The background to the Irish immigration into Britain in the nineteenth century – including the operation of the ‘push’ (economic necessity) and ‘pull’ (economic opportunity) factors – has been explored elsewhere in this book. This chapter focuses on Irish settlement in Cardiff. It examines, in the context of the founding and development of the settlement, the process of upward social mobility experienced by the group and the consequent movement of its members from a position of relative isolation to that of integration and eventual assimilation into the host society.

There were other urban areas in south Wales where the Irish immigrants settled during the nineteenth century and have made their contribution to the social, economic and civic development of the societies they entered. The most important of these are Merthyr Tydfil–Dowlais, Newport and Swansea. Here the Irish immigrants and their descendants first established their own communities and then spread out, eventually, into the host population to become part of the general social structure of the towns. Paul O'Leary analyses these developments in his recent work on the Irish in Wales and provides an excellent overview of the spread of Irish urban settlement in south Wales in particular. Cardiff, however, merits special attention. The size of its population, its social structure and its history of growth and development during the nineteenth century make it similar to other urban areas in which the Irish settled in Britain. It could be claimed, as a result, that Cardiff is reasonably typical of the Irish urban immigrant settlement in the nineteenth century and that a study of the Irish experience in Cardiff provides insights that may be used to explore the patterns of settlement in urban areas of Britain as a whole.

It is useful, at this point to address the question of the ‘ghettoisation’ of the urban Irish immigrant population. O'Leary also considers this concept and is highly critical of the references to ‘Irish ghettos’ in the works of earlier historians of the Irish in Britain. Sociologists rarely use the term ‘ghetto’. Strictly, it should apply only to groups of people living together in clearly demarcated geographical areas who have little or no contact with people outside. In a real ghetto there will be few, if any, non-members of the group.