Enda Delaney argues that migration to Britain was qualitatively different from that to North America and that transience was the overriding characteristic of Irish migrant experience in the twentieth century. He provides an analysis of reasons for large-scale migration, in the process answering the important question of why so many people left Ireland. Demography, State and Society focuses on a number of vital themes, many rarely mentioned in previous studies: state policy in Ireland, official responses to migration in Britain, gender dimensions, individual migrant experience, patterns of settlement in Britain, and the crucial phenomenon of return migration. It offers much that will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers in Irish migration as well as those in the wider fields of modern British and Irish history and migration studies.