Conceiving Irish Diasporas: Irish Migration and Migrant Communities in the Modern Period

Abstract

The notion that the sum of Irishness is not confined to a small island off the west coast of Europe is not new. This could hardly be otherwise; the Irish have long been represented as having a particular propensity towards migration. Enda Delaney opened his first full-length study of Irish migration to Britain by recalling the words of an eighth-century abbot who remarked upon ‘the Irish habit of going away’;1 while debating the Republic of Ireland Bill (1948) John A. Costello stated that the ‘Irish at home are only one section of a great race which has spread itself throughout the world’.2 In the modern period Irish people have trickled, rushed, flowed and been flushed out of their homeland to various destinations at various times. Some Travelled in sorrow and others with enthusiasm, participating in a ‘complex phenomenon’ prompted by a ‘mix of elements of dynamism, persecution, and poverty’.3 Every conceivable category of native Irish person has been represented in this enormous movement and in moving the migrants, and their descendants, have created a multiplicity of new categories of Irishness. Increasingly, Irish emigrants and their multigenerational progeny are encompassed within a single entity or analytical framework: the Irish diaspora.