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Whose Diaspora? Whose Migration? Whose Identity?
Some current issues in Irish migration studies

Piaras Mac Éinrí, Director, Irish Centre for Migration Studies (ICMS), National University of Ireland, Cork
Brian Lambkin, Director, Centre for Migration Studies (CMS), Ulster American Folk Park, Omagh, Northern Ireland

1. Introduction
2. Quantitative and qualitative approaches
3. Emigration and exiles: Irish exceptionalism or mainstream migration?
4. From emigrants and exiles to new diasporas
5. Homeland/Diaspora and ‘third space’ conflicts
6. Ireland: searching for new models of identity. Links between home and diasporic identities.
7. Northern Perspectives: the Belfast Agreement
8. New research agendas and the role of the centres
9. References

1            Introduction

The past two decades have seen significant developments in the field of Irish migration studies. Migration studies as an academic subject is concerned simply with the movement and settlement of people, including immigration, internal migration, seasonal and return migration. In its approach to the whole phenomenon of migration it is multi-disciplinary, in that it aims to include as well as psychology, history, politics, economics, religion, language, literature, art  and so on. It is also comparative in that it seeks to understand the similarities and differences between the migration history, culture and heritage of different peoples.  ‘Migration history’ is distinguished as the ‘whole story’ of human migration so far as we can know it, whereas ‘migration culture’ refers to the distinctive ‘way of migrating’ associated with a particular group and ‘migration heritage’ refers to surviving material and non-material traces of migration history and culture which, to a greater or lesser extent, are ‘treasured’ by the present generation, particularly in archives and museums.

While research in Irish migration studies is still predominantly historical and has mainly been carried out in other countries, there has also been a lively debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Ireland itself about emigration and diaspora, followed by a more recent preoccupation with immigration into the country, although the important topic of return migration has regrettably received only limited attention thus far.

The current debate may in part be characterised as a discussion of the interplay, in Irish terms, between globalisation, migration, tradition, modernisation and exclusion, with the attendant shifts in flows and patterns of migration in and out of the country. But it may also be seen as a debate about the inter-relationship between the place of the Irish diaspora, on the one hand, and of change in Ireland, on the other, in the process of identity definition.

This article considers the significance of these debates and looks briefly at recent shifts in terminology and paradigms. It is argued that new discourses have led to a reconfiguration of the spaces within which multiple meanings of Irish ethnic identity, within and outside Ireland, are negotiated, and have led to more ascriptive, fluid and decentred constructions of Irish identity than the hierarchical, descriptive and fixed traditional definitions.

This process is seen as necessarily unfinished, in particular as regards the renegotiation of ethnic space within Ireland and within the diaspora to enable the incorporation of more hybrid and pluralist forms of identity in terms both of indigenous and of immigrant individuals and communities. While the post-Belfast Agreement context and the developing debate about multiculturalism in the Republic suggest new directions, the experience of the Irish within the diaspora, in particular, can offer especially valuable lessons in negotiating these spaces. At the same time the changing nature of diasporic identity itself, accompanied by the continuing rejection by some in Ireland of forms of Irishness produced outside Ireland compared to ‘authentic’ forms of Irishness produced in the country, needs in itself to be problematised and investigated.

As directors of the only two specialist migration research centres in Ireland, one in the north and one in the south, the authors are primarily concerned with the exploration of these changing paradigms from an Ireland-based perspective. As noted, the Belfast Agreement is itself a recipe for multiculturalism, based on recognition of difference, mutual respect and parity of esteem, even if the community relations model on which it is based has itself been criticised on the grounds that it does not sufficiently attend to inequalities of power and may even perpetuate division through the reification of ethnic boundaries.

The two centres offer interesting contrasts in their respective perspectives. The Centre for Migration Studies (CMS) in Northern Ireland is engaged in the retrieval and interrogation of the historical specificity of the various strands of historical Irish migration to the continent of North America and other parts of the world. This represents a broadening of its traditional focus on emigration to colonial America, as the Ulster-American Folk Park, with which the CMS is linked, moves to embrace an island-wide brief and a concern with the whole of the Irish diaspora.

By contrast, the focus of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies (ICMS), which is part of the National University of Ireland, Cork, in  is primarily but not exclusively focused on present-day issues. Firstly, it is developing on-line life narratives of migrants to and from Ireland and those who stayed ‘at home’, to explore the interconnections between history and memory, and between decisions to leave and decisions to remain. Secondly, it is examining current immigration policy and practice against the Irish historical background of out-migration and a domestic tradition of exclusion of the ‘other’ which typifies historical Irish attitudes both towards its own internal ‘undesirables’ or socially excluded (such attitudes often being the prelude to migration) and towards immigrants to the country.

Relations between the various communities within Ireland itself and between the various strands of Irish migratory communities and Ireland are potentially more open than at any time in the recent past. While quantitative research will always be at the heart of migration studies, new comparative research using qualitative methods can add greatly to our understanding of our various identities and can contribute significantly to the building of new, more open and more inclusive communities. The experience of the diaspora can finally be applied to the ‘homeland’ in a virtuous circle of reflective, experientially based feedback. At the same time, the multi-stranded identities of the diaspora itself can be recognised and validated, enabling the arid polarities of the past to be transcended.

2                        Quantitative and Qualitative approaches

In the Kuhnian description of scientific enquiry, a theory is essentially a model and/or an hypothesis which has not yet been proved by the appropriate application of agreed methods of empirical enquiry and analysis (Kuhn, 1964). In that sense, “theories” can, in the right conditions, be “proved” or “disproved”. ‘Science progresses through filling the gaps in a pre-defined framework.’(Johnston, 1991, p. 12)

This scientific approach emphasises the normative nature of the process of scientific enquiry.  To put it another way, only that which is imaginable to the particular “interpretative community” (say, historians, geographers or applied psychologists) may be explored and then only according to agreed norms. New paradigms may well emerge from the testing of old ones but this is an essentially evolutionary and not a revolutionary process. As in Euclidean geometry, the underlying assumptions are not perceived as questions, but stated as axioms. In particular, the observer’s own position is not presumed to be relevant.

Contemporary social theory challenges this concept of an objective observer. The observer’s vantage point is understood to be a constitutive element in the construction of the phenomenon being approached. Thus, for instance, anthropologists were themselves responsible for the construction of an exotic, non-European “other” in opposition to a Eurocentric norm. The vantage point determined the nature of what was “seen”.

Going further, the phenomenological approach emphasises the need to analyse perceptions. Thus, in the matter of identity, a descriptive approach is necessarily based on an a priori, objective categorisation of individuals. The ascriptive (Cohen 1985) approach seeks to explore the subject’s world-view and identity from the point of view of perceptions rather than objective categories.  Moreover, in the matter of identity, there are at least three ascriptive categories: how the subject constructs her/his own identity, how/whether the community or communities of the said identity perceive the subject, and how the host community perceives both the subject and the subject’s imagined community.

Thus, one needs to distinguish between “objective” material and social conditions such as legal citizenship, and phenomenological ones such as the subject’s self-identity or the extent to which the subject is accepted by the target community and/or feels part, for instance, of a specific diaspora. A person may have citizenship in a country and “feel” that s/he shares the identity of the host community; the host community may simultaneously “feel” that s/he is a foreigner and always will be. While there will always be a need for the gathering of empirical data such as (in this case) immigration and citizenship statistics, a full understanding (if this can be achieved) of migrant and diasporic identities must depend on other methods.

It thus appears to us that the quantitative models of scientific enquiry are necessary but not sufficient in this case. This does not mean, however, that it is not useful to identify paradigms at work within Irish migration studies, as well as shifts in those paradigms - on the contrary. Moreover, the perspectives advanced here constitute in themselves another paradigm in Irish migration studies - there is no ‘stepping outside the box’.

We propose to explore some of the dominant paradigms in Irish migration studies and to consider how these have shifted significantly in recent years. We argue that past certainties of emigration/exile, parting/staying, us/them, assimilation/exclusion, have given way to a new, more fluid universe of shifting, over-lapping, and syncretic identities. Within Ireland itself the old clichés summed up by the recent claim of the then First Minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, that the Republic was a ‘mono-ethnic, mono-cultural’ society have also been challenged, as urban Irish young people, in particular, rejected what they saw as patriarchal, rural and conservative ways of thinking. The new Ireland elected a feminist President, was proud of a national soccer team of mixed ethnicities and varied accents, adopted international pop stars (including a few of its own) as role models and was increasingly drawn into an American cultural orbit. It is a little early to say if all of this has been beneficial. Some, at least, of the old postcolonial inferiority complex has begun to wear off but the search for new, more inclusive identities may only have begun.

3            Emigrants and Exiles; Irish exceptionalism or mainstream migration?

Historians have traditionally dominated Irish migration studies, and as we have said most research is still historical in nature. This is not the place for an account of the content of their work over the past fifteen years or so (O’Day 1996; Mac Éinrí 2000); the focus will rather be on the terms within which it has been framed. What have been the dominant paradigms, and are there ways in which a greater use of qualitative approaches and the perspectives of other academic disciplines, not least psychology, might be useful?

Most research has been carried out outside Ireland. In part this is for obvious reasons. It is easier to study presence than absence, and the Irish have settled for the most part in countries such as the USA and Britain, with a strong and developed tradition of immigration studies. However, there has at the same time been a remarkable recent growth of interest in Ireland itself in migration issues, although not exclusively in emigration issues.

Emigrants and Exiles:  A Primary Paradigm

In considering recent scholarly debates, Kerby Miller’s definition (1985) of emigrants and exiles marks one major point of departure. He distinguishes between the Irish ‘exile’ whose departure is involuntary or constructed as involuntary, whose world-view and culture is seen as pre-modern and whose identity is permanently caught in the backward look to the homeland, and the ‘emigrant’, who is seen as having chosen his or her destiny and who looks forward to a better future, unencumbered by the baggage of the past.

This distinction found an echo in the late-1980s debate characterised by then Foreign Minister Brian Lenihan’s (in)famous comments:

I don’t look on the type of emigration we have today as being of the same category as the terrible emigration of the last century.  What we have now is a very literate emigrant who thinks nothing of coming to the United States and going back to Ireland and maybe on to Germany and back to Ireland again.  The younger people in Ireland today are very much in that mould... It (emigration) is not a defeat because the Irish hone their skills and talents in another environment; the more they develop a work ethic in a country like Germany or the US, the better it can be applied in Ireland when they return.  After all, we can’t all live on a small island (Lenihan 1987).

The opposing viewpoint of those who saw the high emigration of the time as substantially involuntary was expressed thus:

Emigration is not just an accident.  It is not just an individual problem.  Emigration has arisen and increased as a direct result of the failure of the social and economic policies of successive governments on this island.  Their failure in recent decades has been compounded by their lack of honesty and energy in tackling the issue in the 1980s.  Despite discussion of emigration during the general election of 1987, policy documents and pronouncements since then, the political parties have failed to address seriously the notion that we have any choice in how to respond to emigration.  The notion is put forward, and generally uncritically by the media, that emigration is unavoidable, inevitable and long-term.  The notion is unacceptable to those of us in Emigrant Advice and is an insult to those who feel compelled to emigrate (Nic Giolla Choille 1989, p. 52).

This bipolar distinction was subsumed into an increasingly rancorous debate between revisionists and anti-revisionists in the 1980s and 1990s. Revisionists complained that the emphasis on exile was often combined in traditional discourses of Irish emigration with a partial and biased historical narrative which privileged some aspects of Irish emigration, but not others. Thus, Irish migrants were the victims but not the builders of Empire; they were Catholics but not Protestants; they went to the USA but not Canada, Australia or Britain; they settled in urban areas but not rural ones.

The theme of exile/victim finds fullest expression in accounts of the experiences of the Famine and post-Famine Irish, and understandably so.  But it has been argued that some ‘anti-revisionists’ also tended, at least in popular discourse, to collapse all Irish emigration into this single, emotionally charged category, and at the same time to see the entire Irish emigration experience as uniquely bleak and as having arisen out of uniquely oppressive conditions. Revisionists took to calling this view the MOPE - Most Oppressed People Ever - syndrome. The ‘Famine as genocide’ debate, which rumbled on in 1997 in Ireland, Britain and the USA (e.g., New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education 1998) was a particular battleground.

Akenson’s critique of Irish 'exceptionalism’

The major critic of Irish ‘exceptionalism’ is Akenson (1993). He brought a fresh if sharply polemical approach to the issues and opened valuable new fields of enquiry, especially with his emphasis on the global nature of the Irish diaspora, on the place of Protestants (of various faiths) within it, and on the dual role of Irish migrants as both victims and active participants in 18^th and 19^th century European expansionism and conquest.

Now that some of the dust has  settled, we can see more clearly the connections between Irish and other European migratory movements and recognise the multi-stranded nature of Irish emigration. At the same time there is no denying that Irish migration had some unique characteristics, particularly in relation to scale and longevity, at least for the period from the Famine to the nineteen fifties (Mac Éinrí 1997). In the more recent past, it has given way to change and evolution towards the present (no longer exceptionalist) position. The fall in the Irish birth rate since the mid-1980s and the spectacular growth in jobs in the Irish economy in the 1990s suggest that Ireland has undergone its own belated demographic transition. Evidence from other countries suggests that a return to earlier patterns of high fertility, low female participation rates in the labour force and high out-migration are not likely (Mac Éinrí 2001).

As Akenson argues, the Irish diasporic experience, like the Fabergé egg, needs to be seen in its totality and not in its separate parts in order to be fully appreciated (Akenson 1993). In recent years it has been possible to begin a more subtle consideration of the meaning of Irish ethnicity for various generations of different migrants and for their descendants.

This has led to some surprises. Thus, for instance, we know that the generic self-identification of ‘Irish’ before the Famine in America gave way to a sharp delineation between ‘Scots-Irish’ and (Catholic) Irish in the period after the Famine. But more recently, Miller has noted the intriguing trend for persons of Irish descent in the Old South to describe themselves simply as Irish, whereas their own ancestors clearly saw themselves as (Protestant) Scots-Irish (Miller 2000).

The importance and persistence of ‘Irishness’ as an ethnic marker in the USA, as shown by this example, has if anything been enhanced by the emergence of a whole new emphasis on ‘diaspora’ in the late twentieth century. The term, once only used with reference to Jewish people, became hugely influential, and marks an important shift away from the absolutism of the old Chicago School model (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1967), whereby immigrants inevitably and irrevocably assimilated into the host society, even if this took some time. While not marking a total break with past practice (one could after all align ‘emigrants’ with those destined for assimilation  according to the Chicago School model and ‘exiles’ with those who would never ‘fit in’ to the new society) the popularisation of the term diaspora did come about at a time when identities were seen as increasingly fluid in a world where migration itself was increasingly a two-way process. The possibility of return was now seen as an option for an increasing number.  The spread of new methods of communication (email, the internet, satellite television, frequent and cheap transport connections) made it increasingly possible to maintain multiple identities, as least insofar as culture and consumption in multiple locations were key elements in the maintenance of such identities.

4            From emigrants and exiles to new diasporas

The upsurge of interest in emigration which coincided with an increase in emigration itself in the late 1980s was followed by the ‘Robinson years’ (the period 1990-97, when Mary Robinson held the Irish Presidency) and the introduction, only partly successful, into popular Irish discourse of the term‘diaspora’.  The period can be characterised in terms of a shift between the earlier emigrant/exile paradigm and newer, more fluid processes of negotiated identities and more frequent returns.

Scholars dispute the usefulness of the term ‘diaspora’, with one school of thought - a notable exponent is David Lloyd (1994) - viewing it as an attempt to ‘sanitise’ the experience of involuntary Irish emigrants and asserting that the unvarnished term ‘emigration’ is more descriptive and more emotionally resonant. Others point out that diaspora at least encompasses a multi-generational approach, including not only those of Irish birth but also their descendants, and the sense of an inter-connected entity.

Even if one allows that the term has been appropriated to some extent within Ireland as a way of characterising relations between the Irish in Ireland and the Irish outside the country in upbeat, celebratory and largely cultural terms (thereby tending to omit a more critical structuralist analysis focusing on the disproportionate numbers leaving from the ranks of the socially excluded), the genealogy of the word is sufficiently strong and multi-threaded to enable other layers of meaning. Indeed, its use in other contexts (Jewish, African-American) almost always implied a sense that a mass forced departure was brought about by some disaster, surely a perfectly appropriate description, say, for the Famine. The even simpler term ‘migrants’ has the benefit of addressing both those who left and the more recent movements of people into the country, although it omits the multi-generational experience.

Even for those who are happy to employ it, the term ‘diaspora’ is not without problems. It has no agreed definition and has been generally applied to communities other than the Jews only since the 1970s. Various definitions (Chaliand and Rageau 1995) and typologies (Cohen 1997) have been advanced but are not universally accepted, or are seen at best as merely descriptive. There is also a view in some quarters that the emphasis on diaspora has gone too far in its privileging of the transnational over the local and national (Liu, 1997). Some scholars are particularly critical of intergenerational models of diasporic cultural identity and come close to suggesting that diasporic culture is often little more than a fashionable label for whites who feel threatened by a multicultural society and seek to imbue themselves with a designer label from a place about which they actually know little (Waters 1990).

Apart from the Mary Robinson factor, it is conventional to identify a number of factors in explaining the new interest in the Irish diaspora.  The aforementioned advent of cheap travel and cheap communications has meant that though migrants might be gone,  they were less easily forgotten. The simple fact of the resurgence of massive out-migration in the late 1980s, and the fact that some of those who left were well-educated, often middle-class migrants, combined with the drama of the numbers of Irish ‘illegals’ in the USA (Corcoran 1993), made good media copy and provided much opportunity, and no little success, for political activism on the part of the new and very vocal Irish-Americans (Corcoran 1993; O’Hanlon 1998).

Official Ireland’s attitude to the Diaspora

More recently we witnessed the changing of the Irish Constitution (Government of Ireland 1937, several amendments) following the Belfast Agreement in 1998, and the explicit inclusion for the first time of a clause about the diaspora, even if the word was not explicitly mentioned:

…Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage. (Government of Ireland, 1937/2001.)

It is noteworthy that the Belfast Agreement did not require a reciprocal recognition by the British Government of any aspiration to cherish a special affinity with people of British ancestry (originally from Northern Ireland) living abroad.

One must not exaggerate the recognition shown by official Ireland to its diaspora. These limits were shown by a tendency to over-emphasise the successful, as Lenihan did, and to portray the minority who went to the USA with much greater frequency than the majority who went to the UK. When it came to power, and the proposal to extend very limited voting rights to  emigrants, it was quickly evident that their place had not changed at all. They continue to be excluded from voting to this day.

Exclusion and popular discourse

The exclusion of emigrants from Irish public discourse is worthy of further exploration and various hypotheses have been put forwarded but not tested in detail. There is a simplistic populist assumption that ‘the best left’, an assumption reflected even in academic accounts such Kennedy, Giblin, and McHugh (1988, p. 147):

Debate and dissent, so vital to the life of any community, were dulled by the departure of persons at the very time when their ideas were liveliest and when they might be expected to make their biggest contribution to renewal and regeneration...

Drudy (1985, p. 72) puts it thus:

‘It could...be contended that many of the brightest and the most enterprising left, while the conservative and those with little initiative remained behind.  Due to the late age of inheritance, many of the inheritors remained single...’

This might go some way to explaining the attitudes of home-based Irish towards their emigrant siblings: a complex mixture of resentment, begrudgery and denial, with perhaps a touch of a suggestion of betrayal, with those who were ‘really’ committed to the new Irish State being prepared to stay on and stick it out in spite of hardship. There is a more explicit form of denial, insofar as the newly ascendant native bourgeoisie were not about to admit that their own hard-won and precarious state of relative comfort might actually have depended, to an extent, on the drawing off of a potentially rebellious population which might otherwise have sought more radical social change and the beginnings of a more equitable society. As Alexis Fitzgerald (Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1956, reservation No.2, p. 222) put it,

‘I cannot accept either the view that a high rate of emigration is necessarily a sign of national decline or that policy should be over-anxiously framed to reduce it... In order of values, it seems more important to preserve and improve the quality of Irish life...than it is to reduce the numbers of Irish emigrants...High emigration, granted a population excess, releases social tensions which would otherwise explode and makes possible a stability of manners and customs that would otherwise be the subject of radical change...’

ICMS life narratives exploring the experiences of those who grew up in Ireland in the 1950s and stayed on are providing valuable primary material to enable these issues to be explored.

New diaporic identities?

In the example given earlier, the switch from Scots-Irish to Irish identity in the southern USA, one can of course argue that the main reason for this shift is quite simply the attenuation in the strength of ethnic self-consciousness over several generations.  In this case, Scots-Irish ethnicity has virtually disappeared, whereas ‘Irishness’ has been replenished by ongoing immigration and the mediatisation, even popularisation, of Irish ethnic identity.  Many examples of this process could be cited, such as the phenomenal popularity worldwide of Riverdance, the unexpected success of Angela’s Ashes (McCourt, 1997), the success on English-speaking stages worldwide of playwrights such as Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry, the reception of novelists like Colm Tóibín and popular authors like Maeve Binchy as well as diasporic ‘Irish ethnic’ writers like Alice McDermott, the use of an Irish background to such movies as Far and Away as well as the success of Irish or Irish-themed movies such as The Commitments,The Crying Gameand Dancing at Lughnasa, the reception given to PBS/Disney/WGBH’s  Long Journey Home and the success of a whole range of Irish musical acts, including U2, the Corrs, the Chieftains, Sinéad O’Connor, Enya, the Pogues, Black ‘47, Pierce Turner and others who made it into the popular musical mainstream, sometimes with a decidedly untraditional message.

But it also demonstrates the significance of the notion of ethnicity (whatever its content) in multicultural societies, as well as the largely ascriptive nature of such identities. You are what you think you are, even though there is a necessary corollary of ‘recognition’ of that self-defined identity by others within that community and by other communities.  This emphasis on ethnicity as a constitutive element in the identity formation of the individual subject within the community has received much scholarly attention in the period from the 1960s on (Barth 1969). This has been especially evident in the United States (Glazer and Moynihan 1970) but also in the UK, where Stuart Hall’s work (1990) has been highly influential, to the extent that cultural studies perspectives have since spread across a range of other disciplines.

These perspectives have transcended the notion of unitary national identity, real or virtual, including Anderson’s (1991) Imagined Communities, and have situated class, gender and ethnicity as significant elements in a complex process of negotiated subjectivities. Social constructionism, the dominant current perspective within the social sciences, sees the subject as constructed in society rather than founded in an essential inner identity. More recent writing, influenced by French poststructuralist thought, sees the subject as decentred, contingent and hybrid.

The impact on migration studies of these debates has been profound. Migration is process or ‘migrancy’ (Chambers 1994) as well as product. It is now understood as a non-teleological process - neither ultimate assimilation to nor exclusion from the host society is inevitable. This more fluid universe offers the possibility of ‘third spaces’ where identity is negotiated. It is no longer a question of either/or, but something closer to neither/and, or even a spectrum encompassing all that lies between. Homi Bhabha (1994, pp. 38-39), one of the main proponents of  ‘third space’, puts it thus

To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ - the cutting edge of  translation and negotiation, the in-between space - that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.

The new emphasis on diasporas a term should be seen as one (key) example of this process. Diasporas are a particular form of ‘third space’ (Gutierrez 1999, Lambkin 2001a: 38), transnational and shifting in character. Within diasporas a range of identity options can be negotiated and sustained over time, although not necessarily across generations.

If identities, diasporic and otherwise, are shifting, contingent and partially self-invented, this is not to ignore questions of power. One of the interesting features of the processes of re-negotiation within the Irish diaspora has been the way in which sites of resistance to hegemonic impositions of identity have formed, not only in opposition to stereotyping of the Irish within the host community, but also in terms of the relationship with the country of origin and even within the third space of the diaspora itself. These points will be explored later.

Describing the Irish diaspora

Qualitative work on Irish identity at home and abroad needs to be related to quantitative work on the structure of the diaspora. The first major attempt to produce a quantitative description or anatomy of the Irish diaspora was undertaken by Akenson. It has been followed by more detailed studies of particular aspects of Irish emigration and diaspora formation such as Crawford’s The Hungry Stream (1997), andThe Irish Empire, a large-scale television series by BBC Northern Ireland, RTÉ and SBS Independent, Australia, with accompanying book (Bishop 1999). Most recently, The Irish Diaspora, a major collection of papers given at The Scattering Conference hosted by ICMS in 1997 has been published (Bielenberg 2000) and a more popularizing and journalistic account by Coogan (2000). Also, a second volume of essays from the long-running Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, Atlantic Crossroads: historical connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America, has recently appeared (Fitzgerald and Ickringill 2001; see also Blethen and Wood 1997).

While such studies are essential to developing our understanding of the Irish diaspora, perhaps the form most central to its description is that of the atlas.  The need for an ‘Atlas of the Irish diaspora’, which was first proposed in 1999 by CMS and ICMS at a conference on ‘Irish and German Migration in Comparative Perspective’ in Bochum, Germany, has been highlighted by the shortcomings in the work of Chaliand and Rageau. Their treatment of the Irish diaspora in The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas is less than satisfactory because it focuses on emigration from Ireland to North America and Britain at the time of the Great Famine, excluding previous and subsequent emigration to these and other destinations. The potential of the atlas to illuminate historical phenomena right down to the regional or local level, and to facilitate comparative study, has been demonstrated by recent publications such as the excellent Atlas of the Rural Irish Landscape (Alan, Whelan, & Stout, 1997), the ongoing Irish Historic Towns Atlas project (Royal Irish Academy) and Mapping the Great Irish Famine (Kennedy, Ell, Crawford, & Clarkson, 1999). What Ireland needs, but does not yet have, as a basic tool in this area is a Boundary Atlas, such as that already produced for New Zealand (Kelly and Marshall, 1996)

However, in its traditional published format the atlas is limited in its capability to present data at the most local of levels. For example, Mapping the Great Irish Famine presents data down to barony level but hard-copy publication of data down to townland level is never likely to be practicable (Lambkin 1998). This restriction can now be overcome by the presentation of datasets down to townland level through the Internet and already there is a framework for doing so. The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (www.ecai.org) is an international project aimed at developing an interactive electronic atlas of the world from which selected data from regions, eras and disciplines can be instantaneously accessed. ICMS and CMS are particularly interested in the potential of such a framework for presenting both quantitative and qualitative data about the Irish diaspora (Lambkin 2001b: 201-6).

Local studies and family history

Two areas of activity – local studies and family history – continue to expand and are generating huge amounts of data, both in Ireland and in the diaspora. This raises the question as to how the quality of these data might be assured, archived and made accessible. It is likely, for example, that the proposal to introduce Citizenship Education for the first time to the curriculum of schools in Northern Ireland in 2003 will add considerably to the amount of data available at the local level. Citizenship Education in Northern Ireland will complement the programme of Civic, Social and Political Education which has been current in the curriculum of schools in the Republic of Ireland since 1996. Both emphasise the importance of ‘active learning’ through locally-based projects in the construction of civic identity. Increasingly, schools are seen as having a special responsibility for undertaking the study of the local area and community in which they are situated. In addition there is recognition of how value can be added to local studies through comparative studies and there is encouragement to schools to exchange information with partner schools both within Ireland, North and South, and outside Ireland (Lambkin 2001b).

Family history, local history, and local studies focussed on citizenship education are not the only sources of increasing information available at the local level. Further data are being generated by the renewed interest in language studies in relation to Irish and varieties of English in Ireland, including Ulster-Scots, which are supported by the Belfast Agreement in its commitment to parity of esteem and establishment of the North/South Language Body, with two separate Agencies, An Foras Teanga and Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch. It is noteworthy that the revival of interest in Ulster-Scots identity has its reflex in the diaspora and the launch in 2000 of a newJournal of Scotch-Irish Studies, based in Pennsylvania.

Greater value will be added to local studies of all kinds, in Ireland and in the diaspora, if comparative studies at the local level are encouraged and facilitated on a systematic and sustainable basis through an agreed framework, using the latest information and communications. The Electronic Cultural Atlas project provides a model for such a development, which forms part of the agenda of joint work between CMS and ICMS.

5            Homeland/Diaspora and ‘third space’ conflicts

A new homeland/diaspora debate?

Any consideration of the relations between homeland and diaspora needs to start from the premise that each side knows remarkably little about the other, or at least starts from premises that may be very hoary and stereotypical in character. Moreover, it does not take long before tensions of various kinds may be discerned. Many of these have to do with issues of ‘identity ownership’ and with who has the right to define ‘authentic’ Irishness and to construct narratives of a shared past.

The impact of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was enormous, but it is also worth noting that ‘McCourt was celebrated in New York first before making it in Ireland’ (Morrissey 1996). More importantly, McCourt’s New York provided a space for reflection and self-examination which had obviously not been available to him in Ireland. McCourt is interesting on the culture of denial which he sees as central to ways of thinking in Ireland:

The veteran teacher credits his psychotherapy-attuned students at Stuyvesant with forcing him to look inward and write from within the boy he used to be:  “In many ways they were more mature than I was. I’d write something and they’d say, ‘Why are you stopping there? Why don’t you go deeper?’ Because I tried a number of times to discover the tone I wanted, and it was all wrong. I was trying to be jesting.” Growing up in Ireland, he says, “Everybody sneered at the idea of psychology or psychotherapy. It was self-indulgence. Our way of being with each other was teasing. That was our way of showing affection, which could be cruel sometimes. So we had no self-knowledge. And we had no self-esteem. We were raw and angry where I came from. I didn’t know why until recently, until I was writing the book” (Cryer, 1996).

Perhaps this is where the real significance of the contribution of McCourt and others to diaspora/homeland debate may lie. Equally, maybe the Irish in Ireland can now move beyond denial and look the past in the face. Yet there remains the risk that they will only do so if it can be placed beyond the here and the now, perpetrating a new cycle of distancing and alienation.

We would argue that the key paradigm shift in the Irish migration debate was not the replacement of ‘emigration’ or emigration/exile by ‘diaspora’, but rather the frequent and positive use of the latter term by President Mary Robinson as a powerful statement of symbolic inclusive identity and its adoption as an acceptable term by many younger Irish migrants. Regrettably, in Ireland itself the Robinson initiative was received no more warmly than any previous evocation of emigration. It seemed that we still did not want to know, in public at any rate.  

The limits of the debate in Ireland.

A striking example of this divergence of views occurred when Robinson chose to exercise a very rarely used presidential prerogative to address the twin houses of the Oireachtas (Parliament) on the theme of Cherishing the Irish Diaspora (1995). The initiative was received with a mixture of cynicism and puzzlement in Ireland, in contrast with the generally warm welcome which it received from Irish people in other countries. Interestingly, public reaction to Robinson’s efforts in Ireland to bring the Irish abroad to public attention often focused on the word ‘diaspora’ itself, with a professed puzzlement as to its precise semantic meaning often disguising a more fundamental hostility.

Robinson herself was very clear about the tensions between old and new and also about the benefits which could flow from listening to diasporic voices:

Our relation with the diaspora beyond our shores is one which can instruct our society in the values of diversity, tolerance, and fair-mindedness ... The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and loss. They remain even while absent, a precious reflection of our growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.... We need to accept that in their new perspectives may well be a critique of our old ones (Robinson 1995). 

Her plea was endorsed by Irish-American journalists, who pointed to the new attention being given to Irish emigrants in contrast to generations of neglect and denial (Lacey 1995; Lynch 1995). Drawing an analogy between Israel and the Jewish diaspora and the case of the Irish, Lynch sees Robinson as having re-located Ireland as a ‘mother nation’ and adds that ‘alone among modern Irish politicians, she can truly claim the title as head of the 70 million Irish worldwide’ (Lynch, 1995).

Fr. Paul Byrne of the Irish Episcopal Commission on Emigration noted what a ‘boost’ it was to learn of Robinson’s speech but he was dismayed to note the lack of support in Ireland itself for the speech because, in the words of one journalist, “...many politicians and commentators felt that the Irish diaspora was not a matter of national importance.”  Byrne’s heartfelt comment is

Not a matter of national importance? There’s hardly a single family in Ireland which doesn’t have somebody living abroad and feeling their absence. Is there any other issue which reaches so deeply into the heart of Irish families? I’m sure the Egyptians on the day after that terrible last plague when every first born in every house was dead, didn’t think that this wasn’t a matter of national importance (Byrne 1996).

Byrne’s bleak appreciation of the reception in Ireland of Robinson’s ideas proved correct. Not long afterwards, the Government abandoned even the timid and limited measures it had been proposing to give a limited vote to emigrants and even more limited representation, in the form of Seanad seats. There were few protests and the issue was quietly buried.

Differences within the Diaspora.

Tensions between the Irish in Ireland and the diaspora were paralleled by conflicts about the nature of ‘third space’ diasporic identities. The example of the New York Patrick’s Day parade is a case in point. On the one hand a bitter dispute persisted for a number of years between the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), organisers of the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation (ILGO), which has unsuccessfully sought the right to march in the parade. It is possible to see the AOH as the guardians of traditional emigrant Irishness in New York. ILGO represents an alternative Irishness, no longer defined by Catholicism or county affiliation. Ironically, US civil liberties legislation protects the right of the AOH to decide who should be allowed to march in their parade. But it can also be argued that the New York parade is seen as a representation of Irishness and that as such its exclusion of young gay Irish people is problematic.

There was a second conflict. Well-known writer and journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times that

The New York parade matters because it is the largest annual parade in the world. It is a global showcase for defining what it means to be Irish. And it is a peculiarly joyless affair - more a march, really, than a parade. Its atmosphere is one of determination rather than celebration (O’Toole 1998).

Decrying it as ‘redolent of the awful, stultifying, thinlipped official Irishness of the past’, O’Toole launched a savage attack on the New York parade for its Catholicism, male bias, militarism and homophobia, before going on to point out that St Patrick himself was not an Irishman, was a prisoner, felt a marginal figure all of his life and may even have had a less than orthodox sexual life.

It would make sense to re-imagine him as the patron saint of refugees, displaced persons, illegal aliens, sexual outcasts, prisoners, and children victimised by war. A parade in New York that included those groups would do Patrick, and Ireland, great honour. Instead, there is a ritual demonstration to the world of an Irishness defined by religious exclusivity, intolerance, and smug, swaggering power.

O’Toole’s attack and his call for official Ireland to dissociate itself from the parade attracted an angry response from New York Irish-American historian Marion Casey. Taking issue with his wish to re-define the parade, she states:

This opinion is in itself exclusive, intolerant and smug. How can Fintan O’Toole disdain alternative forms of being Irish? By what authority does the Irish State have the right “to push for a reimagining” of “Irish values and aspirations” in the United States? Didn’t Jean Butler and Michael Flatley - both Irish Americans - just re-imagine Irish dancing for Ireland? Why does the New York parade have to be the same as the Dublin parade? Why is it so offensive when Irish people who are Catholic parade on Fifth Avenue? Why should Ireland care if the Irish in New York prefer a more dignified display of ethnicity? “Outing” St Patrick is a spurious cover for the arrogant declaration that Irish culture must be uniform and that Dublin will now dictate a “new” definition of being Irish (Casey 1998).

O’Toole and Casey are both knowledgeable commentators and writers. What is striking about this exchange is the communications gulf. O’Toole is of course entitled to his views about Catholic Irish-America and the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, even if he puts them rather intemperately. But, liberal as he is, he seems unconscious of the illiberalism of insisting that the Irish Government should somehow attempt to dictate what should happen in Irish-America. This is the precise point about which Casey criticises him. Yet she, in her turn, cannot be fully in touch with contemporary Ireland today, or she would have realised that the notion that O’Toole ‘could readily have marched behind the banner of his home county, finding the “joy” he failed to see in the camaraderie of meeting friends and relations there’ held little meaning for anyone living in late twentieth century urban Ireland. Casey’s parting shot is to quote O’Toole himself

“Ireland is a diaspora, and as such is both a real place and a remembered place, both the far west of Europe and the home back east of the Irish-American. Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere.” (O’Toole 1994,, p.27, quoted by Casey).

There may have been a communications gulf to begin with, but the manner of its resolution is equally significant. The Irish Times now reaches a world-wide audience of millions, probably including much of that part of Irish-America which sees itself as ascriptively Irish. The virtual Irish community of the Internet is a place where those born in Ireland and resident there, and those born in Ireland or of Irish descent in other places, can meet on equal terms and engage in dialogue. The old concentric model of Irishness is dead. Perhaps it is easier to imagine contemporary Irishness as being like the Internet itself, decentred but characterised by nodes of greater or lesser significance, thematic as well as spatial, and providing a level of connectedness not previously possible.

6            Ireland: searching for new models of identity. Links between home and diasporic identities

Links between Home and Diasporic Identities

By the late 1980s and early 1990s the search for new Irish identities was in full swing in Ireland itself. By 1993 Ireland (and Britain) had been in the European Union for twenty years. The country was painfully emerging from a period of dramatic change in which various cultural and religious norms at home had begun to be challenged. At the same time the Northern troubles deeply affected both parts of the country.

For the Republic, the reaching out for new identities, however ersatz, was epitomised by the Irish national soccer squad. The team was itself a diasporic mix of colours, and of accents not usually associated with traditional Irishness, even if its iconic hero, Paul McGrath, was a Black Irishman with a strong Dublin accent. Journalist Niall O’Dowd summed up the change:

In olden times, Ireland’s icons were comely maidens strumming harps or perhaps mythical heroic warriors such as Cuchulainn, bravely besting the enemy in his lair. In more recent times, a flame-haired temptress called Maureen O’Hara fit the bill. Not any more. Shortly, the symbol of Ireland to millions worldwide is just as likely to be a Black athlete, speaking with a British accent, who knows just enough about Ireland to get by in a casual conversation. Welcome to the new (O’Dowd 1994).

Meantime, intellectuals were considering new deterritorialised forms of ethnicity, spurred on by post Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) interest in finding more lateral and imaginative ways of reconfiguring Irishness within the island and vis à vis Britain (Kearney 1988; Kearney 1990). Identity was decoupled from territoriality, in  part because many Irish people were caught in a dilemma of wanting to recognise and validate the assertion of Irishness on the part of those who wished to do so in Northern Ireland but refusing to accept that a territorial assertion of such identity justified a campaign of murder in the search for an unattainable closure which itself threatened the identities of those who refused to join up.

As the forces of change challenged the status quo from within, new cultural contestations emerged whereby Irish people in the diaspora no longer accepted that their culture was second-class compared to that of the ‘mother country’. Riverdance confirmed what the more marginal but hugely influential Pogues had already charted. Shane McGowan was the dominant figure in the Pogues and his Fairy Tale of New York, which manages to be cynical and sentimental at the same time, will probably endure as the archetypal Irish song of the 1980s, just as McGowan himself, simultaneously lucid and lost, London-Irish but rooted in Co. Tipperary, wise fool, typifies some of the cross-currents of identity in which a whole generation seemed to be caught.

While the increased interest in migration and diaspora was evident during this period, there are many striking omissions and shifts in emphasis. The centrality of the theme of emigration in Southern Irish life and culture, affirmed again in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is not matched by an equivalent interest in this theme in Northern Ireland, where for many a move to Britain was probably thought of as internal migration rather than emigration. North-South and South-North migration received little attention. The characterisation of many emigrants as well-educated globetrotters has stuck, even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that involuntary migrants from socially disadvantaged backgrounds were and are still a significant strand. There has been almost no attention paid to specific marginal groups such as the HIV-positive. More recently, the self-congratulatory tone of much official commentary on the current Irish economy and the sustained advertising campaigns by FáS to attract Irish emigrants home have obscured the reality that older, less well-heeled emigrants from previous generations are not welcome and that for them return is virtually impossible. 

A younger generation is now emerging for whom emigration does not (fortunately) have the central importance which it had for every previous generation for more than an century and a half. Irish emigration fell to an all-time low in the late 1990s and the predicted labour shortages in the Irish economy should mean that only those who want to will leave in future. On the other hand, the knowledge of and awareness of the emigrant experience, and the sense of connectedness which it conveyed, is also vanishing, adding greatly to an insular and frequently xenophobic attitude towards the outside world, as well as a frequent contempt for pre-1990s Ireland. This is one reason why Irish people, who should know better, sometimes fail to empathise with newly arrived immigrants to our own country.  It is striking that so many of those working in Ireland with immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees are themselves from an older generation of Irish people who have themselves been migrants or who have spent time as voluntary workers in the Majority World. By contrast, there is a relative absence of younger Irish people in such organisations.

This gap in understanding and awareness is dangerous. It is also disturbing, because we are in danger of interring our collective experience of emigration without ever having come to terms with it and with the callously unequal society which condoned it, or with the private and collective traumas which it caused and which have not yet been dealt with.  The evidence of an official and private Irish attitude ‘if you’ve got a problem, export it’ is everywhere. A disproportionate number of the homeless in London are Irish-born (Donnelly 2000). The case of HIV-positive people has already been referred to. The disproportionate numbers of women who left over the generations can only have reinforced an ongoing patriarchy. Many babies born in Ireland to unmarried women were given up for adoption, frequently abroad and often through coercion by religious orders acting in collusion with the State (Milotte 1998). Other unmarried and pregnant women simply left.

New identities in an era of immigration to Ireland.

A second and related issue is that Ireland is now, as pointed out earlier, becoming a multicultural and multiethnic society. We have relatively little experience on this island of the issues which this raises, and what little experience we have has not been glorious, to judge by the system of apartheid applied to members of the Traveller community. On the other hand, there is a wealth of experience - the good, the bad and the ugly, as perpetrators and victims, within the Irish diaspora. We can surely learn from this.

A contributor to a recent conference on asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland made a telling point in linking the Irish rejection of new immigrants with un-negotiated issues around emigration. It is as if, she said, the landscape is pregnant with invisible, sacred spaces, or no-spaces, once peopled by those who since left. Although gone, surrounded by a public silence, the resonance of their residual presence persists. The unspoken question is ‘why, or how, should we welcome strangers, when our own had to leave?’

The Irish as the Blacks of Europe?

In the search for new identities, an interesting variation on the ‘victim paradigm’ occurred in the early 1990s, with the theme embraced in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1991, p.9):

Your music should be abou' where you're from an' the sort o' people yeh come from. -Say it once, say it loud, I'm black an' I'm proud.'  They looked at him. '- James Brown' . . . They were stunned by what came next. 'The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads'. They nearly gasped: it was so true. 'An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin' everything. An' the northside Dubliners are the niggers o' Dublin'.

One critic has suggested that ‘expressions of identity in popular culture are now reaching outside of Ireland for global connections with the racially and economically oppressed, thereby undermining the possibility of a specific Irish identity’.

For Jimmy and the band, soul politics is self-explanatory, for it suggests at once class awareness, racial, and sexual emancipation. But it is the word “nigger,” appropriated as signifier for radical difference, which conveys the thrust of Jimmy’ s rationale. In itself the term subsumes the other aspects of Irish alienation and eclipses the necessity of argumentation. One should wonder, however, why the truth of Jimmy’s slogan strikes the band so plainly despite an absence of supporting evidence (Piroux 1998).

The notion that young Irish people in urban 1990s Ireland, disillusioned by traditional identity models, might have reached out for a more global one, while at the same time identifying themselves as victims within a postcolonial structure, is persuasive. Equally, its limits have become clear in recent years. ‘Blackness’ was all right as an abstract heroic self-construct, until actual Blacks began arriving in Ireland and were subjected to widespread racist insults and attacks in Irish towns and cities. To put it bluntly, The Commitments may be seen in retrospect as firmly anchored in early 1990s, not late 1990s, Ireland. This is not to say that the conditions of oppression and marginalisation of many working-class urban youth are not today as bad as they were ten years ago. But the appropriation of ‘black consciousness’ as a way of attempting to transcend the traditional bipolarities of urban/rural, bourgeois/working classes, nationalist/non-nationalist could only be seen in today’s Ireland as facile. It must be said that Doyle himself has taken a very active role in recent years in working with new immigrants in Ireland and helping to foster spaces for immigrant writers to find a voice in Ireland.

Emigrants Then and Immigrants Now

Still staying in the 1990s, it is significant that the new vocabulary of terms used in connection with asylum seekers and refugees arriving in Ireland is not usually connected at all with the lexicon of terms used to describe the Irish abroad, even though in some cases the same words recur. The Irish were ‘illegals’ in late 1980s USA and the term was used in a neutral or sympathetic fashion, but the same word is now used as a term of opprobrium when applied to asylum seekers in this country. This form of denial enables us mentally to separate the experiential universe of Irish emigrants, which has relevance and resonance for us, and the world of the asylum-seeker. This happens even though the experiences of the latter are directly comparable in significant respects with those of generations of Irish emigrants. 

Yet, this insistence on maintaining two parallel but unconnected universes comes at the very time when Irish people are also beginning to recognise the reality of their own hybridity and their own complex history. The disappearance of the old polarities can be charted in various ways. For instance, there were some who migrated and returned - and left again.

Most of my friends, too, had since married, and mentally moved on. It certainly wasn’t the same as the annual two-week visit. It began to dawn on me that maybe there was no going back. I couldn’t relate in the same way to those people anymore. They had no idea of what my life had become, and I had no idea what theirs was all about. I know now that I am irrevocably changed by my time in New York. That was one thing to which I had never given any consideration. But I wasn’t content to just accept things anymore. I had an opinion, and was not afraid to voice it. This did not make me popular. One friend told me I had become aggressive and overbearing. But I was personally offended by some aspects of the Irish status quo - from the still present blatant inequalities in the treatment of women to the disgracefully high taxes (Mullins 1996).

Another thoughtful press article focuses on the hybridity of accent - it is no longer a question of ‘hanging on’ to an ‘authentic’ Irish accent or ‘becoming the Other’. The author sees his evolving Dublin/Massachussets accent thus:

As I make this transition, I take heart when I hear other Irish emigrants with hybrid accents - cyclist Stephen Roche with his French airs, football manager Liam Brady whose accent is a perfect Dublin-London combination and Eamon Coghlan whose American pronunciations are much more understandable to me today. For me, they are not just kindred spirits, but hybrid heroes (McGovern 1995).

In their different ways, these perspectives suggest an acceptance of the shifting and contingent nature of identity. The inter-relationship of migrant and home society identities, and the lived individual experience of the migrant, have dissolved the old dichotomies for ever. Viewed in terms of entire societies, however, it is easy to detect a certain unease on the part of those who feel excluded. Irish attitudes towards Travellers have not grown more tolerant – perhaps the opposite. A fledging anti-immigrant, racist party, the Immigration Control Platform, has derisory public support but claims that it speaks for large numbers of the silent majority.  Those who purport to support the Irish language have almost entirely failed to make common cause with new migrant cultures even though it must be evident that the emergence of a strong rights-based support for minority cultures is the best and only chance of long-term survival, not the intolerant dream of a totally Irish-speaking Ireland, isolationist and xenophobic. Perhaps a glimmer of hope may lie in the unexpected success of TG4, Ireland’s Irish-language fourth television channel, which has proved remarkably popular with non-English speaking immigrants because of its exciting and innovative programme and the fact that many of its programmes are subtitled (in English!).

7            Northern perspectives; the Belfast Agreement

The rethinking of Irish identity, which continues to be such a central issue in Irish migration studies, has received particular attention in Northern Ireland. Identity construction in the broader political context has been studied by McCall (1999), while Buckley and Kenny (1995, p. 212) have drawn attention to how metaphors, such as sieges and invasions, provide the conceptual structure within which individual identities are constructed:

Ethnicity arises out of patterns of social interaction. Of these patterns, the most intractable are those founded in kinship. The reluctance to marry across the sectarian divide establishes patterns of practical interaction that span the generations. Upon these are built other patterns of interaction based on school, church, voluntary society, and geography, among other factors. And these in turn provide the basis for economic and political rivalry.

Cassidy and Trew (1998) have offered a ‘multi-dimensional approach’ to the construction of identities in Northern Ireland. Using social identity theory, Irwing and Stringer (2000) have investigated the pattern of intergroup differentiation between Catholics and Protestants and developed new measures of political attitudes in relation to changes due to political initiatives, cross-community reconciliation programmes and segregated and integrated schooling. Further work by Stringer and colleagues (2001) focuses on the impact of schooling on the social attitudes and identities of children. What is of particular interest to migration studies is how the construction of identity in the homeland and the development of political and other attitudes compares with that in the diaspora, and for this reason the five-nation study described by Roe and colleagues in this issue is particularly welcome (Roe, Lewis, Whyte, Binks, Ferguson, Trew, Bretherton, & Mellor, 2002).

The British-Irish Agreement (or Belfast Agreement or Good Friday Agreement—even the name is contested) may also be seen as an exercise in multiculturalism. It enshrines the recognition of difference within a framework of equality and sets out a complex network of new institutions and rights-based policies to create a space where all may feel cherished. Although not intended as multicultural in the classic Canadian or Australian sense, it provides an interesting template for a changing Ireland.

8            Towards a future research agenda; the role of the CMS and ICMS

In the light of the above comments, the research agendas of the ICMS and CMS may be seen as exploring new paradigms in migration studies, while not neglecting traditional approaches. This is taking place within the context of an Ireland which is itself beginning to recognise the plurality of its own traditions and identities and which is re-connecting in significant ways with its own diasporic communities. The following ongoing initiatives are especially relevant:

• The CMS Irish Emigration Database. This database of more than 30,000 records provides a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data and is drawn from multiple sources, including ship passenger lists, estate records, emigrant letters and other sources. These data have proved particularly useful for students taking Queen’s University Belfast’s MSSc in Irish Migration Studies, the only such programme in Ireland or elsewhere. The course is taught at the CMS and is generating a valuable body of new research with a particular emphasis on local studies. Many students taking the course already have a background in historical or archival studies and come from all parts of Northern Ireland and the adjacent counties of the Republic. The database, which is free text-searachable, can be consulted from within the Northern Ireland library system   and is currently available on-line with limited access for an experimental period.
• The ICMS oral archive The Global Irish. This archive has two components (a) Breaking the Silence: staying ‘at home’ in an emigrant society and (b) The Scattering, an archive of Irish-born migrants and persons of Irish descent around the world. Both projects will run on a joint North/South basis. When complete a substantial and fully searchable body of 800 interviews will be available on-line, along with appropriate contextual material, to be accessed for scholarly research purposes and by anyone with an interest in Ireland and Irish migration. The project will provide a permanent, user-friendly and accessible record of what it was like to live in Ireland in the mid-20^th century period of high emigration, or to have emigrnated from Ireland or be the descendant of Irish migrants. Its emphasis on the subject, using a life narrative approach,  will enable the tensions between history and memory to be explored in new ways. Its integrated approach and its use of leading-edge web-based technologies will make it a uniquely accessible record of Irish life and will be one of very few such projects anywhere.
• Within Ireland, both CMS and ICMS are concerned with ongoing research to explore the links between the Irish migration experience and the experiences of new immigrants here. ICMS’ Immigrant Lives uses the same technologies and methodologies as Breaking the Silence and The Scattering to profile recent immigrants in Ireland. The semi-structured interview format being employed has many points in common with those used for the Global Irish project, enabling comparative analyses to be conducted into the experiences of Irish migrants elsewhere and immigrants to Ireland.
• CMS’ ongoing enquiries into ascriptive approaches to identity are reflected in two recent conferences The Significance of 2^nd, 3^rd and nth generation identity and The Literature of Irish Exile Further interdisciplinary conferences will take place on a regular basis.
• CMS and ICMS are working on a joint project Mapping the Diaspora, using GIS technologies to portray the spatial distrubution of Irish-born migrants and their descendants within the diaspora.
• ICMS will be hosting an interesting project by a visiting scholars in 2002-2004. Dr Jason King has received a Government of Ireland fellowship to explore refugee discourses in the period after the Great Irish Famine as a means of interpreting current Irish discourses and policies concerning asylum seekers and refugees.
• CMS has a virtual exhibition on-line, The Art of European Migration, which is an on-going project designed to promote comparative migration studies
• ICMS is engaged, with support from external local partners from the statutory and voluntary sectors who together constitute the Southern Integrated Research Partnership in an ongoing series of policy and applied research projects on the reception and integration of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants in Ireland. Much of this work is comparative and interdisciplinary in nature and international in focus.

The independent development of two Centres for Migration Studies in both parts of the island in the late 1990s was a response to new needs generated by new ways of seeing and talking about the Irish migration tradition, largely centred on the term ‘diaspora’. Responses elsewhere to the similar sets of needs have been the establishment of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies in the University of Aberdeen (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/), which has a major research interest in migration and diaspora issues, and the growth of the Association of European Migration Institutions (http://www.aemi.dk/home.php3). Other important developments in this area hve been the pioneering work in local studies by Raymond Gillespie and colleagues at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of Ireland Maynooth (http://www.may.ie/nirsa/homepage.html) and the establishment under the directorshiop of Nicholas Canny of the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change at the National University of Ireland, Galway (http://www.nuigalway.ie/chs). If, as we have argued, we are moving into a new world where Irish identity is constructed in a much more ascriptive, fluid and decentred way, what are the implications for public policy? Can we rely on informal social processes to ensure benign outcomes to what for many may be bewildering change, or do we need to provide formal support and guidance through investment in new research, new information resources and new education programmes based on them? We believe the latter. 

The implications of the formal recognition of the relationship between homeland and diaspora through the amendment to Article 2 of the Republic’s Constitution are yet to be fully considered, let alone those for Northern Ireland, which, even though it has not made a parallel formal commitment, is likely to come under increasing pressure to demonstrate parity of esteem and show how it ‘cherishes’ those living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage. While the concept of ‘cherishing’ with its connotation of ‘protecting’ or ‘tending lovingly’ requires interrogation,  as evidence of  it in practiceone can already point to growing cross-Border co-operation in cultural tourism that assists visitors of Irish and Northern Irish ancestry in pursuit of their family history. Making such visitors to Ireland feel particularly welcome in archives, libraries and museums, heritage centres, and sites of historic monuments and buildings, north and south, is a powerful way of affirming their diasporic identities.

If, as we believe, new research, new information resources and new education programmes based on them are key ways of supporting, not to say cherishing, the positive development of identities within and outside Ireland, there is clearly a need for greater cross-Border and international co-operation between Centres such as ours, and also for Irish Migration Studies to be more inclusive of those concerned with the issue of diasporic identities  across the range of relevant academic disciplines, not least that of psychology.

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