Emerald Nightingales – Irish Nurses in the NHS (2025) / AvaxHome

This documentary brings us back to an age when Irish nurses migrated in droves to the UK and became an integral part of the medical workforce within the NHS. In the 1940s and 1950s, waves of young Irish women crossed the Irish Sea and sought work within Britain’s healthcare system, enduring hardship, long working hours and prejudice, but also bringing care, compassion and professionalism to British hospitals. The film, produced by Buckinghamshire New University (BNU) uses repurposed archive footage and stills to re-create that era, and features interviews with former NHS nurses including Mary Hazard, who emigrated to the UK in 1952 and started out as a student nurse in London. Hazard is a natural storyteller who brings vivid tales of life in London for Irish immigrants in the 1950s. In those days young Irish nurses socialised at Irish dancehalls such as the Galtymore in north London – the Copper Face Jacks of its day – often toning down their accents to fit in with their new environment, and many of them marrying English men. The documentary also reveals how the NHS actively recruited young Irish women to train as nurses in the British hospital system, visiting towns and villages in Ireland and setting up recruitment centres in local hotels. The documentary has emerged from London Metropolitan University’s oral history project on Irish nurses led by Prof Louise Ryan and former nurse and now radio producer Gráinne McPolin, and will give an insight into the vital and often unrecognised role Irish nurses played in the growth of the NHS.

MediaInfo

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