Irish In Britain

The Irish Women’s Service (formerly the Irish Women’s Project) at The Maya Centre is a specialist mental health initiative that helps Irish women and women of Irish descent to explore issues relating to their culture and heritage. As our longest-running specialist service, this support includes those from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The initiative has continually supported generations of Irish women in London, including Traveller, migrant and migrant-descendant communities.

This approach informs our understanding of transgenerational trauma, allowing us to work effectively with the daughters and granddaughters of immigrants who have been impacted by the adverse experiences of their parents or grandparents. Moreover, the Irish Women’s Service extends its resources to Irish women belonging to any faith (including atheism), any race, any sexual orientation, and any neurotype, acknowledging the complexity and nuance within Irish female identities.

The program is and has always been an Irish women-for-Irish women initiative, enabling our therapists to intimately consider how diverse Irish identities intersect with women’s lived experiences of gender based violence, abuse, trauma, and/or loss. We also consider how these events can compound feelings of isolation and a loss of identity, especially when physically detached from one’s ancestral land or social upbringing. In recent decades, we have worked with survivors of institutional abuse, multi-heritage women and Traveller women to aid mental health and emotional wellbeing journeys against the backdrop of minoritisation within an already minoritised group.