‘Germs’ in the heart of the other: emigrant scripts, the Celtic Tiger and lived realities of return

Abstract

Abstract During the 1990s and 2000s, the period coinciding with Ireland's economic and social transformation and ubiquitously referred to as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, the Irish nation transitioned from being an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving society. In association with this shift, considerable attention has been devoted to Ireland's new immigrant groups, including refugees and asylum seekers and more recently to migrant workers from new EU accession states. During the same period, inward migration was consistently comprised of significant numbers of former emigrants returning to Ireland; however, the place and experiences of Ireland's return migrants has received comparatively little attention from mainstream media sources and is a relatively recent development in scholarship on migration. Taking as its impetus Piaras MacEinri's (2001) call for scholarship that places Ireland's history of emigration alongside contemporary immigration, this paper critically explores scripts – media representat...