Emigration has been an enduring and defining experience for the island of Ireland, usually associated with conceptions of failure, taboos of adulteration and myths of authenticity. While the pre-1922 Irish nationalist historical narrative had blamed that experience on the history of extirpation and persecution attendant on British imperialism, Ireland and Northern Ireland’s continuing haemorrhaging of youth, from the 1920s to the mid-1990s—and again during the recent recession—has on the one hand attested to and amplified a sense of national shame in the South, while in the North, successive pro-union governments remained largely silent for fear of the uncomfortable issues emigration raised in relation to a failing economy and ongoing sectarianism. Yet the relationship between home and diaspora has been compelling, socially, economically and culturally for those who claim an Irish heritage internationally and for those who inhabit the two states on the island of Ireland, which have both profited—though very differently, and with no shortage of ethno-national anxiety—by their capacity to harness that relationship in expedient ways. From the “homecoming” tourism so vital to Ireland and Northern Ireland’s hospitality sector to the self-affirming (or perhaps not-so affirming) representations of Ireland in Hollywood; from traction gained in the identity politics of hyphenated selves in Irish-American and Scots-Irish cultures, to the ever-present and influential engagement of American political clout in the recent Peace Process, Ireland’s diaspora culture still fashions identities, supports industries and creates important yet often contradictory relationships between home and abroad. But what do such hegemonising processes omit? What has been swept aside in the cultural and intellectual imaginary of globalised Irishness that might begin to unpick its inevitably homogenising drives? While Ireland lays claims to the cultural imaginary of its diaspora, is there adequate space for the historically diverse, fractured, dissonant and contested identities that make up the divided Ireland of the past and the diverse Ireland of today? What also of those more long-standing communities on the island who identify their Irishness differently, or indeed, who identify as British, Northern Irish, Anglo-Irish or Ulster-Scots? And what of those diasporas, like the Scots-Irish, whose Irishness differs from that of the East-coast Irish-American Catholics so often invoked in imagery of the Irish abroad?
Coming 15 years after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998, some 20 years after the onset of the Republic’s economic boom, with the unprecedented flow of inward migration that enabled, and 5 years after a seismic economic crash that saw youth emigration return to shocking levels, The Gathering 2013 homecoming organisation grappled with various meanings of Irishness, and with various representations of belonging, amid a deeply troubling and contradictory set of social and economic transformations. In its emphasis on commonality and transnational/transhistorical fixity, The Gathering was marked by tensions centred around Ireland’s diversity, fragmentation and rapid historical change. This was in some respects to crystallise a problematic relationship that has long existed between Ireland and its diaspora. Enda Delaney and Ciaran O’Neill (2016: 8) characterise Ireland’s connection to its diaspora and history of emigration as “contradictory […] seen as a burden, an embarrassment, or a mark of domestic and cultural failure.” But how important were these tensions to government agencies, when, in the final analysis, The Gathering was calculated to have attracted an extra 250–275,000 visitors in 2013, along with an additional €170 million in revenues, on promotional costs of less than a tenth of that amount (Backer and Hay 2015: 101)? Did The Gathering’s success also conveniently eclipse the embarrassing, returned spectre of mass Irish emigration, thus resulting “in a silencing of sentiment in relation to the exodus of mainly young people from Ireland in that exact period” (O’Leary and Negra 2016: 133)? Embattled by unprecedented, post-2008 Crash economic woes, and engulfed in the significant social unrest, mass mobilisations and civil disobedience that accompanied the “Right to Water” and emerging “Right to Change” movements from 2014—along with, among other issues, growing calls for marriage equality for LGBTQs (see Mackle, this volume) and the demand for rights to abortion spearheaded by the “Repeal the 8th” movement—the Republic has struggled in dealing with recent political agitation (Hearn 2015; Murphy 2016) that coincided with commemorations of a period of burgeoning republican, suffragist and socialist political struggle a century ago.
Ellen Hazelkorn and Andrew Gibson have noted (2016: 106) an increasing focus in Ireland on the economy to the detriment of more cultural concerns, observing, for instance, that, in the Irish public sphere, recent “discussion of constitutional reform (2012–2014) – a proxy for another discourse on national identity – largely bypassed A&H [arts and humanities].” This narrow focus on financial profitability—understandable as it has been amid the economic gloom—has extended across policy areas, including tourism and heritage. If The Gathering, as a phenomenon that “morphed into an exercise of social capital and community-centred activity” (Cochrane 2015: 143), was explicitly envisaged as an opportunity to harness the cultural to the economic, to what extent would the latter eclipse the former? As Feargal Cochrane argues in relation to Gabriel Byrne’s controversial characterisation of The Gathering as a “scam” (Byrne, The Irish Times, 5 November 2012):
But Byrne had drawn attention to diasporic resentment of the extent to which, as Alfred Markey (2014: 64) puts it, “the expression of Irish identity has so overwhelmingly, so totally been sequestered by mercantilist ideas.” The Gathering seemed to some the quintessence of this neoliberal appropriation, which cheapens and reifies a profoundly emotional and complex relationship between Ireland and its enormous diaspora. As Cochrane (2015: 145) notes, the focus on revenue often belies the fact that “diaspora tourism is driven by a series of deeply held emotions that go beyond the purely pragmatic.” On the one hand, crucial to The Gathering’s success (economically or otherwise) was its reliance on human contact and cultural events that tapped into these “deeply held emotions,” ranging from family reunions, to festivals, exhibition GAA matches, historical commemorations and tours, and across a myriad of general celebrations of Irishness. On the other hand, there was an air of superficiality and “paddywhackery” to The Gathering; which as Mary Gilmartin (2015: 1) notes, “displayed a particular and limited understanding of Irishness [and] conveniently evaded the reality of life in contemporary Ireland.” Here, emphasis is placed on an often loosely historical and questionably essentialising Irish imaginary. Claire Lynch (2014: 82) has articulated that The Gathering was driven by identity politics in which members of the diaspora were encouraged “to play a version of themselves […] an Irishness version 2.0.” This Irishness is at once, paradoxically, simplistically static and mesmerically pliable, “built on long-lost family connections, granting visitors a licence to express an identity that might otherwise be unstable” (Lynch 2014: 82). But where is the breaking point in this Irish imaginary’s exceptional elasticity? Ironically, an Irishness granted to those at a significant remove from Ireland is often less or indeed unavailable to hundreds of thousands who live on the island of Ireland. Gilmartin points to the 2011 census, in which 15.5% of the Republic’s population “did not describe themselves as ‘White Irish’” (2015: 2). In events and marketing material related to The Gathering, little reference was made to this newly diverse and radically changed Ireland, or of the possibility of belonging and Irishness (or more complicated versions of it) for those newcomers who have now made Ireland their home. Gilmartin (2015: 2) notes the lack of diversity or inclusivity on The Gathering’s flagship website, which “made scant reference to many of Ireland’s current residents” thus “legitimat[ing] a form of exclusion.”1the substance of the criticism was linked to the fact that in Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, diaspora tourism is heavily focused on its income-generation potential [… and] such return visits present a key revenue stream for homeland economies (2015: 144, 145).
In considering the “cultural commodification” of Ireland, Marion Markwick (2001: 48) notes that “ironically, perhaps, as Ireland has become a dynamic, modern and integrated European State, so too may marketing myths have become more successful in selling Ireland as a static, insular and remote place.” She observes (ibid.) the pervasive imagery of “a peripheral and primitive, but never productive Ireland,” that while there is “commercial merit in promoting such images […] this poses questions (including some ethical ones) about the possible negative effect of these images. […] Can contradictory messages be successfully juxtaposed or blended?” As David Lloyd (2013: para. 11) has claimed of the common “diasporic imaginary” in Ireland after the Celtic Tiger, “the new Irish diasporic discourse does not give rise to an alternative politics founded in the critique of the nation-state from the place of displacement but is bound instead to an almost euphoric disavowal of the successive violences of Irish history.” A rich tapestry of deeply critical social commentary emerges in the history of the Irish abroad, furnishing instances of reflection on Ireland and emigrant experience that are evidently still salient today. They recommend what Lloyd has advocated in calling for a “continual mindfulness” in how we conceptualise the Irish diaspora which “can furnish the basis for movements of solidarity with other diasporas” (2013: para. 17). Here the backward glance of the modern diaspora and the frequently commodifying designs of those meeting it call for mediation by a robust critical engagement with the ways in which the heritage and tourism policies of “Ireland Inc.” are shaping our sense of transnational Irishness today.
Micheál Ó hAodha and Máirtín Ó Catháin (2014: ix) have attested that “the recent past has witnessed a new fluidity in concepts of Irishness and a reappraisal of its frames of articulation including the nexus that is Ireland and the Irish, and the concepts that are ‘at home’ and abroad.” Yet little of this fluidity and reappraisal was evident in The Gathering as it struggled to reconcile an arguably outmoded diaspora imaginary with the realities of a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland that produced a new generation of Irish economic migrants. If, in the Republic, much of the controversy surrounding The Gathering’s year-long...