Connections and capital

Abstract

This chapter explores how the onset of economic turmoil and austerity from 2008 brought back the idea of experiencing emigration as a central imagining of what it meant to be Irish. The Celtic Tiger years had led to an effective ending of emigration, and a view that the very idea of leaving Ireland to seek a livelihood was in the past. In the years after the downturn began, emigration numbers soared as Irish people, particularly the young, had to find employment overseas. Rather than seeing emigration and the diaspora as a necessary economic corrective in recessionary times, the Irish government took active steps to reach out to its diaspora and use them as an economic opportunity. The chapter argues that the reimagining of the diaspora as a reservoir of skills, opportunities, and income for Ireland reconstituted them as a global network that would support the process of economic revival. Thus, while emigration returned in the wake of economic collapse, and had not in fact been consigned to history, the diaspora was reconfigured as a networking opportunity that could be used to profit Ireland.