Introduction
In 1990 the newly elected president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, recognised an estimated total of more than 70 million people as belonging the diasporic Irish ‘family’. The precise size of the multi-generational diaspora is unknowable but this figure highlights the very large numbers involved and provides a telling contrast with the present-day ‘home’ population of around 6.5 million. It reflects the long time period of substantial emigration, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the greatest ratio of the two populations being in 1891 when 38.8 per cent of those born in Ireland were living outside.
This decisive move to de-territorialise the nation signalled a remarkable change: as Richard Kearney put it ‘the Irish sense of belonging is no longer pre-determined by the map-lines of our island’. The struggle to achieve independence, unfinished in the six northern counties, has given a special resonance to the territorial claim. It was thus particularly symbolic that the clause stating ‘Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage’ should be substituted in the rewritten article 2 of the Irish constitution ratified in 1998 for the sixty-year old assertion of unity with the north. A different and much more diverse set of people was included in the Irish nation for the first time, bringing into view ‘Ireland's other history’.
Official reluctance to accept this change was illustrated by the distaste expressed in the Dáil in 1995 when Mary Robinson called on the home-based nation to ‘cherish the diaspora’. But realignment advanced rapidly over the next twenty years, reflected in an enthusiastic welcome for ‘The Gathering’ in 2013, especially in business quarters, and followed in 2014 by the appointment of a Minister for the Diaspora. For different reasons historians have not unanimously welcomed an extension of the ‘Irish’ story to include the diaspora. In 2005 Joe Lee fiercely attacked Don Akenson for the lack of precision in his definition, insisting that, without criteria for measurement, boundaries could not be drawn around this expanded Irish population. Describing diaspora as a ‘slippery concept’, he argued that indeterminacy about what constituted Irish identities, especially because of outmarriage and the role of personal choice, invalidated the academic use of the term.