migration and the experience of place.

In order to expand our understanding of the multiple ways in which people understand and narrate identity, this paper focuses on a particular group of female migrants: migrant mothers. Studies of maternal migration often focus on mothers separated from their children, involved in "transnational mothering" as a consequence of the global care chain (for excellent examples, see [START_REF] Parreñas | Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families[END_REF][START_REF] Pratt | Families apart: migrant mothers and the conflicts of labor and love[END_REF]). Alternatively, maternal migration is studied in the broader context of family migration, but the focus here is most often on (male) heads of households, or on the experiences of children (for critiques, see [START_REF] Kofman | Gendered global migrations[END_REF][START_REF] Lutz | Gender in the migratory process[END_REF].

While there is a small but growing literature on migrant fathers (see [START_REF] Kilkey | Migrant men's fathering narratives, practices and projects in national and transnational spaces: recent Polish male migrants to London[END_REF], recent feminist work has paid less attention to migrant mothers [START_REF] Gedalof | Birth, belonging and migrant mothers: narratives of reproduction in feminist migration studies[END_REF]) and more to the global reorganisation of reproduction [START_REF] Kofman | Gender and Global Labour Markets: Incorporating Skilled Workers[END_REF]).

Yet, as we argue in this paper, it is also important to pay closer attention to the experiences of co-resident migrant mothers -those who live with their children. Migration "reveals the inherent quality of intimate relationships" (Holdsworth 2013, 82), and we suggest that being a co-resident migrant mother, as a particular and important form of intimate relationship (Erel 2009, 147), is a topic that needs further attention in migration studies. In order to develop this argument, we highlight the experiences of migrant mothers in Ireland. As a spatial context that lays claim to privileging the mother, Ireland is a particularly useful site for this examination.

In this paper, we pay particular attention to place-based experiences and identities with our focus on the geographies of belonging and not-belonging for migrant mothers in Ireland. These are topics of growing interest in geography, even though this interest does not always translate into clear and precise definitions. Marco Antonsich has attempted to provide an analytical framework for belonging, and he usefully distinguishes between "placebelongingness" and "politics of belonging" [START_REF] Antonsich | Searching for belonging -an analytical framework[END_REF]. Place-belongingness is affective and emotional: it refers to a sense of feeling at home. In contrast, the politics of belonging refers to socio-spatial processes of inclusion and/or exclusion. In her recent book, Nira Yuval-Davis further develops the concept of the politics of belonging. She takes a multiscalar approach, seeing belonging in terms of religion, nationality, citizenship, cosmopolitanism and caring (Yuval-Davis 2011). The introduction of "caring" is important here, because it takes the practice of caring and locates it within a broader discussion of the politics of belonging. This ensures that caring is not just associated with the private sphere and with "place-belongingness", but that it is also seen as fundamental to how the politics of belonging is, and might be, conceptualized and experienced. There is an extensive literature on caring and migrants, particularly centred on the global care chain. However, as Raghuram suggests, the discussion of care in migration literature is "relatively unvariegated" (2012,156). In her contribution, Raghuram argues for a spatially grounded and differentiated understanding of care. To this end, she incorporates the concept of the "care diamond", which has been used to show the ways in which care is organized and delivered, through four different nodes: families/households, market, communities and state (Raghuram 2012: 163). 1 Raghuram argues for the use of the care diamond in understanding the relationship between migration and care, as it shows the complexity and specificity of care more clearly than the concept of the care chain. In this paper, we respond to Raghuram's call by using the care diamond as a way of thinking about the relationship between care and the politics of belonging for co-resident migrant mothers. In this way, we examine both structural and cultural understandings (Erel 2009, 8-14) of care, mothering and belonging for migrant mothers in Ireland. We argue that the caring work that is performed by migrant mothers actively works against their potential to develop a broader sense of belonging. Migrant mothers thus experience and are subjected to the politics of not-belonging, in ways that challenge their efforts to develop place-belongingness through the act of caring. In this paper, we discuss the geographies of belonging and not-belonging as expressed in our interviews with migrant mothers in Ireland. We start by providing the broader context for our paper and our research.

Context

Ireland offers a fascinating site for a study of migrant mothers. The 1937 Irish Constitution makes two direct references to mothers. The first, in Article 41, claims that the State shall "endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home" (Constitution of Ireland 1937). The second, introduced in 1983 as one of a series of divisive amendments on the issue of abortion, asserts that the right to life of an unborn child is equal to that of the child's (biological) mother. This close association of woman, motherhood and home served to spatially entrap women in Ireland, for example through limited access to work and public space, prohibitions on contraception, divorce and abortion, and a repressive regulatory regime that punished moral transgressions [START_REF] Crowley | Producing 'decent girls': governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922-1937)[END_REF]. More recently, the Irish state has attempted to prevent pregnant women from travelling to Britain to access abortion services. Subsequent debates led to an amendment of the Irish constitution, incorporating in 1992 a specific guarantee of women's right to travel. While public and institutional suspicion of women's bodies has not waned -see the 2004 Citizenship Referendum which licensed a significant change in Irish citizenship laws following a moral panic about the figure of the "citizenship tourist" 2 -local, European and global economic, social and legislative changes over the past thirty years have served to undermine the conservative status quo reflected in the Irish Constitution and recent moral panics. The lives of women in Ireland have been converging to a much greater extent with those of women in the rest of Europe. For instance, female participation in the labour force increased from 43% to 56% between 1996 and 2011 [START_REF] Mcnally | Prevalence and Predictors of Grandparent Childcare in Ireland: Findings from a Nationally Representative Sample of Infants and their Families[END_REF]Turner and McMahon 2011). Paid maternity leave and subsidized parental leave times have been introduced and extended in duration. Parents also receive tax breaks and child benefit contributions and the most financially vulnerable mothers also receive additional payments such as the lone parent benefit. However, ongoing debates highlight that many issues have only been partially tackled. For instance, there has been an increase in childcare facilities in parallel with the growing participation of women in the labour force [START_REF] Gallagher | Neoliberal governmentality and the respatialisation of childcare in Ireland[END_REF]). However, these facilities are often not affordable for parents with several children and for people with low and lower-middle incomes because child care facilities receive no or only minimal subsidies from the state: in 2005, the Irish state spent just 0.3% of GDP on childcare services for children not in primary school, compared to an OECD average of 0.8% (Thévenon 2011, 79). While salary levels have fallen due to the economic crisis that began in 2008, childcare costs have remained static or increased making full-time care unaffordable for an increasingly larger group of people with small children.

Finally, childcare regulations and supervision of facilities' compliance with them are only developing gradually in Ireland, making parents reticent about entrusting their children to these facilities. The limited support for women with children to work outside the home means that, in practice, many mothers in Ireland have few options but to be full-time carers for their children, as envisaged by the Irish Constitution. This paper discusses the specific experiences of migrant mothers and their feelings of (not) belonging through our analysis of interviews with women with children who have recently moved to Ireland. The paper is based on a more extensive study that focused on capturing the experiences of people who had moved to Ireland in recent years, either in 2004 or 2007. The study was funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and had a longitudinal design in order to explore the dynamic nature of newcomers' experiences. We recruited participants using a variety of methods, such as distribution of flyers in public spaces like libraries, internet cafes, migrant focused organizations, snowballing and e-media. One site that we used was an online parenting forum for "ex-pat mums and dads." Two women contacted us following our post on this forum, and their stories made us realize that mothers, particularly of young children, faced a range of specific challenges that were not well addressed in broader research on migration to Ireland or in the research on mothers and children. In total, 11 of the 60 people who participated in the study are mothers, and two other participants became pregnant for the first time during the course of the study. Of these 13, four are from the US, three from the UK, two from Germany, and one each from Ireland, Poland, South Africa and the Netherlands. While women often had a variety of reasons for moving to Ireland, five moved to Ireland primarily to be with their Irish partners, five moved primarily because of their partner's work, and the others moved for reasons of employment. The women were also diverse with respect to their social background. Seven of the women had completed a third level degree and five had professional qualifications. Just one had secondary education only. Nine had worked in professional jobs before coming to Ireland, while three had been in third level education. In Ireland, five engaged in paid employment, two in academic studies and two had their own businesses. Two gave up their work or training due to issues around childcare and two women created their own enterprises in order to be more flexible. In terms of their residence in Ireland, six lived in smaller urban and rural areas and seven in larger urban areas such as Dublin, Sligo and Belfast. Although several of our participants lived in Dublin, they typically lived in suburbs with relatively poor infrastructure. While our participants are clearly not the most disadvantaged group of migrants such as asylum seekers, illegal migrants and people on temporary work visas who have figured prominently in many publications on migration to Ireland [START_REF] Loyal | Understanding immigration in Ireland: State, labour and capital in a global age[END_REF][START_REF] Luibhéid | Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant[END_REF], they cannot easily be defined as privileged either. Even if they have in many cases unrestricted access to the labour market due to their EU citizenship and or due to being married to an EU citizen, many of them struggle to make a living, especially since the beginning of the recession, and have, like Irish people, had to make a range of painful changes to their lives. In many ways, our participants present a good cross-section of migrants living in Ireland, most of whom originate from within the EU or from English-speaking countries outside the EU (for example, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Yet, this group of newcomers has received relatively little attention in discussions of migration in Ireland [START_REF] Gilmartin | European migrants in Ireland: pathways to integration[END_REF]. Our discussion is thus innovative: it narrates the experiences/perspectives of two types of immigrants -EU and/or English-speaking co-resident mothers -neither of whom receive much attention in current discussions on migration.

The geographies of belonging

In this section, we discuss the various ways in which migrant mothers in Ireland describe their experiences of belonging. We focus particularly on 'home' as a form of placebelongingness, as it captures the geographies of belonging in both material and symbolic ways [START_REF] Blunt | Home[END_REF]. There has been a recent interest in the materiality of homemaking, particularly in relation to migration [START_REF] Long | Diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space[END_REF]Tolia-Kelly 2004). Despite a growing academic interest, however, few of the women we spoke to made explicit reference to home-making as a specific material act. The one person who did, the South African woman, did so in relation to a question. When asked what she would describe as home, she answered "this house for now" (2007SA01) 3 . Later, she elaborated:

Interviewee: […] but we try and give them the sense of stability and roots with our family traditions. And in a sense for us, I know it seems odd to some people that we, like a tortoise move with everything that we own and we carry it with us, but that is our safety for the children.

Interviewer: So it is things, particular kinds of photographs and mementos?

Interviewee: Yes and their stuff, all their toys and my books, those kind of things that travel with us. Some people have a base somewhere else and they live this sort of temporary life.

Interviewer: So you made that decision that wherever you are that is your home?

Interviewee: Yes. (2007SA01)
Family traditions for this woman also involved food -"the South African sweets and crisps and a couple of chocolates and things, the chips, … and some of the cereals" that she could purchase in a South African shop in Dublin. Yet, she was the only person who mentioned food. One other woman mentioned possessions, but in the context of deciding whether to rent or buy a place to live 4 . She said that not being in her own place was the "hardest challenge" for her, but then acknowledged that buying a house and shipping her possessions to Ireland would be a "final decision…if we buy it means we will be staying here for a long time" (2007UK04). For a small number of women, the act of buying a house was a symbolic marker of home-making. One woman, a returned Irish migrant, had just bought a house with her husband. She said "it feels quite nice to have made that commitment to buy the house" (2007IR01b). However, home ownership was not necessarily a guarantee of belonging.

Another woman, who lived with her husband and his brother in a house the two men had bought together before she met her husband, repeatedly commented on how she and her husband had never had a house on their "own" (2007US06/b). Though interviews often took place in people's homes, this context was rarely mentioned by the women we spoke to. Instead, they were more likely to talk about other ways of feeling at home. One way was through the presence of animals: two people had brought dogs with them from their previous home, and another had got a dog in Ireland as a marker of belonging. Another important way was through new friendships, which were seen as crucial to establishing a connection to Ireland and to developing a sense of place-belongingness.

The women we spoke to told us of a variety of ways in which they had attempted to develop friendships in Ireland. Women with children at primary school level often highlighted the importance of their children's school as a place to meet new people 5 . A woman from the UK who was living just outside of Dublin suggested that making friends is a necessity for migrant women because they do not have any other support networks.

Interestingly, the women who appear to be open to these new friendships were mostly other non-Irish people because they faced similar challenges.

Because with the ex pat community here [at the school] that we are involved in because all our husbands have demanding jobs that take them abroad and things like that, so you are often on your own without anybody really so making friends here as quickly as In some cases, such self-help friendship networks developed into more structured support groups and led to the development of part-time work opportunities for the women involved.

The woman from the UK, for instance, developed a cookery school which she was able to run precisely because of the help that she received from her friendship network. For women who had very small children, mother-child based groups often fullfilled the same function as highlighted by a young American woman:

[…] I also have made friends through going to the breastfeeding group and things like that so I have a few other friends around who are mothers from all over. […] there is also a mother and toddler group every Tuesday so there are a lot of mums around with babies.

[…] (2007US04) But often women also bonded because they found themselves in a similar situation and thus struck up friendships. So the American woman also told us that she made friends with other women with small children who were living in the same apartment complex: "The girl across the hall had a baby a couple of months before I did so we kind of are friends, and there is another girl who had a baby around the same time so we all became friends" (2007US04).

Women with very young children also made use of online parenting groups and other internet fora to find out about things and to create a sense of place-belongingness. As a young mother from the US commented: I mean I couldn't imagine life without the internet to be honest, like rollercoaster and different sites, they just help with everything, questions answered, there is always someone who needs help and you can help them. I think there are some great websites out there for parents in Ireland. (2007US06)

The website had, in this instance, led to a close friendship with another young woman from the US who had recently had a baby in Ireland, and the two women meet up regularly for lunch. Besides these support networks that catered to the specific needs of women with (small) children, women also negotiated other relationships such as with (previous) coworkers and especially in the case of women with Irish partners with his friends and their partners (2007US04, 2007US06, 2007SA01). Women with Irish partners often also engaged in new ways with their Irish in-laws once they had children. Most of our female interviewees found their Irish in-laws welcoming and women with children in particular often asserted that they found them to be supportive. One young woman from the US, for instance, spoke very positively of her parents-in-law:

They are definitely very supportive, ever since they found out that we were having a baby they have been very supportive, money wise, anything that we need because they know that it is a struggle. So in that way they have been very accommodating.

(2007US04)

However, few of the interviewees gave the impression that relations with in-laws were entirely based on mutual liking; most of them seem to be predicated on mutual needs. As a consequence, long-distance friendships and friendships with other migrants in Ireland were seen as very important.

The interviews with migrant mothers suggest that contrary to the literature on home-making [START_REF] Long | Diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space[END_REF]Tolia-Kelly 2004), human relationships rather than material objects are central to people's feelings of belonging in Ireland. While the women we spoke to asserted the importance of family relationships for their lives, they foregrounded friends, rather than family, as central to their everyday lives in Ireland.

The centrality of friendships appears to be related to the lack of adequate structural support for people with children in Ireland. In order to fill this gap, migrant mothers, unlike their indigenous peers who rely on family-based support, invest in friendships and technologically mediated relationships to build up support networks. While these networks appear to provide effective solutions to their everyday problems, they also highlight broader issues about the process of integration. They demonstrate the exclusionary practices of the indigenous Irish population: migrant women are rarely able to participate in the same networks as Irish women because the latter, especially if they are from the local area, rely on their family networks and are less open to contacts with newcomers. In a sense this also increases the vulnerability of migrant women because they have to build up these networks at the time when they also require support. At least in the short term, this could lead to social isolation. As we found, belonging, has a range of different meanings for the mothers we spoke to, and these meanings had certainly been affected by their experiences of both migration and motherhood. As Ralph and Staeheli comment, "the syntax of belonging … is structured by relationships and practices in a variety of locations" (2011,526). Their observation is equally pertinent for understanding not-belonging, which is the focus of the next section.

The geographies of not-belonging: families and work

The migrant mothers who spoke to us highlighted home and friendships as important in creating a sense of belonging. These are directly related to two aspects of the care diamond: families and communities. However, the relationship with families and communities also foregrounded experiences of not-belonging, though not-belonging was exacerbated by the state and by markets, the other aspects of the care diamond. In our analysis of the ways in which migrant mothers described their sense of not-belonging, two topics emerged as of particular importance. The first relates to families, while the second relates to work. The interconnections of families and work as sites of not-belonging provide a powerful illustration of the relationship between care and mothering and the politics of belonging.

Many of the women we met spoke about their sadness at being separated from their parents and siblings -particularly their mothers -at this time in their lives. A young German woman who was pregnant when we interviewed her for the second time spoke about how her pregnancy made her feel even more detached from Ireland. She explained it in terms of family: "you want to be with your parents and your sisters, that is the main issue and maybe because everything is so new" (2007GER02b). A number of women who had already given birth mentioned how they missed immediate emotional and practical support from their mothers. One woman said, of giving birth to her first child, that "I was missing my mother acutely" (2007SA01). Another said that the absence of her mother in the time after her first child was born had led her to consider where she might give birth in the future, commenting that "so I think if I had another I might have the baby back home" (2007US06). Women mentioned regular travel -both to and from Ireland -as a way of ensuring that family relationships were nurtured. However, travel became more difficult as parents or children got older, either because of time constraints imposed by school attendance or the expense of international travel, so other forms of communication -telephone, email, or Skype, for example -were also important means of staying in touch. However, for many of the women we met, these long-distance affective relationships were unsatisfactory primarily because they placed limits on the amount and quality of care their (female) family members could provide to them.

The emphasis on the provision of care by family members needs to be understood in the broader landscape of childcare in Ireland. While there have been some recent efforts to expand the provision of childcare in Ireland [START_REF] Gallagher | Neoliberal governmentality and the respatialisation of childcare in Ireland[END_REF], relatives continue to be a very important source of childcare for pre-and primary-school age children in Ireland (Share and Kerrins 2009, 33). Grandparents play a crucial role in this: as Share and Kerrins comment, "grandparents fill the gaps in child care provision" (2009,39). Women with Irish partners often availed of help from their partner's family. Sometimes this was on a reciprocal basis.

For example, a young woman from the US described how her arrangement with her sister-inlaw, saying:

Yes she [sister-in-law] will take [my daughter]. We had a wedding to go to a couple of weeks ago so she had [my daughter] for 2 days and then I take the kids pretty often so it makes it fair and I don't mind having the kids around especially if [my husband] is working Friday nights so it is kind of nice to have the kids around. (2007US06) More often, though, the reliance on Irish in-laws for support with care forced mothers into closer relationships with their partner's family, and this was often a source of tension and irritation. As a woman from the US said of her in-laws, who lived close by: "they are family, but I don't feel like they are my family, I don't want them to be my family" (2007US05).

While she was quite vocal about the difficulties she experienced with her in-laws, others were more circumspect. One young woman from the US spoke very positively of the financial support provided by her parents-in-law, but described her interaction with them as predicated on her son, their only grandchild: I would go over there because of course they like to see [my son], so I would, occasionally if his mum asks me, do you want to go to town, I will go to town with her and we will go shopping. Or she would baby sit [my son] during the week if I need to do something. I mean I wouldn't go over there everyday and just sit and have a chat, but occasionally. ( 2007US04) Indeed, all of the women with Irish partners spoke of their conflicted relationships with their partners' families, ranging from their desire for limited interaction to outright avoidance and dislike.

Other women lived far away from their families, and were reliant on other forms of childcare. Their experiences of childcare in Ireland were often shaped by their experiences in their countries of origin. So, for women from other European countries where childcare is often provided by the state, the lack of availability of state-provided childcare in Ireland was a recurrent theme. A Dutch woman, married to an Irish man, was most vociferous about state failings in this regard: they so don't stimulate women in the workplace and they almost force you to give up your job instead of trying to help you and support you and keep you in your job. And then there are no women in government and there are no women in senior positions, well because there are no childcare facilities and there is no flexibility and there is no financial support for that. (2004NL01)

The reliance on private, marketized childcare meant that the cost of childcare was a significant issue for women with young children, and an issue they were very aware of and spoke about openly. Many felt they had to balance the cost of childcare with their likely earnings, and felt that this would prevent them from returning to work. A young Polish woman thought that she might get her mother to come to Ireland and look after her child so she could return to work (2004POL06b), a phenomenon described as "flying grandmothers" in the UK (Kilkey, Plomien and Perrons 2014, 186). A woman from the UK said she couldn't work during her children's summer holidays "because then I have child care costs" (2007UK02b). Her part-time work during term-time, with a relocation agency, involved such irregular hours that she usually relied on friends to help out. This reliance on networks of friends was common among women who had moved to Ireland because of their partner's work, but often it took time to build these networks. Friends were also more likely to provide help in the daytime, but not in the evenings or at weekends. As women without family in Ireland struggled to find babysitters, the result was more limited opportunities for social time with their partners. As a South African woman told us, "especially with young kids in the family then you can't go out in the evenings very much, it took us a long time to figure out about baby sitting and things like that" (2007SA01). This was echoed by the UK woman who said that it took her a while to find a babysitter, and that in the end she asked neighbours for recommendations, rather than advertising in a supermarket (2007UK02). This woman also commented that this "is an issue for other ex pats that they can't go out for the first few months until they find a baby sitter that they know is reliable" (2007UK02). Though this appeared to happen over time, it often took much longer than people initially hoped for, and often led to a sense of loneliness and isolation, as well as taking a toll on adult relationships.

It also made it difficult for women to find time on their own, and many spoke of their desire for time away from their children, as well as the obstacles they encountered in making that happen.

Difficulties in accessing affordable childcare meant that many of the women we met, particularly those with young children, were full-time mothers. In their work with young Polish mothers in London, Ryan et al. found that many "welcomed the opportunity to be fulltime mothers" (2009,68). We found some similar sentiments in Ireland, among women from a range of different educational and employment backgrounds, though this was often discursively framed in terms of broader societal pressures over ideal motherhood and the importance of stay-at-home mothers [START_REF] Dillaway | Locating mothers: how cultural debates about stay-at-home versus working mothers define women and home[END_REF]. A UK mother of two, who had resigned her professional job when she moved to Ireland because of her husband's promotion, said: I love being there for them. … I really had a terrible trauma with putting them in childcare when they were babies and I was working. I would send them when they weren't really well and things because it would put me under pressure... I always felt a bit disapproved of at work if I took time off. And with two of them there were often times when they were sick…. So I always was on a permanent guilt trip that I was being a bad mum or a bad employee, so now I just enjoy the luxury of not having that cost and dilemma. (2007UK02B)

A young woman from the US told us "I do like being a stay at home mum, I couldn't imagine putting her in a crèche or anything like that and just bonding and spending time with her. I couldn't imagine missing out on that" (2007US06). Another young woman from the US, who was unable to complete her postgraduate studies when she became pregnant, said of her time as a stay-at-home mother:

Well I am not going to lie, I do feel like I am missing out a little bit on what I could be doing with my life, but he won't be young for so long and I understand that and I value the time that I get to spend time with him and I also value not having to work because I have friends who have kids who work and they are very stressed out. (2007US04) Meanwhile, women who did not speak English as a first language welcomed the opportunity to teach their children their language and cultural norms. Yet, as illustrated by the young woman from the US, many stay-at-home mothers were ambivalent about their situation.

When they spoke favorably about their situation, it was often through comparison with other mothers, who they saw as having no choice but to work. At the same time, many also expressed a sense of being isolated or de-skilled, and they also spoke about missing work. An Italian woman who had just given birth to her first child spoke about wanting a break from "kids-related discussions" with other mothers (2007IT04b). A South African woman, who is a trained graphic designer, has had limited opportunity to work in Ireland. This is partly because of her youngest child's developmental disability, but partly because of the difficulties in making professional contacts and getting freelance work because of the constraints imposed by childcare responsibilities. "I do miss [work] terribly," she said (2007SA01). The women who commented on missing work were not only those with highly skilled jobs and career ambitions. This ambivalence towards full-time mothering was common among women of all nationalities and skills levels, and may be accentuated by women's experiences as migrants [START_REF] Madianou | Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: the role of ICTs in Filipino transnational families[END_REF].

Though many of the women we spoke to were, at the time, stay at home mothers, they generally saw this as a temporary arrangement, expressing a strong desire to return to or continue working in the future. Some had already managed to combine motherhood and work, such as the US woman who had set up her own business, or the UK woman who, despite saying that she was a stay at home mother, had two part-time jobs. For the woman from the US, running her own business was intimately connected to becoming a mother: Interviewee: … Because my incentive was to be just financially independent so he takes care of basics, I can take care of my trips home and savings for the kids for school which is really important if they wanted to go to America or here or whatever.

Interviewer: So this is your way of getting independence for yourself. Women with older children had also managed to find work, though not always in their area of expertise. A UK woman with two older children had started part-time work as a hotel receptionist, though she had previously worked as a research assistant/interviewer in a large urban hospital in Canada (2007UK04). An older US woman worked as an office assistant, though her training and experience was in graphic design (2007US03). Women with younger children spoke of their plans for when their children were older, such as the business graduate who was retraining in horticulture (2007US04b), or the Irish woman with a sales and marketing background, who spoke of developing an arts and crafts café for young children (2007IR01). In these ways, the experiences of these migrant women in Ireland are not unusual. For example, [START_REF] Boyle | A new look at family migration and women's employment status[END_REF] highlight how family migration has a negative impact on women's experiences of employment. Research suggests that having children is a contributing factor in the deskilling of migrant women in Switzerland [START_REF] Riaňo | Understanding the labour market participation of skilled immigrant women in Switzerland: the interplay of class, ethnicity, and gender[END_REF] and in exclusion from the workforce in Denmark [START_REF] Liversage | Life below a 'language threshold': stories of Turkish marriage migrant women in Denmark[END_REF] 6 . As Aure points out in a study of skilled dependent migrants in Norway, the withdrawal of migrant women from the labour market for the purposes of child-bearing and child-rearing may be compatible with gendered expectations, but serves to "make women more vulnerable and economically dependent and may work as a 'honey trap'" (Aure 2013, 282). However, in the Irish context migrant women also had to negotiate a labour market that had been highly masculinized for many decades, and that was described as a "private patriarchy" as recently as the mid-1990s [START_REF] Mahon | Ireland: a private patriarchy?[END_REF]. Though female participation in the workforce has increased significantly, from 43% to 56% between 1996 and 2011, this employment is polarized, with inequalities experienced by women in both high-skilled and less-skilled employment [START_REF] Mcnally | Prevalence and Predictors of Grandparent Childcare in Ireland: Findings from a Nationally Representative Sample of Infants and their Families[END_REF]Turner and McMahon 2011). Despite increased levels of workforce participation, women also continue to take the majority share of childcare and housework (James 2011, 664). However, none of the women we spoke to expressed a desire to remain as a stay at home parent in the long term, and some were very conflicted about what it would mean for their sense of identity. This was a recurrent theme in an interview with a Dutch woman with two young children who was facing redundancy and a planned move to rural Ireland. At the start of our first interview, she said "I have always worked so I feel very strange about giving up my job, I have always had my own financial independence and I like working" (2004NL01). She returned to this topic again at the end of the interview, saying "I am a little bit apprehensive about being a stay at home mum, I do it now because I am on maternity leave and I love it because you know it is fine and you go back to work. But now that that is going to change I am a little bit apprehensive about that" (2004NL01). When we met her a second time, she had been looking for jobs but had not been successful, and was frustrated with what she perceived as a lack of support for mothers to return to work. As she said, "I don't want someone else to raise my children for me, but then I also want to work so where is the balance?" (2004NL01b). For many women, it appeared that the only way in which they could re-enter the workforce was to create their own employment. There is a growing awareness of so-called "mumpreneurs" [START_REF] Ekinsmyth | Mothers' business, work/life and the politics of 'mumpreneurship[END_REF], but this rarely highlights migrant women, in contrast to a broader focus on entrepreneurship among migrant men [START_REF] Kloosterman | Immigrant entrepreneurs: venturing abroad in the age of globalization[END_REF]. Yet, among the women we met, many spoke about being entrepreneurial as a way of overcoming the structural barriers to employment in Ireland for migrant mothers.This was particularly the case for women who had moved to Ireland because of their partners' work, in contrast to stereotypical depictions of "trailing spouses."

The experiences of not-belonging, as recounted by the women we met, centred on families and work in the broader context of care and care-giving. In many ways, the daily experience of caring, particularly for younger children, heightened women's sense of notbelonging and apartness. It made them keenly aware of the distance from their broader families, which in turn limited their options for childcare support, which in turn restricted their possibilities for working. In this way, migrant mothers experienced not-belonging because of the particular configuration of the care diamond in the context of Ireland. The limited role of the state in childcare provision, and the increasing marketization of childcare, means that access to childcare in Ireland more generally is restricted and expensive: the intersections of markets and state thus create difficult conditions for equitable access to childcare. In Irish society, these difficulties are overcome through the use of families and communities, particularly grandparents and local people who act as childminders in the child's home [START_REF] Mcnally | Prevalence and Predictors of Grandparent Childcare in Ireland: Findings from a Nationally Representative Sample of Infants and their Families[END_REF]. For migrants, particularly recent migrants, this is not a clear option. As our participants showed, many were without extended family support, and struggled to build communities in the shorter-term. While women used cultural arguments to justify their roles as full-time mothers, often centred on images of ideal motherhood, their stories simultaneously revealed the structural obstacles to belonging for migrant women, particularly in relation to work.

Conclusion: new geographies of belonging?

The migrant mothers we interviewed in Ireland describe 'belonging' as a web of familiar people, practices and networks. They make a considerable effort to engage with Ireland, but they are also ambivalent about it -ranging from concerns about the treatment of women, to issues with creating strong and lasting networks of belonging. Their ambivalence about Ireland and their difficulties to create place-belongingness in Ireland appear greater than for people without children who we also interviewed as part of the broader study. Many of the mothers cannot actively participate in Irish society because of a relative absence of affordable childcare and alternative structures, notably the family as a support system. This absence of support structures does not allow them to participate in the work market, an important place where local women and newcomers without children create belonging. They thus disproportionally depend on friendships with other women in similar circumstances to accomplish their everyday lives. However, paradoxically, this does not generally allow them to create close links with Irish people either, because most Irish mothers rely on family-based support networks. As a result, many of the women with children who we interviewed formed complex support networks with other migrant women. While these networks appear to be highly effective, they also prevent these women to fully integrate into Irish society. This situation has led many of the women we interviewed to engage more urgently in a critical reflection about the meaning of belonging and their feeling about Ireland and their country of origin in general.

Though our focus is on belonging, the women we spoke to illustrated, in a very grounded way, the care diamond approach recently advocated by [START_REF] Raghuram | Global care, local configurations -challenges to conceptualizations of care[END_REF]. This argues for a greater geographical sensitivity to care, specifically paying attention to how relationships between the four different aspects of the care diamond -families, market, civil society and the state -differ across spatial contexts. The stories that the women we met shared with us centred on care because as parents of dependent children their lives are structured by the nature and availability of care options. In contrast to much of the academic literature on care and migration, their caring took place in situ: in most cases they lived with their children, and the need to care for their children, and for their families, was pressing.

Yet, they received limited support in this role, and had to work hard to develop their own support networks and their own ways of coping, often at great personal cost. This was particularly obvious in relation to employment, since many mothers -particularly of younger children -felt they were unable to work because of the difficulties in accessing childcare. In these ways, their ethics of care restricted their possibilities for belonging. Excluded from work environments, and with limited or no family support, they were forced into defining themselves primarily as mothers in a context where mothers are assigned a specific, and restricted, role and had limited options to forge connections with Ireland outside of networks related to mothering and caring. The realities of life for many migrant mothers thus come into conflict with a broader politics of belonging in Ireland that frames mobile women as problematic and potentially threatening, and that marks the space of mothers as the home. In this context, migrant mothers in Ireland are compelled to negotiate the simultaneous processes of belonging and not-belonging in their everyday lives, demonstrating how "people cannot be simply defined, in most situations, as either belonging or not belonging" (Yuval-Davis 2011, 200). As our research shows, their efforts to do so are inventive and often inclusive and range across a wide variety of locations. However, they also demonstrate how the caring work of migrant mothers, while discursively supported by the Irish state, is not practically supported, often to the detriment of the geographies of belonging for migrant mothers.

  possible was essential really because when you have young children you need people sometimes. I suppose that was one of the incentives I had […], you are driven by necessity almost because once I did start work I needed people to pick the children for me because the school was quite out in the sticks. (2007UK02)

Interviewee

  not money, I am just interested in creating financial independence because no one can tell you what to do when you have your own money, no one, not your boss, not your husband, nobody, you have your own choices and at this point in my life that is what I am really striving for. And it is not money it is just the freedom of choice because without it you have no choice. (2007US05)

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a broader research project entitled "Towards a dynamic approach to research on migration and integration" funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. We would like to acknowledge this funding, as well as the research assistance of Elaine Burroughs and Owen McCarney. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an ESF Conference on "Home, Migration and the City" in Sweden in August 2010, and we are grateful to the organisers of that conference, Ayona Datta and Kathy Burrell, and the other conference attendees, for their observations and insights. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper who made very helpful suggestions for improvement.

We would particularly like to thank the research participants for sharing their stories about life in Ireland with us.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. The politics of belonging. London: Sage. 1 Raghuram takes this term from the work of Shahra Razavi, who describes the care diamond as "the architecture through which care is provided" (2007,21).

The term "citizenship tourist" was used to describe a pregnant woman coming to Ireland primarily for the purposes of giving birth (White and Gilmartin 2008) 3 Interviewees are identified by year of arrival (either 2004 or 2007), nationality (US, UK, GER, IR, SA, POL, GER, and by a numeric identifier. 4 In Ireland, rental accommodation is typically furnished, so it can be difficult to set up home with personal possessions in a rented apartment or house. 5 In Ireland it is customary for parents to accompany their children to school during most of their time at primary school. 6 In Denmark, this was primarily because having children limited the options for migrant women to learn Danish. Language proficiency was not an issue for the women who participated in our research.


Mary Gilmartin
email: mary.gilmartin@nuim.ie

Bettina Migge

Home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary Ireland

Keywords: migration, identity, place, home, language, Ireland

This paper discusses immigrant identity and place in contemporary Ireland. It draws from a longitudinal research project that involved recent immigrants to Ireland. Participants in the project came from 18 different countries, and ranged in age from 22 to 68. Their reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, adventure and personal relationships.

Combining insights from socio-linguistics and human geography, the paper first considers the different ways in which immigrants to Ireland narrate place and identity, paying particular attention to content and linguistic strategies. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a focus on the concept of "home", highlighting the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants used to discursively construct notions of home and identity in their interviews. The paper concludes by arguing that detailed discourse level analysis of people's narratives of place offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place.

Introduction

"My heart stays with my parents…but my breath is here" So said Tomaz, 1 whom we interviewed as part of a recent research project in Ireland. 2 We have opened with this quote because it sums up many of the difficulties we encounter when talking about broader questions of identity and place. In particular, it shows the complicated relationship between immigrant identity and place: Tomaz is pulled between two different places: connected to both and, as a consequence, whole in neither. Research on immigrant identity and place also highlights the complicated nature of the relationship, and takes a variety of forms. One approach focuses primarily on how identities are changed through the act of migration, for example through changing gender roles or different racial positioning (for overviews, see [START_REF] Pessar | Transnational migration: bringing gender in[END_REF][START_REF] Silverstein | Immigrant racialization and the new savage slot: race, migration, and immigration in the New Europe[END_REF]. Another approach focuses on how places are changed by immigrants, such as through the development of new religious landscapes (for overviews, see [START_REF] Peach | Social geography: new religions and ethnoburbs -contrasts with cultural geography[END_REF][START_REF] Kong | Global shifts, theoretical shifts: Changing geographies of religion[END_REF]. There is also a growing body of work that aims to conceptualize the relationship between place and immigrant identity in a more integrated way. For example, work on transnationalism and translocalism shows the ways in which both places and identities are connected and changed through the experience of migration [START_REF] Conradson | Translocal subjectivities: mobility, connection, emotion[END_REF][START_REF] Levitt | Transnational migration studies: past development and future trends[END_REF]Brickell and Datta 2011). Transnational and translocal approaches have been particularly important in foregrounding concepts such as "belonging" and "home" that allow the relationship between place and immigrant identity to be understood in more nuanced ways (see [START_REF] Ehrkamp | Placing identities: transnational practices and local attachments of Turkish immigrants in Germany[END_REF][START_REF] Blunt | Home[END_REF][START_REF] Wright | Guest editorial[END_REF][START_REF] Antonsich | Searching for belonging -an analytical framework[END_REF][START_REF] Ralph | Home and migration: mobilities, belongings and identities[END_REF][START_REF] Van Riemsdijk | International migration and local emplacement: everyday placemaking practices of skilled migrants in Oslo, Norway[END_REF][START_REF] Wright | More-than-human, emergent belongings: a weak theory approach[END_REF]. The quote from Tomaz shows this very clearly, as he 1 Tomaz is a pseudonym. articulates the different ways in which he as a migrant is connected to different places: his head in Ireland, his heart in his country of origin, and Tomaz unsure of exactly where home is.

In this paper we consider the relationship between immigrant identity and place in more detail through a specific focus on immigrants living in Ireland. The paper is based on a larger qualitative research project that ran between 2008 and 2011, where we conducted repeat interviews with 60 recent immigrants to Ireland. Here, we focus on the role of narrative, in particular how these recent immigrants narrate their understanding of place.

Calls for a focus on the relationship between language and place are not new: Yi-Fu Tuan (1991, p. 694) for example, insisted on the need to take language seriously as part of the process of place-making and [START_REF] Sarbin | Place identity as a component of self: an addendum[END_REF] argued that an understanding of "place identity" can only be achieved through an analysis of how persons are narratively positioned in time and space, including physical and metaphorical space. As Brickell points out, however, geographers "have failed to devote sustained attention to speech as a practice that provokes meanings in, and of, different spaces" (2013, p. 207). In responding to Brickell's critique, our focus on narratives of place thus has two key purposes. First, it provides insights into immigrant identities, by illustrating the ways in which recent immigrants describe themselves through the act of talking about place. Second, it shows how individual narratives of place act as a form of place-making, creating situated understandings of home and belonging. Our account is informed by discourse analytical approaches to the interview that see it as a social practice and not merely as a research instrument [START_REF] Krzyżanowski | Multiple identities, migration and belonging: 'voices of migrants[END_REF]. Instead of taking what is said at face value, discourse analytical approaches [START_REF] Johnstone | Discourse Analysis[END_REF] argue that interviewees use language in order to "imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet unrealized events" (Ochs & Capps 2001, p. 2). This approach allows us to illuminate social actors' situated conceptualization of abstract notions such as place, identity, home and belonging and their relationships to each other, through an analysis of how representations of place and connections among places and between them and their constituents (people, actions, experiences) are constructed in personal narratives using semiotic resources such as language.

This offers, we suggest, new insights into immigrant identity and place, illustrated here through the example of Ireland. The paper begins with a brief overview of the Irish context and a broader description of the research project and participants. It continues with a general discussion of the ways in which research participants narrate place and identity. In the next section, we discuss the explicit ways in which research participants linked place and identity in their narratives through the use of the concept of "home". We conclude with a brief reflection on how detailed attention to narrative provides new insights into the complex relationship between immigrant identity and place.

The context for the research

In the period from 2000 to 2012, almost 1 million people immigrated to the Republic of Ireland. The majority were EU nationals, ranging from 87.4% of all immigrants in 2007 to 76.5% in 2012 [START_REF] Gilmartin | Changing Ireland 2000-2012: immigration, emigration and inequality[END_REF]. Ireland had long been an immigrant destination for EU-153 nationals, for example people from the UK, Germany, France and Italy. However, with the enlargement of the EU in 2004, Ireland's decision to grant immediate rights to work and live in the country to new EU nationals meant that it quickly became a destination for immigrants from Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in particular. By 2007, 56.5% of all immigration to Ireland came from the EU-104 countries [START_REF] Gilmartin | Changing Ireland 2000-2012: immigration, emigration and inequality[END_REF]. EU nationals are free to move to and work in Ireland. In contrast, people from outside the EU require special permission -such as work permits or student visas -to move to Ireland for longer periods, and to work in Ireland.

In the period from 2002 to 2011, the population of Ireland born outside the country increased from 10.4% to 16.9% (Gilmartin 2013, p. 95). Our research took place against this backdrop of significant change in the population structure of the country. In late 2008 and during the greater part of 2009 we interviewed 60 people who had moved to Ireland either in 2004 or in 2007. Since the project had a longitudinal focus, we carried out repeat interviews during the latter part of 2010 and early 2011. Interviewees had thus spent between one and five years in Ireland by the time of their first interview and between three and eight years by the time of their second interview. We contacted potential interviewees using several methods such as snowballing, a parenting website for expat mothers and through leaving information in various public locations, such as libraries, throughout Ireland which allowed people to self-select. Interviewees decided where the interviews would take place. Some people wanted to be interviewed in their homes, and we met others in quiet cafes or bars. All the interviews took place in a relaxed environment and had a semi-guided format: we covered an agreed set of topics (e.g., reason for coming to Ireland, impressions of Ireland, attitudes about things Irish, experiences on the job market and at work, social life, services, long-and short-term plans) without imposing a particular order. Following introductory questions about arriving in Ireland we let interviewees develop their own narratives which we furthered by both clarification-type questions and comments. Some interviews involved both authors, others were conducted by only one of us. This influenced the interview: the fact that one author is Irish and the other German meant that interviewees often framed or qualified their remarks based on who they were addressing. As a result, interviews with both authors present often took a different shape and direction to those with just one author in attendance.

Participants are representative of Ireland's immigrant population. Most of them came from European countries, but there also were people from countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, India and South Africa. In total, the 36 women and 24 men came from 18 different countries, were aged between 22 and 68 at the time of the first interview and lived in a range of locations across Ireland (see Table 1). People's reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, study, language skills, adventure, and relationships (see [START_REF] Gilmartin | European migrants in Ireland: pathways to integration[END_REF]. Building on a previous project (MCRI 2008), we decided not to focus on specific groups defined by nationality because we found that nationality was only one of several factors that influenced people's lives in Ireland. So-called national communities are socially heterogeneous and on their own insufficient for understanding immigrant identities (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2008, p. 98). Instead, national identification needs to be examined in conjunction with micro-social factors, as migration "remains a singular, subjective and unique experience which resists generalization" (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2008, p. 98).

Insert Table 1 around here

Narrating place and identity

Building on the approach advocated by de [START_REF] De Cillia | The discursive construction of national identities[END_REF], we discuss both the content of descriptions and the linguistic strategies that are used by immigrants to describe the places they lived in and their experiences in Ireland, and the changes that occurred. By content, we refer to the topics people referred to when they directly answered our questions about specific places, whether these were the local areas where they lived or more abstract scales such as the nation, as well as the people who inhabit them. By linguistic strategies, we refer to the different ways in which people represent places through language. Both content and linguistic strategies provide insights into place and immigrant identities. de Cillia et al. were most interested in the linguistic strategies used to promote national identities, but we find their distinction between constructive, perpetuating and dismantling linguistic strategies of broader relevance (1999, pp. 160-161). Constructive strategies aim to build identities, and seek to create a sense of shared identity or solidarity around a sense of "us" or "we". Perpetuating strategies seek to maintain identities, by supporting and defending continuity. Dismantling strategies, in contrast, serve to challenge or de-mythologise or demolish existing identities.

When applied to immigrant narratives, these linguistic strategies serve to construct, maintain or challenge broadly accepted or "commonsense" understandings of place, whether local, urban or national, as well as individual and collective identities. In this section, we discuss the general themes that emerged across our repeat interviews to show the commonalities in how immigrants narrated both place and identity.

When we asked people about living in Ireland, three broad topics dominated: the physical landscape, the built environment, and social interactions. People in both urban and rural areas regularly described the physical beauty of the natural landscape. Talking about how it felt to show friends around in her new house, one interviewee from the UK said: "when the weather is good you forget where you are when you are here. You are looking out and thinking I am near the sea, the fresh air and it is absolutely beautiful" (2007UK05). 5 Descriptions of the beauty of the natural landscape often contrasted with negative reactions to weather and to the built landscape. 6 The quote above is qualified with reference to the weather: the place is beautiful when "the weather is good". this was often contrasted with 5 Interviewees are identified by the year of arrival in Ireland (either 2004 or 2007) and by a nationality identifier (for example, POL for Poland) and a numeric identifier. The use of "b" signifies the second interview with the interviewee.

negative reactions to weather in Ireland. A Polish man in Dublin highlighted the wind and the rain as things that he dislikes, describing them as physically painful:

The only thing I don't like in Ireland is rain. The weather is, when it is winter it is still windy and the rain is smashing your face. (2004POL02b)

Others described the weather simply as depressing, and as a metaphor for a more general dissatisfaction with Ireland. People were also critical of the built environment, which at times contributed to a sense of alienation. This was particularly the case for immigrants from other European countries, who highlighted the backwardness of Ireland's built environment in comparison to larger continental European countries. Yet, despite these initial assessments, people often spoke about how their attitudes to the built landscape had changed, and how they had grown to accept and like the place where they lived.

The third topic that dominated was social interaction and friendships. Irish people and the overall atmosphere in Ireland were generally experienced as positive and welcoming, though there was a sense that this friendliness was quite shallow. Many people suggested "that it is very easy to hang on [out] with Irish people but then it's not easy to become real friends. To know really who they are, what they want. At some stage you can't be closer to them." (2004IT04) because people eschewed serious topics and personal issues. 7 In contrast to a broader literature on cosmopolitan belonging (see, for example, [START_REF] Binnie | Cosmopolitan urbanisms[END_REF][START_REF] Vertovec | Super-diversity and its implications[END_REF], we found that interviewees living in rural areas were more likely to invoke friendship and neighbourhood networks in their description of place and identities.

Comparing rural Ireland to the UK, a UK-Spanish couple told us that they felt at home very 7 It is worth noting that immigrants often comment on difficulties in making friendships with the settled population, across a range of spatial contexts. For example, Ryan et al. (2008, p. 682) discuss this phenomenon in the British context, while Gmelch (1980, p. 139) highlights "the friendliness of people at home" as a motivation for return migration.

quickly in the rural southeast mainly because of the friendly and helpful attitude of their neighbours who provide a great support network for them: Interviewee (M): Yes or even here, the neighbours here, they are very good. We said we have come here to be one of you, not to be different or anything. We are very lucky with them, we had this bad weather and they are coming to see if we are all right or they phoned to see if we needed anything. They are nice. It won't happen in England I think.

Interviewee (F): Certainly not the part we lived in anyway.

Interviewee (M): And for me that is very very important. (2004UK06)

The topics that people highlighted were thus material and tangible: weather, natural and built environment, and the quality of social engagement and interaction. We next discuss the ways in which people talked about these topics through a focus on linguistic strategies.

The linguistic strategies that people used were varied. When we started this project, we expected people to describe their identities in relation to place, whether that was local, national, or at some other scale. However, people rarely articulated a place-based identity without prompting from us. When we asked, though, several of the interviewees strongly aligned with their country of origin: these are clear examples of perpetuation strategies as immigrants seek to assert their national identity from a different spatial context. In the following array of quotes, we can see the modifiers of definiteness (absolute, definitely) and current relevance (still) in these quotes. They convey the sense that national identity is an immutable characteristic of their personality which has not been affected by having lived abroad for many years: Others are less definite, but also seek to perpetuate their sense of their own national identity.

Here, a Polish interviewee argues that he will always maintain a primary Polish identity: he asserts this through the repeated use of the word still (a continuative modifier):

No I am still Polish. Just you know I spent here 5 years. […] But it is still, my Polish background, my education, my name like the influence which I get by my parents, my school whatever. I am still thinking in that way." [… if I ] had a kid here for them that would be like they could be the part of Irish society in full because if somebody is, was born in the country that terminates that. You belong to the place you was born. I was born in Poland so you know if I have a very good time here still it is like my brain works in the Polish way. (2004POL02) (italics added)

In addition to perpetuation strategies, immigrants often used comparison, particularly the identification of difference, to construct and dismantle perceptions of Ireland and their place of origin. We found that comparisons frequently served to simultaneously construct and dismantle: though we rarely asked directly about people's place of origin, interviewees nevertheless made comparative reference to it when discussing issues related to Ireland. Most interviewees spoke positively though generally not in what could be classed "idyllic" terms about their country of origin. Apart from invoking important social relationships, they also highlighted a range of positively valued stereotype-like properties about these countries. For example, people presented their country of origin in general and various of its institutions and practices in particular as (more) orderly and rule-or principle-governed in comparison to Ireland. As an example, an American woman who obtained residency in Ireland despite not being married to her Irish partner implied that in the US immigration follows strict procedures and rules: "Yes, there would be a few countries which would allow someone's partner to live there but not very many, we could never go and do this in the United States unless we were married" (2007US04).

Critical assessments of the country of origin were also present, particularly directed at co-nationals. Strikingly, people from Poland probably voiced the greatest amount and strongest types of criticism about their co-nationals, both those living in Poland and those in Ireland. Two interviewees with some qualification characterized Polish people as discriminatory and close-minded: "Poland would be a bit racist country like, it is not like for the blacks" (2004POL01). Many Polish interviewees recounted how they are often either cast as failures or traitors because they decided to leave Poland or are thought of simply as financial resources for the people back home.

In fact many people implied that (temporarily) leaving Poland was prompted by a desire to escape the narrow confines of Polish life and to broaden their minds. While people sometimes also extended such negative descriptions to members of their own family, it seems to us that these starkly negative descriptions are linked to issues of class. For instance, one Polish woman argued that the negative stereotypes apply to people who work in the construction industry, i.e. less well educated people. She said: "I just can't understand people who have been living in a country for a number of years and can't say a word of English, they must be really stubborn. How could you not pick up or know some words?" (2004POL01). She, and others who used such descriptions, were mostly of middle class backgrounds. They used distancing language, for example "they", to clearly distinguish themselves from working class Poles who, in their view, were responsible for negative opinions about Poles. This shows the complex relationship that immigrants have with both place and identity, where a narrative of separation is used to disrupt any sense of a shared identity with immigrants on the basis of a common country of origin, and dismantling strategies are used in relation to the place of origin.

Place-based identities: narratives of home

In this section, we provide a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a specific focus on the concept of "home". There is a growing body of work on home within geography (see [START_REF] Blunt | Home[END_REF][START_REF] Skey | Thank god, I'm back!': (Re)defining the nation as a homely place in relation to journeys abroad[END_REF]. In their recent review of this literature as it relates to migration, [START_REF] Ralph | Home and migration: mobilities, belongings and identities[END_REF] suggested that "home" should be understood in conjunction with "belonging". These two concepts yoke identity and place together, with home "located in the complex relationships through which migrants and others build and interpret lives" (Ralph and Staeheli 2011, p. 522). See also [START_REF] Wright | More-than-human, emergent belongings: a weak theory approach[END_REF]. In this section, we look at how notions of home are represented and negotiated in the narratives of a small number of research participants (see Table 2) and the insights this provides into people's sense and ways of conceptualizing place and identity. 8 Narrators build representations of place and place-belongingness through the creation of stories. In these stories, people forge connections between places, people, actions and emotions that allow insights into their understanding of concepts of home "because it allows the investigation of traits that are seen as salient" (De Fina 2006, p. 351). Through detailed textual analysis, we stress the local occasioning of such categories: people's constructions are not fixed but are situated and shaped by the interaction (and also shape the interaction itself). In our analysis of interview narratives, we were interested in whether home had one or multiple referents; what kinds of places were defined as home; what makes people feel at home; and how these narratives change over time. This allows us to understand the variation in people's construction of the notion of "home" and its relationship to identity.

Insert Table 2 around here

Our sample included people for whom home had a singular referent. For instance, an interviewee who grew up in the UK but now lives in Dublin (2004UK01) used perpetuating strategies to identify home with a certain region in England. On prompting, he explains that he considers it home because it is a place he is familiar with -"where I grew up" -and he has family links "that's where my parents live". The use of just ("It's just where I grew up and that's where my parents live.") and the unmitigated summary statement of "that's where I'm from" seek to actively limit the interpretation of home to these two factors, possibly as an attempt to ward off negative reactions from the Irish interviewer. This is reasserted a little further along, when he restates "Yes and the fact that that's where I am from", in response to the interviewer's probing question of whether family is really all that attaches him to 8 In this section, we focus on the narratives of people who do not have children. We discuss the geographies of belonging of migrant mothers in Ireland in Gilmartin and Migge (forthcoming).

England. Dublin, in contrast, is not identified with any personal relationships, but he sees strong parallels in terms of the built environment between the two places ("You know lots of semi-detached and stuff. Just general suburban […].") They induced feelings of familiarity, but did not lead to feelings of positive attachment to Dublin. In fact, by negatively connotating these similarities as "uncanny" and suggesting that they are the result of negative processes such as "conspicuous consumption", he appears to be downplaying their significance and denying that this similarity could constitue an emotional attachment to Dublin. A Polish interviewee also claims only a singular identity, Polish.

However, in contrast to the interviewee from the UK, he foregrounds issues of socialization as central in defining home because according to him such processes are not reversible and thus tie you to that place no matter how you feel about a new place ("I was born in Poland so you know if I have a very good time here still it is like my brain works in the Polish way" (2004POL02)).

It was more common, however, for people to have less bounded and more ambivalent understandings of "home". As discussed by [START_REF] Krzyżanowski | Multiple identities, migration and belonging: 'voices of migrants[END_REF], interviewees who were ambivalent about their belonging often relied on metaphoric expressions in order to express their understanding of home. An interviewee who came from Wales to Ireland, but whose parents were originally from the west of Ireland and who had strong family connections to Ireland, expresses his ambivalence about his sense of national and cultural belonging by likening it to a dilemma about which side to support in a sporting event involving two familiar teams:

Extract (1)

Interviewer 1: So if we were to ask you where is home? What would you say?

Interviewee: The only way to kind of phrase it like you know when Wales used to be kind of playing in Ireland in rugby like you know. Where you kind of, but I always kind of saw myself like in a bit more kind of, like the whole kind of Wales [unclear] because Dad and Mum just moved there for work you know. Dad got a job there like and then, but then like all my kind of relatives are Irish then like you know so I kind of struggle with the whole kind of Welsh thing anyway like you know like because most of my friends would be Welsh through and through like so. (2007UK01) However, ultimately he makes it clear that he considers himself Irish, rather than Welsh.

Discursively, he first constructs the greater salience of his Irishness/Ireland by identifying them with primary or significant social relationships, namely parents and the immediate wider family ("but then like all my kind of relatives are Irish"). Thus, it is ancestry and family relationships that create belonging. Wales, by contrast, cannot serve for identification because it is only linked to friends, a more ephemeral category of people. Second, his own (and his family's) presence in Wales is depicted as resulting from an externally induced necessity "Dad got a job there like". Third, Welshness is cast as an unclear or unpenetrable category for him ("I kind of struggle with the whole kind of Welsh thing anyway like") that is also unattainable for him because it requires Welsh roots ("being Welsh through and through"). He underscores his emotional distance to Wales further by using the distal deictic element "there" to refer to it ("moved there") suggesting that he considers it to be at a remove from him. However, this broad black and white categorization does not seem to sufficiently capture his sense of home because immediately after this turn, he independently returns to the issue, narrowing the notion of home to a specific location, his home town in Wales.

Extract (2):

Interviewee: […] But I don't know home would always be [town] I suppose that's where I grew up like and that's where my kind of friends are and stuff so and it's great to go back and it's a great kind of town to go back over Easter and Christmas and it's night to kind of thing [sic] but yes it's kind of, I don't mind coming away from it either like so.

In Extract (2) he explains that he considers his hometown "home" because it is linked to the fact that it is loaded with up and friends. However, neither appear to be part of his primary sense of self because he does not "mind coming away from it either". Part of the reason seems to be that his friendship networks are no longer locally based because "a lot of people have kind of moved to Cardiff and yes it would be that kind of town like you know so they would be just back at Christmas and Easter and that kind of thing like so". His narrative thus contains a complex and at times contradictory mix of constructive, perpetuating and dismantling strategies that are rarely resolved over the course of two interviews.

Other interviewees also assert association to two places, but do not present this as a dilemma or something that is in need of justification. A Spanish interviewee for instance uses constructive strategies to assert that he now has two homes since he moved to Ireland ("I have two homes now").

Extract (3)

Interviewer 1: So if I ask you where you think home is? Where is your home? Interviewee: I have two homes now. As he explains in Extract (3), home crucially includes positive feelings of being "at home" in a place and remembering things linked to it when you are away. Thus home may have several referents for him. In his narrative, Barcelona is linked to family, a great outdoor lifestyle and a love for the city and its language while Dublin -described somewhat negatively as "a small city" that is claustrophobic at times and with a dull life-style ("for me it's quite tough being work, home, pub, home, work") -is nevertheless linked to positive emotions and meaningful social relationships such as good flatmates, an Irish girlfriend and being independent from his parents.

A somewhat different approach was adopted by another interviewee from the UK (Extract (4)). Unlike other interviewees who seem to conflate notions of identity and home, she delinks them. On the one hand, she uses perpetuating strategies to stress the continued relevance ("still") and unchanged nature ("clearly") of her English identity and its nonnegotiability ("absolute part") and importance through the use of adverbial modifiers and a slightly qualified ("probably") statement asserting her lack of alignment with Irishness. On the other hand, however, she declares Ireland/Dublin as home using constructive linguistic strategies:

Extract (4) Interviewee: ... but I am still very clearly English. And I would get offended probably if somebody said to me I was getting an Irish accent, and that is honest.

But that is because being English is an absolute part of who I am, I don't want it to go. Interviewer: I do actually. Here it is all about easy conversation and... Interviewee: Yeah and I feel that there are a lot more people here who are prepared to do things for you just because they are a friend of a friend and I like that sometimes. In business maybe it is not so good but in friendship it is great. Somebody will say [unclear] I'll get him to get you something cheap in this place, or sort you out, or give you a lift home, I have two friends driving that way that night. You wouldn't get that so much in England. (2004UK05) In this case, home is also not associated with significant personal social relationships and/or ancestry but with the fact that Dublin and its inhabitants generate feelings of connectedness for her.

An interviewee from Slovenia also dissociates home from feelings of identity, but in a somewhat different manner, highlighting the restrictive nature of European national identities. She considers Slovenia and Ljubljana as home because that is where she is from and where her family lives. However, she is unsure whether she can still claim Slovenian identity because having lived outside of Slovenia she has changed -she has become culturally hybird: "I am not sure if I fit there completely anymore because I lived in Sweden I picked up Swedish things. I am living here [in Ireland] now I am picking Irish things" (2007SLO01). To resolve the dilemma posed by hybridity, she uses constructive strategies to align with a higher level identity, European, that by its very nature is fuzzy and not fixed, but promotes hybridity: "I think of myself as European because I don't think I fit anywhere like somebody who has never moved anywhere". Her depiction of the perfect place to live (Extract ( 5)) further confirms her synergistic orientation to issues of identity and ultimately also home:

Extract (5)
I was joking the other day. The best solution for me or the best ideal place I would like is to take Stockholm because it's a beautiful city on the sea and everything and the lakes and so on. Put it in the Alps so I can go skiing in half an hour [laugh]. Put [workplace] in Stockholm and my colleagues there and then bring my Slovenian friends there and that would be like, and put it somewhere where the climate is nice [laugh]. That would be ideal but obviously it's not going to happen. (2007SLO01)

A similar synergistic approach to identity and home is also taken by other interviewees from Europe who have lived in or have close connections to a third or fourth European country.

Rather than aligning with one or the other for identity purposes, they claim a supranational cultural identity. Such supra-identities are not only useful for avoiding overt alignment with possibly stigmatized national identities but are also used to project a modern sophisticated cultural identity that is not based in nationalist traditions.

We also found that conceptualizations of home and people's identities were dynamic, influenced by a variety of events and circumstances. For instance, in the second interview, after having spent three years in Ireland, the interviewee from Wales with Irish family roots asserted an even stronger alignment with Ireland despite having suffered the negative effects of the recession firsthand. He suggests, though still tentatively ("well I suppose"), that Ireland has changed from being a place of cultural belonging determined by his family ties to one that has become associated with positive feelings ("happy") and new important social connections ("my girlfriend is here too").

Extract (6)

Interviewer: […]so what really makes you hold on to Ireland? […] Interviewee: Well I suppose when I came over I was [unclear] kind of happy and then my girlfriend is here as well, she is in Dublin as well. ( 2007UK01b) He now considers it his home because even if he had to move away from Ireland, he argues, that would only be a temporary move. He also offers rational reasons for "holding out" in Ireland, namely the fact "that when you are talking about going over to the UK, it seems like all the roads lead to London and I wouldn't be that keen to head to London", and "but also because the bosses here, I have been told they were thinking that it would pick up and something would come in". Note that he uses the directional expression "going over…" instead of "returning to …", a dismantling strategy which suggests that this point of reference is now Ireland rather than the UK, the place where he originates from.

The Spanish interviewee's sense of home had also changed between the two interviews which were about a year apart, in the middle of Ireland's economic downturn. However, in this case, the interviewee's sense of attachment to his city of origin, Barcelona, rather than Dublin, his current place of residence, appears to have deepened and is expressed by a greater use of perpetuating and dismantling linguistic strategies. Barcelona continued to be depicted in a positive light and as a place to spend one's life. By contrast, Dublin had become a place full of negative experiences and negative energy that compared negatively to Barcelona. The only positive emotional attachment to Dublin that he was still confident about was his girlfriend (Extract (7)):

Extract (7)

Interviewer: So do you think then that one of your main reasons to still be here is your girlfriend? Interviewee: Yes. (2007SPN01b) Besides this emotional link, he now only invoked purpose-based aspects such as the fact that he was determined to pass his advanced English certificate, that his girlfriend had not yet finished university and that he was still gaining work experience that continued to link him to Dublin. Both the work experience and the English language certificate were presented as being "important for me, for my life, my career and for my pride", but these were always firmly located back in Barcelona. Essentially, Ireland had become a place for gathering experiences for a better life in the near future in Barcelona. There were also people whose sense of attachment to Ireland and overall identity had ultimately not changed. The man from the UK who had a singular referent for home (2004UK01), for instance, reasserted this perspective during his second interview (Extract ( 8 In general, though, we noted ambiguity and complexity in how people talked about home, both in terms of the content of their discussions and in the ways that this was expressed.

Often, we found that immigrants would talk about home in contradictory and conflicted ways, particularly when they tried to reconcile the need for independence with the pull of emotional attachments or responsibilities. For example, a young Polish man (Extract (9)) said:

Extract (9)

I don't miss Poland at all, I just miss my parents, that is it, that is the biggest reason to go there. And the other thing is I wouldn't leave my parents when they are older, I have to look after them. (2004POL03b).

Here, we see home articulated in terms of the pull of obligation and duty, a story that surfaced but was often suppressed in the interviews. Linguistically, we saw that people made use of indirect strategies such as the use of adverbial modifiers ("still", "kinds of", "definitely", "probably", "there", "completely") and directional verbs to put on record their orientation to and alignment with places and identities. In other cases, interviewees explicitly named the places they aligned and disaligned with as well as used bold statements ("yes", "here", "I have two homes now", "Yes and the fact that that's where I am from") to confidently assert their sense of self in response to our probing questions about home and belonging. In this way, a focus on narratives of "home" shows how immigrants, in an effort to foreground constructive strategies in relation to both place and identity, most often resort to an uneasy tension of perpetuating and dismantling strategies as they struggle to make sense of new or challenging place-based identities. Rather than asserting that attitudes to place and home are determined by fixed and pre-defined identities, our analysis shows how both place and identity are mutually constituted and persistently mutable for contemporary immigrants, with narrative as central to this process.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have suggested that a greater attention to narrative -in particular, through a micro-level discursive analysis of the linguistic strategies used by immigrants -offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place. We suggest that immigrants narrate place by focusing on three key topics. They talk about the physical landscape, the built environment, and social interactions. Drawing from de Cillia et al.

(1999), we showed how immigrants use three linguistic strategies to discuss place and identity. These are constructive, perpetuating and dismantling strategies, and we showed how each of these strategies often works through comparison. In fact, adding to the work of de Cillia et al., we show how comparison is a particularly important linguistic strategy for immigrants, because it allows them to make sense, construct, perpetuate and dismantle their own and others' understanding of place and their relationship to place. Our analysis shows that comparison is central to immigrant discourses of place and identity: it is repeatedly used Understanding the linguistic strategies of immigrants is important for two key reasons.

The first is because they point to the ambivalence and fuzziness, as well as mutability, of individual perceptions. The second is because they point to processes of inclusion and exclusion that matter for immigrant integration and assimilation. Attention to language makes this ambivalence clearer, as we see how immigrant narratives place: as imbued with rich social relationships that are local and translocal, and as sites of ambiguous and changing meaning. These issues are developed in more detail in our discussion of "home", where we use a detailed analysis to show the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants use in relation to this concept. In particular, we showed how "home" -a concept that yokes together immigrant identities and place -is highly variable and conceptualised in different and at times contradictory ways for people.

It has been difficult for researchers to fully capture or show the complexity of the relationship between "place" and "identity", particularly in relation to immigrants. Our argument is that greater attention to language, taking inspiration from discourse analytical appraoches, allows us to better show this complexity, because it takes language as a social practice rather than as a source to be mined for data. Paying attention to language then offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place, particularly the ways in which language is used -often simultaneously -to construct and dismantle place and place-based identities. Comparison is central to this process, yet comparison is also poorly understood within geography [START_REF] Ward | Towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities[END_REF][START_REF] Mcfarlane | Introduction-experiments in comparative urbanism[END_REF]. Our analysis points to both the importance of comparison in immigrant identity-and place-making, and to the centrality of language as a social practice to this process.

  to go (2004UK05) there are two things I don't lose at all, my accent and my passport. (2004UK06) Interviewer: Do you still think of yourself as South African? Interviewee: Yes definitely. (2007SA01) Interviewer: So would you say that you are turning Irish or that you are adopting more Irish things? Interviewee: Personally I don't, in my mind I am an Indian. (2007IN02)

  is that a really clear answer? Yes I cannot say that this [Dublin] is my home or just one is my home both [Dublin and Barcelona] are, both are because I am feel really good here [Dublin] as well. While you are on holidays you still remember in here, your flatmates, your things to do. I don't know so. (2007SPN01)

  Interviewer: Where do you think of as home? Interviewee: Here [Dublin]. Interviewer: So it is where you are living and feel safe and so on. Interviewee: Yes it is. And I know it is very easy to go straight back to England but I think I would feel a more anonymous in England, being such a larger place [unclear] what you are able to give back to society. Here you [unclear] a smile on your face or... do you know what I mean?

  )), showing the same kind of noncommital alignment to Ireland. Extract (8) Interviewer: […] How do you feel about living in Ireland now? Interviewee: It is fine, I was happy enough before. Interviewer: And you are still happy enough? Interviewee: Yes. Interviewer: And is there any change in the quality of the happiness from the last time to this time? Interviewee: It is about the same. Interviewer: And in terms of your future plans, do you see yourself remaining here? Interviewee: Probably not forever, no. But for the next couple of years... Interviewer: For the next few years staying here? Interviewee: I think so, yes. (2004UK01b)

  mgilmartin 15/12/2014 11:45 Deleted: bald on record or unmitigated by migrants regardless of national, ethnic or gender background (see Clary-Lemon 2010 for a discussion of comparison in the narratives of Irish migrants in Canada).

The project, entitled "Towards a dynamic approach to research on migration and integration", was supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS).

EU-15 countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

EU-10 countries are Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The contrast between unspoilt depopulated natural landscapes and built landscapes is a common trope in writing on Ireland[START_REF] Graham | Ireland and Irishness: place, culture and identity[END_REF][START_REF] Duffy | Through American eyes': 100 years of Ireland in National Geographic magazine[END_REF]