The Bad Bridget Experience

The Bad Bridget Experience comprises five creative encounters. It centres around an innovative museum exhibition and immersive sensory installation at Ulster American Folk Park, an open-air National Museum NI museum in Omagh, County Tyrone. This is complemented by online content that brings aspects of the museum exhibition and installation, and original content, to an international audience. Alongside the online and in-situ encounters are an engaging and creative Education Programme aimed at teenagers, and a reflective and emotive Community Programme with female participants. The Bad Bridget Experience is based on the AHRC-funded research project, 'Bad Bridget': criminal and deviant Irish women in North America, 1838-1918.

The Bad Bridget Experience brings the academic research to a wider public audience for the first time and conveys a more nuanced understanding of the Irish migrant who departed Irish shores than previously known. It presents a seldom told alternative to the 'American dream'. The project centres around emotions as a means to engage, educate and stimulate reflections. Visitors and participants will learn of the emotions of emigrants before their departure from Ireland, their hopes that they could make something of themselves in the new world, their sense of responsibility towards their families at home, and the economic desires of those who helped fund their passage abroad. It will explore disappointment experienced after migration. Poverty remained a feature of many Irish immigrants' lives. Having spent everything on the passage ticket and provisions, they had little on arrival. Life abroad presented new challenges including a very different climate and unfamiliar working and living environments. Job opportunities for girls and women were also limited and, as the academic research uncovered, treatment and conditions were heavily dependent on employers and circumstances.

Migration was not unaffected by heartbreak. Partners, relatives and friends who promised to migrate never appeared. The migration of pregnant unmarried women shows that the concept of leaving Ireland to avoid the shame of pregnancy outside marriage predates the 20th century. Relationships also broke down abroad; our research shows that Irish women were the most likely migrant group to be deserted by their husbands. For much of the 19th century, infant mortality was also higher in Irish families than any other ethnic group. The loneliness, poverty and lack of support networks led to criminal and deviant behaviour, as made clear by heart-breaking statements of many of those who ended up in courts and prisons, which will be used to good effect as part of the Bad Bridget Experience.

Irish migrants who left rural Ireland were thrust into urban America. The immersive sensory installation seeks to confront visitors with the sights, smells and sounds of 19th-century New York. While historical research to date has focused on chain migration, where one migrant assisted a relative or friend to travel abroad, our research reveals a more complex picture. Those who offered assistance were often in poor circumstances themselves, able only to offer a floor to sleep on for a few days rather than to facilitate a gradual acclimatisation to North America. The transient existence of many Irish immigrants also meant promises of assistance were not fulfilled because new arrivals could not track down contacts.

Irish migrants also experienced judgement. Stereotyping and discrimination against the Irish presented challenges. The Bad Bridget Experience allows space for reflections on similarities between migration in the past and today. The research also showcases resilience, perseverance and determination, evident in Irish female migrant's survival strategies. Sometimes strategies were deviant or criminal, but not always, and the exhibition allows visitors to engage with the diversity of responses to opportunities and challenges in the 'New World'.