Nowadays, seventy million people world wide are part of the Irish diaspora, even if a lot of them don't know they have Irish ancestors, a number which is no less than ten times the actual population of Ireland. Such a large number of people must have come from a long period of migrations. And so, the first Irish migrations date back at least to the early seventeenth century. On a first part, we will talk about the migrations from the early seventeenth century until 1717, and then we will move on to the next period which is from 1717 to the end of the eighteenth century. In both parts, we will be discussing the push factors of emigration, the pull factors and the places of Irish settlement and the way in which the Irish settlers integrated or not.

As far as we know, the first significant migrations from Ireland began in the early seventeenth century. After the battle of Kinsale of 1601, about seven to eight thousand Irish Catholics fled to Spain because of the English Protestants' repression. The next wave of migration was in the late 1620s, mainly to Brittany, because of years of food shortages in Ireland. One of the largest groups to leave Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of the Irish who went to serve in the huge continental armies of Europe. Between 1634 and 1660, more than 30,000 Irish men were recruited into the French army. And another estimated 30,000 soldiers left Ireland to fight in Irish brigades for France in 1691. These were mainly family groupings who tented to form clusters of Irish settlements in specific parts of cities. The most popular destinations were Galicia, Brittany, Belgium, and the southwest of France. In the seventeenth century, as the trade between Ireland and the European Atlantic ports was becoming larger and larger, Irish families of merchants went to live in these countries. They settled in place like Saint-Malo or Bordeaux in France which they thought as being rights places for a better life. As they were