Irish in Europe

The Irish in Europe Project (IEP) was founded in 1997 in NUI Maynooth (NUIM) to foster the investigation of Irish migration to Europe in the early modern period. Over the past decade or so it has organized conferences, promoted a scholarly network and produced four volumes of essays and two works in its monograph series. It has collaborated with partner projects in Trinity College Dublin. From the beginning it has been committed to the establishment of a virtual research environment for students of Irish migration and to this end has collaborated closely with colleagues in information science in NUIM.

In 2007 the IEP was awarded an Irish Research Council (IRCHSS) grant to process a large body of biographical data, amassed by various research projects, containing information on Irish migrants to early modern Europe. The project was co-directed by Thomas O’Connor, Mary Ann Lyons and John Keating, with the technical input of Damien Gallagher. The legacy databases involved included data on Irish students in Leuven university, collected by Jeroen Nilis (Leuven), data on Irish students in Paris and Toulouse, sourced by Laurence Brockliss (Oxford) and Patrick Ferté (Toulouse) and military and mercantile data amassed by Colm Ó Conaill (TCD) and Oscar Recio Morales (Complutensian, Madrid) in French and Spanish archives under the auspices of PRTLI-sponsored Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies in TCD.

This material, including over 30,000 individual records, is now available to the academic and general public in a Virtual Research Environment (VRE), accessible through this site. It provides access to the data and also permits researchers, using the designated protocols, to upload new information automatically. In its second phase, due to come on line in the next twelve months, the VRE will ingest new data from Spanish, Italian and French archives.