A new exhibition at Epic, Dublin’s Irish emigration museum, explores connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. Entangled Islands aims to tell “the stories of a wide range of Irish people who traversed and settled in the Caribbean”, while also outlining “our intersecting histories of colonisation and resistance”.
The exhibition was partly inspired by growing academic research into connections between Ireland and the Caribbean in the last 20 years. Such research, as the exhibition explains, “complicates understandings of the Irish diaspora as a historically marginalised people”. The extent of this scholarship is clear across the exhibition, although the tone is accessible throughout.
One prominent theme is a reevaluation of Ireland’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The topic has previously been tackled in books such as Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1812-1965 by Nini Rodgers (2007) and Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean (2023), edited by Finola O’Kane and Ciaran O’Neill.
