The Irish diaspora () refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.
The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages,Flechner, Roy; Meeder, Sven (2017). The Irish in Early Medieval Europe: Identity, Culture and Religion. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 231–41. but it can be quantified only from around 1700. Since then, between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. That is more than the population of Ireland itself, which at its historical peak was 8.5 million on the eve of the Great Famine. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool. Those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States.J. Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845–1855 (2000)
After 1765, emigration from Ireland became a short, relentless and efficiently managed national enterprise.David P. B. Fitzpatrick, "Emigration, 1801–70", in A New History of Ireland, vol. V: Ireland under the Union, I, 1801–70, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1989), 569; David Fitzpatrick, "Emigration, 1871–1921", in A New History of Ireland, vol. VI: Ireland under the Union, II, 1870–1921, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1996), 607 In 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans claiming Irish as their primary ethnicity.
As recently as the second half of the 19th century, most Irish emigrants spoke Irish as their first language. That had social and cultural consequences for the cultivation of the language abroad, including innovations in journalism. The language continues to be cultivated abroad by a small minority as a literary and social medium.The cultural and linguistic contexts are discussed in: Ó hAnnracháin, Stiofán (ed.), 1979. Go Meiriceá Siar. An Clóchomhar Tta, Baile Átha Cliath; Ihde, Thomas W. (ed.), 1994. The Irish Language in the United States: a historical, sociolinguistic and applied linguistic survey. Bergin & Garvey. ; Noone, Val, 2012. Hidden Ireland in Victoria. Ballarat Historical Services. The Irish diaspora are largely assimilated in most countries outside Ireland after World War I. Seán Fleming is the Republic of Ireland's Minister of State for the Diaspora and Overseas Aid, a post which was established in 2014.
Definition
The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. The diaspora, broadly interpreted, contains all those known to have Irish ancestors, i.e., over 100 million people, which is more than fifteen times the population of the island of Ireland, which was about 6.4 million in 2011. It has been argued the idea of an Irish diaspora, as distinct from the old identification of Irishness with Ireland itself, was influenced by the perceived advent of global mobility and modernity. Irishness could now be identified with dispersed individuals and groups of Irish descent. But many of those individuals were the product of complex ethnic intermarriage in America and elsewhere, complicating the idea of a single line of descent. "Irishness" might then rely primarily on individual identification with an Irish diaspora.Nash, Catherine (2008), Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging, Syracuse University Press, pp. 33–50.
The Government of Ireland defines the Irish diaspora as all persons of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases where they were registered as Irish citizens in the Foreign Births Register held in every Irish diplomatic mission. Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller—some 3 million persons, of whom 1.47 million are Irish-born emigrants."Irish Emigration Patterns and Citizens Abroad" , Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Irish Abroad Unit, 20 June 2017, retrieved 28 November 2018 Given the island of Ireland's estimated population of 6.8 million in 2018, this is still a large ratio."Population and Migration Estimates" , Central Statistics Office, April 2018, retrieved 28 November 2018
However, the usage of Irish diaspora is generally not limited by citizenship status, thus leading to an estimated (and fluctuating) membership of up to 80 million persons—the second and more emotive definition. The Irish Government acknowledged this interpretation—although it did not acknowledge any legal obligations to persons in this larger diaspora—when Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland was amended in 1998 to read "[f]urthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage."
There are people of Irish descent abroad (including Irish speakers) who reject inclusion in an Irish "diaspora" and who designate their identity in other ways. They may see the diasporic label as something used by the Irish government for its own purposes.
Causes
The Irish, who were called by the Romans Scotti but called themselves Gaels, had raided and settled along the West Coast of Roman Britain, and numbers of them were allowed to settle within the province, where the Roman Army recruited many Irish into auxiliary units that were dispatched to the German frontier. The Attacotti, who were similarly recruited into the Roman army, may also have been Irish settlers in Britain. The movement between Ireland and the classical Britain may have been two-way as similarities between the medieval accounts of Túathal Techtmar and archaeological evidence indicate that the Romans may have supported the invasion and conquest of Ireland by Irish exiles from Britain with the hope of establishing a friendly ruler who could halt the raiding of Britain by the Irish, and some historians have also suggested that the Cruthin of the north of Ireland may have been Picts.Tuathal Techtmar: A Myth or Ancient Literary Evidence for a Roman Invasion? By R. 8. Warner, The Ulster Museum. After the departure of the Roman army, the Irish began increasing their footholds in Britain, with part of the north-West of the island annexed within the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata. In time, the Irish colonies became independent, merged with the Pictish kingdom and formed the basis of modern Scotland.
The traditionally Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland (the Highlands and Hebrides) are still referred to in the Gaelic language as a' Ghàidhealtachd ("the Gaeldom"). Irish monks and the Celtic Church engineered a wave of Irish emigration to Great Britain and Continental Europe and were possibly the first inhabitants of the Faroe Islands and Iceland.The 9th-century Irish monk and geographer Dicuil describes Iceland in his work Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae. The presence of early-medieval Ogham inscriptions, primarily in Wales, but also the Isle of Man and England, along with Irish narratives, like The Expulsion of the Déisi, support further waves of Irish migration to Britain. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, Great Britain and Continental Europe experienced Irish immigration of varying intensity, mostly from clerics and scholars who are collectively known as peregrini. Irish emigration to Western Europe, especially to Great Britain, has continued at a greater or lesser pace since then. Today, the ethnic Irish are the single largest minority group in both England and Scotland, most of whom eventually made it back to Ireland.
The dispersal of the Irish has been mainly to Britain or to countries colonised by Britain. England's political connection with Ireland began in 1155, when Pope Adrian IV issued a papal bull (known as Laudabiliter), which gave Henry II permission to invade Ireland as a means of strengthening the papacy's control over the Irish Church. That was followed in 1169 by the Norman invasion of Ireland, which was led by the general Richard de Clare, or Strongbow.
The English Crown did not attempt to assert full control of the island until after Henry VIII's repudiation of papal authority over the Church in England, and the subsequent rebellion of the Earl of Kildare in Ireland in 1534 threatened English hegemony there. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a papal possession, which was granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king and so in 1541, Henry VIII asserted England's claim to Ireland free from the papal overlordship by proclaiming himself King of Ireland.
After the Nine Years' War (1594 to 1603), political power rested in the hands of a Protestant Ascendancy minority and was marked by a Crown policy of plantation, which involved the arrival of thousands of English and Scottish Protestant settlers and the consequent displacement of the pre-plantation Roman Catholic landholders. As the military and political defeat of Gaelic Ireland became more pronounced in the early 17th century, sectarian conflict became a recurrent theme in Irish history.
Roman Catholics and members of dissenting Protestant denominations suffered severe political and economic privations from Penal Laws. The Irish Parliament was abolished in 1801 in the wake of the republican United Irishmen Rebellion, and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union.
The Great Famine during the 1840s saw a significant number of people flee from the island to all over the world. Between 1841 and 1851, as a result of death and mass emigration, mainly to Great Britain and North America, Ireland's population fell by over 2 million. In Connacht alone, the population fell by almost 30%.
Robert E. Kennedy explains, however, that the common argument that the mass emigration from Ireland was a "flight from famine" is not entirely correct. Firstly, the Irish had been coming to Great Britain to build canals there since the 18th century, and as soon as conditions in Ireland improved, their emigration did not slow down. After the famine ended, the four years that followed it were marked by more emigration than the four years of the blight. Kennedy argues that the famine was considered the final straw because it convinced more people to move even though several other factors influenced their decision.
By 1900, the population of Ireland was about half of its 1840 peak, and it continued to fall during the 20th century.
In the decades that followed independence in the 1920s, emigration accelerated for economic and social reasons, and with the preferred destination switching from the United States to Great Britain, over 500,000 emigrated in the 1950s and 450,000 in the 1980s, and over 3 million Irish citizens resided outside Ireland in 2017.
Irish people who still lived in Ireland were subjected to discrimination by Great Britain based on their religion. Evictions increased after the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, the passage of the Encumbered Estates' Court in 1849 and the removal of existing civil rights and class norms. Any remaining hope for change was squashed by the 1847 death of Daniel O'Connell, the political leader who championed liberal and reform causes and emancipation for Ireland's Catholics, and the failed rising of the Young Irelanders in 1848. More was to be gained by immigrating to America from Ireland, and the 1848 discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada lured away more.Kennedy, Robert E. ' 'The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility.' ' Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
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