  Tempo Exterior nº 5 segunda época -
xullo/decembro 2002
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| The Development of Irish Diaspora Studies: success and failure in a scholarly enterprise |
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Patrick O’Sullivan |
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I am grateful to my colleagues in Tempo Exterior, and my colleagues in Galicia, for this invitation to write about the study of the Irish Diaspora. It will become clear that this is an area of research and study which I regard as intrinsically inter-disciplinary and comparative – and I value this opportunity to learn from colleagues. In an article of this size I will have to assume some knowledge of the patterns of Irish history, and some knowledge of the patterns of Irish migration – though I will clarify detail where I think that absolutely necessary. But, in any case, what we are considering here is, as it were, not the thing itself, but the ways in which the thing might be considered and studied, and the ways in which knowledge might be shared. In this article, given the nature of the invitation from Tempo Exterior, I have placed in the foreground my own preoccupations and my own efforts. I suppose that this decision can be defended – in that I demonstrate what one person, with very limited resources, can accomplish in a specific field. But I want also to acknowledge the work of my friends and colleagues within Irish Diaspora Studies throughout the world. Scholarship is always a collaborative enterprise, and I try, below, to give examples of collaboration at work. Each person does what she or he can do, in specific circumstances. And, if I give an account of the things that I have been able to do, I must be aware that my work is only part of larger enterprises(1).
A number of my other interests and preoccupations come together to shape my interest in the development of Irish Diaspora Studies. One of those background interests is my study of the nature of academic disciplines, and the problems that arise when we try to develop an interdisciplinary approach to a specific area of research or concern. I can well understand why it might be necessary to chop up ‘the human condition’ into bite size chunks, so that each academic discipline can apply its own ground rules, use its own methods, and respond to its own preoccupations. But why, when the time came to put the patient back together, were there no longer any ground rules? Often those of us who engage in these debates find ourselves quoting Thomas Kuhn – without having to agree wholeheartedly with Kuhn - and in turn echoing Kuhn’s own quote from Copernicus, the description given by Copernicus of the field of astronomy before his own breakthrough. ‘It is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other the result would be more monster than man(2)’. We are, of course, immediately within huge debates about the nature of knowledge, how some kinds of knowledge seem to be able to click together, to be genuinely cumulative, whilst others seem to need to go over the same ground again and again. It is not simply a matter of sciences versus arts or humanities. For, anticipating my argument, I can say that our approach to Irish Diaspora Studies forces us to interrogate much that has passed for science in the past, or still passes for science, and much that passes for knowledge. For example, one of the themes we are still teasing out is the effects of nineteenth century and early twentieth century theories of ‘race’ on the study of the Irish, and on Irish understanding of ourselves. My own approach to these debates is quite prosaic. No one academic discipline is going to tell us everything we want to know about the Irish Diaspora. The study of migration, emigration, immigration, population movements, flight, scattering, networks, transnational communities, diaspora – this study demands an interdisciplinary approach. This statement is echoed throughout the study of migration and diaspora(3). The study of diaspora can be regarded as a specific sub-section of the more general study of ‘the human condition’. It is the nature of the phenomenon under study that demands the interdisciplinary approach. If we look at the more extreme statements of the interdisciplinary ideal, then the ideal is quite impossible(4). In a formulation which has annoyed students, I say: yes, interdisciplinarity is impossible, but it happens all the time. The easiest way to show that the interdisciplinary process happens all the time is to invent some new verbs: for example, to verb to Foucault, the verb to Lacan, the verb to Baudrillard. If your particular discipline has been Foucaulted, then you will know exactly what I mean. If your discipline has not yet been Foucaulted, then we wait with anticipation, and sympathy. And yet we can note in passing how some at first seemingly radical observations by Foucault have very quickly become received wisdom. Knowledge is shaped by power? Yes, of course it is. What else did we expect? This observation has particular resonance if we study – or are members of – a powerless group: peasants, women, children, immigrants, minorities… The Irish. Since, whether we like it or not, interdisciplinarity happens all the time, then the choice for scholars is fairly simple: we can be its victims or its masters. Part of the charm, and – it has to be said - the intellectual fun, of the interdisciplinary approach is that we can watch and map the spread of specific theories, and buzz words, across the different disciplines. Acting as the intellectual equivalent of a virus warning, we can alert colleagues to likely dangers and likely effects. But, of course there is nothing so practical as a good theory. The interdisciplinary approach is constantly searching for good theory, theory that will marshal our material, or open up new lines of thought and enquiry. We are wary of theories that try to demonstrate the impossibility of knowledge – though, as I have said, our project demands that we are often critical about what passes for knowledge. In a sense, we have cut one knot by being specific about our desire for knowledge. What is it that we want knowledge of? The Irish Diaspora, its causes and consequences. If , as I say, no one academic discipline is going to tell us everything we want to know about the Irish Diaspora, then one possible defence of Irish Diaspora Studies is that we demonstrate a post-modern approach to post-modernism – making use of the new verb ‘to Lyotard’, I could say that we try to distinguish ‘noise’ from ‘knowledge’. And that is the next issue that I need to look at – for the amount of ‘noise’ around the study of the Irish Diaspora can be overwhelming.
There is a problem which I do not labour in my own published works. Yet the size of the problem cannot be over-stated – for there is the distinct possibility that the nature of this problem will distort everything we do. Perhaps the most interesting statement of the problem was made by the nineteenth century Irish activist and polemicist, John Mitchel. Mitchel’s Jail Journal, published in 1854, begins, ‘England has been left in possession not only of the Soil of Ireland with all that grows and lives thereon, to her own use, but in possession of the world’s ear also. She may pour into it what tale she will: and all mankind will believe her(5)’. Throughout much of its modern history the island of Ireland has been a part of the British Empire, an entity which (in its various manifestations) demanded loyalty from its subjects and which defined disloyalty as treason. One ‘grand narrative’ of Irish history sees that history as reaching its culmination in 1922, with the formation of an independent Irish state on (part of) the island of Ireland. Cardinal Mannix, the Irish-born, Irish nationalist, and the influential leader of Australian Catholicism at the time of World War I, said in 1916: ‘Our loyalty is freely questioned. The answer is that Irishmen are as loyal to the empire to which, fortunately or unfortunately, they belong, as self-respecting people could be under the circumstances(6)...’. Circumstances change. Patrick Quinlivan, the historian of the Fenians, the Diaspora-wide, secret Irish revolutionary organisation of the late nineteenth century, has said that the aims of the Fenians have been largely achieved, whilst the aims of the nineteenth century British Government are ‘filed with those of Nineveh(7)...’. The entity, the British Empire, which shaped discourses, which poured tales into the world’s ear, no longer exists. But, to a certain extent, circumstances do not change. We can ask, in what fashion does awareness of the words ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irish’ enter the consciousness of the world in our own time? It is certainly through news coverage of the over thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, that portion of the island of Ireland which remains part of the United Kingdom. In any case, those centuries of conflict, reinforced by the recent decades of conflict, have left a strange legacy, a cumulative English discourse of ‘the Irish’, which portrays the Irish as both quaint and dangerous. I am not sure to what extent this pattern can be put into a comparative context. Certainly, the other small countries which were absorbed into the ‘United Kingdom’ – Scotland and Wales – have become weary of the ways in which their economies and culture are controlled from London. And, in the wider world, certainly this ‘Irish/English’ duality is a part of the ‘native/settler’ duality: this, influenced by Sartre and Fanon, I have analysed elsewhere(8). A colleague who shares my interest in the culture of Japan (another, former imperialist, island nation whose people write beautiful poetry), tells me that the Japanese speak of the Koreans much like the English speak of the Irish(9). There are many dangers here for the scholar of Ireland and the scholar of the Irish Diaspora. Many of our sources for the history of the Irish are English, or are shaped by English perceptions of the ‘Irish Question’. For example, earlier this year we were asked to give advice to the Public Record Office of England and Wales. The PRO intended to develop a project, a web site, with lottery funding, which would demonstrate something of what was held in these huge archives about four immigrant groups in Britain: East European Jews, immigrants from the Caribbean, from South Asia, and from Ireland. Now, Britain – like, I think, most of the former European imperial and colonial states – has great difficulty in seeing itself as an immigrant-receiving country. So that this initiative, by the great archive of the British state, seemed to us well worth supporting. But – after some preliminary discussion – we could already see familiar patterns emerging. We explained to the archivists that we already know what was held in the archives of England about the Irish. If you hit the search button marked ‘Irish’ what you will get is much about ‘the Irish Question’ as defined by that tradition within British statecraft and historiography. And you would get much about the Irish as a problem group within British cities. And so it proved. So that there was a danger that the Public Record Office would simply collude with this systematic and systemic disparagement of the Irish within the research record – if it simply presented this archival material on its web site. But we also explained to the archivists that we are quite used to this pattern. Like many of those who study the hidden and the dispossessed, who try to hear the voices of the silenced, we are used to working ‘against the grain’ (as the phrase is) of the research record and the archives. We also know that there is much inside those archives of interest to us – for example it is in the Coroner’s Court archives of England and Wales that my colleague, Frank Neal, has found authentic, first person narratives of Irish Famine refugees and famine survivors of the 1840s(10). A recurring pattern within the ‘native/settler’ duality is the use of humour, whereby the ‘settler’ tells disparaging jokes based on the whimsical stupidity of the ‘native’. These jokes, in English culture, are traditionally told as ‘Irish jokes’. And there is much of this sort of material in the archives. Anyone who loves humankind’s traditional oral literature has great affection for these jokes and stories. There is always a sense of joy when we meet them in new contexts. But the telling of the stories in the Irish/English, ‘native/settler’ context is an exercise in power, pure and simple. They are certainly part of the archive, part of the historical record – is the record to be denied or sanitised? There is a fairly obvious solution – a small number of key essays, by myself, by Christie Davies and others, have analysed this kind of humour in its Irish/English context(11). We have agreed to make our essays freely available to the web site of the Public Record Office, so that this sort of humorous material can immediately be seen in context. John Mitchel spoke of ‘England’ having ‘the world’s ear’. Over the centuries a long procession of commentators have visited Ireland, visitors from England or from other parts of the world, with good will or ill will(12). Sometimes these will be very significant figures within English culture or literature, like Edmund Spenser, Arthur Young or Thomas Carlyle. Non-English visitors will usually be guests of England, or guests of English landowners, and already have perceptions shaped by English sources. From the eighteenth century onward there is usually the background suggestion that England, with its powerful economy and dispossessed peasantry, is the norm or the ideal. It is intriguing how often we are offered essentially psychological explanations of the woes of Ireland – analysis of the ‘personality’ of the peasant. Because these texts tend to be readily available they have long been a major source within Irish historiography. It will be recognised that the point being made here is very like that made by Edward Said in Orientalism – a point which Said has himself acknowledged(13). But the difficulty of applying a straightforward ‘post-colonial’ approach to the history of Ireland are obvious – since the Irish (like many of the small nations of Europe) are victims, accomplices and beneficiaries of British and other European imperialisms. Sometimes, of course, these foreign commentators on Ireland are just plain wrong. The liberal German, Moritz Julius Bonn describes his meeting with Michael Davitt, whom he describes as a wild-eyed fanatic who had lost an arm in a bomb outrage(14). In fact, Michael Davitt lost his right arm at the age of 11 in 1857. He was a child worker in a textile mill in Lancashire, England - mill machinery crushed his arm(15). So, in interpreting the empty sleeve, what was a narrative of the maimed, migrant child becomes evidence of Irish violence and irrationality. Thus the world reads ‘Irishness’. I have corresponded with my friend and colleague in Brazil, Laura Izarra, about our shared enjoyment of the writings of Borges. I have collected notes on mentions of the Irish in the works of Borges – I have written an unpublished essay on Borges and the Irish. The essay is unpublished because it seems to me not worth the bother of publishing – for ‘the Irishman’ in Borges is entirely mediated through Borges’ love of English literature(16). Another example would be representations of Ireland and the Irish in cinema, especially in thrillers emanating from the USA, where the plots and conventions of film noir have – as is the way – been relocated to a site of current conflict(17). Northern Ireland. Again we see notions of loyalty/disloyalty built around the ‘Irish’ persona. I do not say, of course, that Irish people do not have issues about loyalty/disloyalty. All diasporic peoples face such conflicts, as families fragment, new families are formed, old countries make demands and new countries make new demands. We Irish have a national day, St. Patrick’s Day, which we value and which we have taken with us all over the world. Indeed, in the work of Cronin and Adair, we have a diaspora-wide study of St. Patrick’s Day, and the changing nature of the celebrations over time and in different places. Indeed, Cronin and Adair show clearly that there have long been quarrels over ownership of St. Patrick’s Day – those who control the celebration control definitions of ‘Irishness(18)’. Complete the following sentence: you cannot really be Irish unless you… What are we to make then of the weird and worrying representations of St. Patrick’s Day on television, particularly in American situation comedies or cartoons. Recently I have watched, open-mouthed, St. Patrick’s Day episodes of The Simpsons and Happy Days on cable television. So much alcohol, so much stupidity… You cannot really be Irish unless you… get very drunk on St. Patrick’s Day. It is possible to respond with anger to all this, this mix of prejudice and lazy thinking – and anger is always available as a source of energy. The danger for scholarship is more subtle. Given the nature of the evidence, the archival record, the sources, the discourse so far, it is in fact far easier to study anti-Irish prejudices and stereotypes of the ‘Irish’ than it is to study real Irish people who actually lived. This would be to develop a ‘media studies’ approach to Irish Studies and Irish Diaspora Studies. As, I think, I have made clear, I have the greatest respect for those who adopt this approach. It is a necessary step. But it is not what I want to do. I should now also mention the Irish relationship with language. You cannot really be Irish unless you… speak the Irish language. Political and cultural activists must build their projects with the material to hand – I might use the French word ‘bricolage’, handyman’s work, if not word had not already been copyrighted by Levi-Strauss. The Irish activists of the nineteenth century focused on the declining Irish language as one marker of identity, and Irish writers and poets in the twentieth century have maintained a troubled relationship with the language. Article 8 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland says that: ‘The Irish language as the national language is the first official language.’ And, ‘The English language is recognized as a second official language.’ In fact, attempts to halt the decline of the Irish language have not been successful – one shrewd commentator has observed that task of maintaining the Irish language was given to two groups of people who had little power to shape events: teachers and children(19). Now, I think there are interesting scholarly issues here – I think that the focus on Irish as a ‘national language’ within Ireland means that we have lost sight of Irish as a diasporic language, and I am anxious to develop projects which track the use of the Irish language outside Ireland. But we must listen to an Irishman, writing home in the nineteenth century, in Irish, from America: ‘I gcuntas Dé múin Béarla do na leanbhain…’ For God’s sake teach the children English. And he continues, in Irish, Without English the children will be blind like the other fools who have come out here(20). Over the past two centuries the Irish Diaspora, for the most part, has been and is a phenomenon within the English-speaking world. In the nineteenth century the main country of destination was the United States of America, with England (or Britain, Ireland’s neighbouring island) also very important. In the twentieth century the main destination was Britain, with the USA still very important. The Irish are now an English-speaking people, in a world where English is becoming a global language. A number of commentators have observed that the very language we speak contains within it those ‘native/settler’ patterns outlined above, where the word ‘Irish’, and associated words (like the popular first name ‘Patrick’ or ‘Paddy’) are associated with violence, bad temper, stupidity and untrustworthiness. The very word ‘Ireland’ offered a pun to the pun-loving sixteenth century English poets – the land of ire, of anger. There is an English expression, still in common use – behaviour that is totally unacceptable, unforgivable, uncivilised, is described as ‘beyond the Pale’. A ‘pale’ is a simple English word, meaning fence or boundary. In the times of English conquest of Ireland ‘The Pale’ circumscribed the city of Dublin, and marked the then extent of English rule. ‘Beyond the Pale’ lived the wild, unconquered Irish.
Keeping, for the moment, ‘scare quotes’ around the word ‘Irish’, we can now look at some of the ways in which research material is collected and organised, at organising ideas and structures. Some of these structures will be the traditional academic disciplines themselves – some (acknowledging that by now we are well and truly Foucaulted) will be actual physical buildings. To a certain extent we are continuing our theme of hitting the search button marked ‘Irish’, gathering material about the ‘Irish’ as we find it within specific disciplines and systems of research and discussion. These are often very difficult to unpack, because you can have layer after layer of unquestioned research and assertion going back for several decades within academia. And, again, it is our search for knowledge that forces us to ask questions. To give but one example of the ways in which we who study the Irish must master these wider debates, let us look at the influence of what is called Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis – briefly, the suggestion that there is some sort of connection between the rise of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. A massive amount of research literature and commentary has arisen around this suggestion. And I should alert you now to one of the miseries of the interdisciplinary approach – that we are going to have to wade through huge amounts of verbiage on one specific theme, master it, and maybe ultimately decide that it is not helpful or that it is irrelevant. But of course that theme will have shaped, or distorted, the research record. Historians of Europe have lost interest in the Protestant ethic thesis – Braudel said that he was ‘allergic’ to it(21). The plain truth is that we now know too much about the rise of capitalism in Europe to be over-impressed by Weber’s suggestion. Historians of the United States of America, however, do remain impressed – indeed, Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis has become one of the foundation myths of the United States. The social sciences generally still like their Weber – partly, I think, as a corrective to Marx, Weber is taught as showing the importance of ideas in shaping history and behaviour. Weber turns up again and again in management theory and in some – often lazy – management research(22). Within this massive literature on Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis the Irish find themselves in a curiously vulnerable position. As we have seen, Ireland, as the neighbour of the first industrialised state, England, conquered by that state and incorporated into the super-state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is continually involved in compare and contrast exercises, which contrast England’s prosperity with Ireland’s poverty, England’s Protestantism with Ireland’s Catholicism. Indeed, a possible area of exploration might be how far Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis is simply one manifestation of standard Protestant anti-Catholic polemic of the late nineteenth century. Important parts of Weber’s own evidence come to him from English sources – Thomas Carlyle, for example – and from nineteenth century Britain’s renewed interest in English Protestant polemic of the seventeenth century. One key quotation in Weber is from Cromwell’s Declaration of War against the Irish. In the social sciences – particularly in research into work and management – the Irish, as mostly Catholic, conveniently English-speaking, find themselves dragged, again and again, into pieces of research, often very tiny, but cumulatively giving the impression that there is indeed something here to be studied. There is one odd thing about all these words about capitalism in its Protestant and Catholic manifestations. There were in England and in Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards a series of laws for ‘the suppression of popery’. These laws controlled or limited Catholic ownership of land, access to land, and access to the professions – versions of the laws in England also controlled where Catholics could live. These ‘anti-popery’ laws are remembered in traditional Irish historiography and in folkloric versions of Irish history as the ‘Penal Laws’. Opinion as to the true purpose of these laws varies, as does opinion as to their effectiveness. But the fact remains that there was a series of laws which mounted an assault on the economic power and the economic activity of Catholics. Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis is a suggestion about economic power and economic activity. Yet there is little or no mention of these ‘Penal Laws’ in all the discussion of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. In fact – acknowledging the usual difficulty of proving a negative – I have yet to find any mention of these ‘Penal Laws’ in a Weber-influenced works of sociology. We have, of course, side-stepped the moral, ethical and the practical issues, about seeking of profit, ‘globalisation’, the spread of predatory capitalism, and so on. Further, there is always a temptation for Irish and Catholic commentators to, in effect, embrace Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, and see here evidence of the religiosity, the otherworldliness, the spirituality of the Irish. My own conclusion, in Religion and Identity, Volume 5 of my series The Irish World Wide, was that ‘if the migrant Irish, Catholic and Protestant, go forth with any single world-wide task then (and I do not know whether to report this with pride or shame) that task is to disprove the Weber thesis(23)’. We find, as we progress, a number of these tangled knots of research and assertion. There is space here to only briefly mention a few. Indeed each of these knots would require its own chapter – or book – to fully elucidate the complexities and to clarify in what ways they shape the discourse of the ‘Irish’. For example, there is a tangle of material which focuses on the fact that ‘the Irish were a rural people in Ireland, a city people in the United states…’, as if that were some sort of anomaly(24). But that is precisely how cities work – the recurring gift of free adults from rural areas to the growing city powers city prosperity(25). In the background to this American synthesis we can detect the influence on historians of Chicago School sociology, with its focus on the ‘problem’ of the immigrant, plus the influence of another American foundation myth, a ‘valorisation’ of the West, Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’. This, oddly, connects with another foundation myth, another ‘valorisation’ of another West within Ireland, which sees the rural life style of the West of Ireland as the quintessence of ‘Irishness(26)’. Much of the historiography of the Irish in Britain focuses on the Irish working poor, in an agenda that was, in effect, set for us by ‘the condition of England’ debates of the 1830s. Many debates within Irish Diaspora Studies are statistics-led. And this can be a good thing – it was, for example, through statistical analysis that the importance of women within the patterns of Irish migration was most effectively brought to the attention of the scholarly world. But a statistics-led approach unintentionally precludes a more complete analysis of the Irish migration experience. Statistics will identify clusters, which will, of course, be clusters of Irish working poor in slums – in the familiar pattern through which migrants enter cities. The danger of simply colluding with the ‘condition of England’ and similar debates is obvious. The result may be simple repetition (albeit with cautions and shaking of heads) of the by now familiar and well-studied hostility towards the Irish poor, as job-stealing, fever-carrying, morally contagious, violent, lazy and rebellious. There are similar, and connected, tangles of research and assertion around other themes. You will find much about the Irish as a ‘martial race’ people, which has linked with an Irish search for acceptance and self-esteem – but which seems ultimately to arise out of the migrant search for work and the tendency of empires to find useful the notion of the ‘ethnic soldier(27)’. There is a cluster of material around the Irish and mental health issues, especially problems of alcohol abuse. It will be appreciated that there are delicate issues here, which we are exploring in a series of research projects(28). People – especially a migrant people – need real knowledge about the real problems they might face. But how far has the research record already been mis-shaped by prejudice and preconceptions? It should be clear by now that you could spend an entire scholarly or academic lifetime – indeed several lifetimes – studying prejudice, preconceptions, stereotypes of the ‘Irish’ and the ways in which these have entered academic structures and distorted the research record. In an Ireland that is economically successful, and no longer a gross exporter of human beings, the Irish of Ireland are increasing protected from all this. It is, perhaps, a peculiar defence of political independence that, at the very least, it means that you are not insulted in your own country.
Oppression, compensation, contribution By the late 1980s I had, for some time, been tracking the ways in which the Irish Diaspora was discussed, researched, studied, taught, and written about. I had been making my own contributions to that study. In the 1990s I was able to make my most substantial contribution – so far. I put in place networks to develop, edit and publish, with Leicester University Press, the six volume series of scholarly volumes, The Irish World Wide. The six volumes appeared regularly from 1992 to 1997 – the paperbacks appeared from 1997 to 2000(29). This is not the place to report on the vicissitudes of publishing a scholarly series in the publishing climate of the 1990s. There were vicissitudes. But the project was seen through to completion, and it is a tribute to the courage of the publishers and the patience and hard work of the contributors that the project was completed. That project was both a report and a demonstration. It reported on the ‘state of play’; within Irish Diaspora Studies in the early 1990s. It demonstrated which academic disciplines were contributing to that study, and how they were contributing(30). It also explored the nature of their contributions, trying to see patterns and gaps in the research record. One of the things that became clear as The Irish World Wide project came together was that it would have been quite wrong to simply present the edited chapters without context or background. Some chapters came from the very centre of the debates, and tangles of comment and research, outlined above. Much work went into my seven Introductions, the General Introduction to the series and the six individual Introductions to the six themed volumes. I had, for example, to decide how you would reference those instances where the study of the Irish Diaspora connected with a knot of research literature. It would have been insufficient to source the debates simply within the latest manifestation, with the latest buzz words - this would have the effect of hiding from the reader the complexity, the long history, of these debates. So, there arose my ‘something old/something new’ style of referencing – just enough to not ignore the complexity. In writing my Introductions I began to think about two words which I had met, again and again, in discussion and reading, and which we have met in this article: oppression and contribution. In much writing about the Irish Diaspora oppression is presented as the sufficient and only cause of Irish emigration, linking with the description of emigration as ‘exile’ in ways that precluded other kinds of analysis, and often with scant regard for the normal rules of historical evidence and chronology. In studies of the Irish in the new, host countries, their contribution to the well-being of their new country is stressed – usually economic contribution, but often military service. This – in what I have called the ‘argument from Fredericksburg’ – is a very strong theme within Irish-American historiography(31). I recalled that I had seen those two words, oppression and contribution, elsewhere, as part of a continuum: oppression, compensation, contribution. My source was, of course, within feminist historian Gerda Lerner’s categorisation of women’s history: Lerner pointed out that most writing on women fell into those three categories: accounts of male oppression of women led to the search for ‘compensation’ (accounts of ‘famous’ or ‘extraordinary’ women), and a report on women’s contribution, economically or politically. This meant that the study of women’s history was shaped by the oppressor, and gave no account of women ‘functioning in that male-defined world on their own terms(32)’. My conclusion was that Lerner had noticed a general pattern: that when an oppressed group, any oppressed group, begins to collect material about its own history, and begins to write that history, we get a historiography which falls into the pattern: oppression, compensation, contribution. Some of the reasons for this we have discussed already in this paper. The reasons for such an approach are understandable. But it is an approach that conspires with the oppressor to let the oppressor shape the agenda, it is tendentious, and it leaves out a great deal. This, as theory goes, is fairly rough and ready. But I am told that students like it – it has the merit of categorising material before it even reaches us(33). It also has predictive value – if we are going to go down that ‘scientific’ road(34). I need to stress that if I put ‘scare quotes’ around the word ‘oppression’ then I am not thereby suggesting that no oppression took place. In Lerner’s formulation, ‘oppression, compensation, contribution’ are not categories of experience – they are kinds of writing. There does not seem to be any way of avoiding this kind of writing – and I am not sure that we would really want to. But it can be transcended. Like some of the dangers listed above, the problems of the sources, the danger of studying only prejudice, the danger of the ‘media studies’ approach, once we are alerted, we can see ways forward. And, yes, the next time we hear a joke about a stupid Irishman, we can compensate by listing our four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature(35). Despite vicissitudes, The Irish World Wide project seems to have done its work. It was, for example, gratifying to be sent a recent special issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History containing a series of articles on ‘Teaching Irish-American history’, and to see there the chapters of The Irish World Wide, used in teaching and working as they were designed to work(36). The creative migrant The Irish World Wide was originally planned as a five volume series. And it is a mark of the courage of the publishers that they did not blink when I said I wanted to add an extra volume on the relationship between the arts and diaspora – this became Volume 4, The Creative Migrant, published in 1994. This volume includes chapters on autobiography, poetry, the theatre, cinema, music and dance – as phenomena of the diaspora. Ethnic identities tend to coalesce around leisure activities. Rural and customary work practices rarely transfer from the old country to the new country. It is in spare time that identity can be nursed and comforted. We have seen the example of St. Patrick’s Day. Other things happen. There is often an overt commodification of culture – as the sometimes covert commodification of culture in the homeland become more visible. Sometimes the diaspora will value parts of the culture that the homeland has no time for. From 1903 to 1922 Francis O’Neill, an Irish born policeman in Chicago, USA, published five compilations of Irish folk music, and two further books of reminiscences. O’Neill discovered that he was ideally placed in Chicago to be a collector of Irish folk music: for there could be found ‘exiles from all of Ireland’s thirty-two counties…’ O’Neill himself never expected his efforts on behalf of Irish traditional music to be appreciated or understood, ‘in the face of both racial and national indifference…’ In fact, O’Neill’s main collection, 1001 Gems, is generally revered as The Book by Irish musicians. The precious Captain Francis O’Neill Collection of Irish Music is housed in the Library of the University of Notre Dame, Chicago. This collection would not have been possible – and would most probably have not been valued – in the Ireland of O’Neill’s lifetime. In 1914, Michael Coleman, a fiddle player from Sligo, Ireland, settled in the USA. The burgeoning American recording industry of the 1920s went to the Irish dance scene in the large American cities, to make sound recordings for the ‘ethnic’ market. Records by Coleman and other Sligo fiddle players were sent back to Ireland by Irish emigrants. All over Ireland these ‘cultural remittances’ spread the ‘Sligo fiddle style’ – jaunty, flamboyant, highly ornamented – and all but destroyed the more austere music styles of other regions. One player has told how, anticipating the techniques of the ethno-musicologist, he would slow the rotating disc with his finger – so that he could catch all the detail of Coleman’s ornamentation. There are very significant and dynamic processes going on here, which folkloric notions of authenticity or ‘timelessness’ find of no interest. I remember at the time trying to explain all this to an academic colleague – and failing. In 1994 I was idly watching the Eurovision Song Contest – like you do – when Riverdance happened. And made it all visible. One lead dancer from Chicago, the other lead dancer from New York Unfortunately, too late for me to mention Riverdance in The Creative Migrant. Also in 1994 was established the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Meanwhile, and especially since 1997, the Irish music and performing arts part of the programme at Boston, USA, has grown. From these and other centres we have seen a sequence – not a flood – of new research by new young scholars. The theoretical and practical tensions remain, but the work is being done. Captain Francis O’Neill would be pleased. Shaping the research agenda Some time ago I was asked why I had not joined the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature. I replied that I had not joined because I could not think of anything new to say about W. B. Yeats. IASAIL was founded in 1969, and held its inaugural meeting in 1970. It changed its name in 1998, to the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), ‘to reflect the real diversity of its members’ interest in all traditions of writing on the island in Irish and in English as well as new Irish literature in Britain, America and elsewhere.’ So, IASIL has broadened its remit, to include the literatures in both the Irish and the English languages. IASIL has also acknowledged that there will be writers outside Ireland who themselves acknowledge Irish writerly traditions, and place themselves in some sort of discourse with Irish history and literature – particularly, of course, the history of emigration, and the literature of emigration. IASIL is thus now a diaspora wide scholarly organisation – indeed its most recent, and highly successful, 2002 conference was held in Brazil. But of course IASIL remains firmly bedded within the academic discipline that has coalesced around the study of literature – a discipline which has been well and truly Foucaulted, and which still tends to focus on the task of creating new comment on a small canon of readily available texts. However, I did finally think of something new to say about Yeats – and, with the change of the organisation name, I am now a loyal member of IASIL. ACIS, founded as the American Committee for Irish Studies in 1960, later changed its name to the American Conference for Irish Studies. There are now a number of sister organisations, the British Association for Irish Studies, Société Française d'Etudes Irlandaises, the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. There are hopes for the creation of an Australian Association for Irish Studies. Note that there is no Irish Association for Irish Studies – the concept of ‘Irish Studies’ is not particularly well developed in the Republic of Ireland (an observation which would need another paper to explore). In Northern Ireland there is the Institute of Irish Studies, at Queens University, Belfast – founded in 1965. And now reported to be under threat, as the series of crises in United Kingdom universities escalates. I should also mention the hardworking Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland. And there is now (2002/2003) the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) , which – it is hoped - will be a defence against loneliness, and will also slot into European Union cultural and educational programmes. There are now a number of Centres or Institutes of Irish Studies and Professors of Irish Studies throughout the English-speaking world: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Illinois, Liverpool, London. Melbourne, Australia, managed to get Elizabeth Malcolm, its Professor of Irish Studies, in place whilst its great rival, Sydney, still struggles – despite the fact that the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is the base of the great historian of Irish Australia, Patrick O’Farrell. So, in an odd sort of way, the spread of Irish Studies is itself a diasporic phenomenon. But these developments in Irish Studies do not mean that there have been similar developments in Irish Diaspora Studies. We do now, at last, have one nominal Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies – a personal chair held by Bronwen Walter at Anglia Polytechnic University, England. And we do have the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh, which – under its Director, Brian Lambkin – has made important links between Irish Diaspora Studies, museum studies and family history. But it is possible to detect a number of tension, tensions at different levels. Some of these tensions might be predicted, if we look back to the discussion in the earlier parts of this article. First of all, Irish Studies is itself often under attack by the core disciplines – we know, at an anecdotal level, that some of the institutional developments outlined above were opposed within institutions by the traditional academic disciplines. Further, there are really precious few careers in Irish Studies – the academic career structures remain within the traditional disciplines. So, for example, it is a constant complaint within the Irish Studies associations that when teachers of Irish history retire from a university they are unlikely to replaced within that university by another teacher of Irish history – they may well be replaced by a teacher with some other specialisation. The long term strategy of Irish Studies must be to dig in – to become, in effect, institutionalised, to have its own funding and its own buildings. A notable achievement here – though not necessarily a model that can be followed elsewhere – was the creation of the Glucksman Ireland House in New York, officially opened in 1993, and now getting into its stride(37). Irish Studies has tended to have at its core an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and history. The relationship between literature and history is, perhaps, clearer in Ireland than in many other countries. When W. B. Yeats wrote… ‘Did that play of mine send out he was asking a real question, one that not many poets are required by history to ask of their own work. I will leave it to the reader to decide which poet lives in happier circumstances – the poet with political influence and moral responsibility, or the poet without. But this dynamic is certainly interesting, and certainly worth exploring – students like it. But, once again, we are working within certain definitions of ‘Irishness’, we are working within a restricted literary canon, within one grand narrative. It is a constant complaint of those who study the Irish Diaspora that it is all too easy to have an Irish Studies conference, organised by one of the associations – for example, the American Conference for Irish Studies – at which there will be NO paper on the Diaspora. This, given what I have said above about culture and diaspora, will seem odd. But we need to be aware of the diverse forces that shape the research and scholarly agenda. Increasingly scholars of the Irish Diaspora have tended to try and organise their own conferences, with varying results. These things take a lot of organisational time – great costs and distances are involved. Also, there is a tendency to have to start each time from Square One – there is no agreed agenda or approach. But an excellent Conference organised by Piaras Mac Éinrí in 1997 at University College, Cork, Ireland, did produce an excellent book, which I like to think of as continuing the tradition of The Irish World Wide(38). In 1997 I was invited by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the United Kingdom’s leading funding and training agency, to attend a meeting to launch a major new research initiative on ‘Transnational Communities’. £3.8 million pounds was spent over five years on 19 research projects. Without wishing to be critical of some very able scholars, it was very striking that the research projects were shaped by the preoccupations of the individual academic disciplines, especially by anthropology – not by the needs and wishes of any individual ‘transnational community’. On our planet, life is lived within nation states, of one sort or another. The study of a planet-wide phenomenon is like to take place within a nation state, be funded in some way by that state, and be shaped by the state’s current fears and preoccupations. Earlier this year, 2000, I attended the final Public Event of that five year, £3.8 million pound ESRC research programme – and saw discussion collapse into a debate about current British asylum and immigration policy, a debate which, in Britain, is shaped by rightwing newspapers. irishdiaspora.net After 1997, and the end of The Irish World Wide project, I began work on what is my current major project, a narrative history of the Irish Diaspora – working title, Beyond Ireland. What is interesting about a narrative history is that – as will have been gathered – an enormous amount of what has been written about the ‘Irish’ has to be jettisoned. It does not advance the narrative. It is ‘noise’, not ‘knowledge’. So, in tandem with my narrative history, I have found myself writing a critical historiography of the Irish Diaspora. Inevitably I found myself looking for ways that I could continue to ‘contribute’. I could see that we might use developments in information technology and in computers to solve some recurring problems: developing dialogue between scholars in different parts of the world or within different disciplines, building a cumulative research record, getting the Irish Diaspora on research agendas, getting beyond Square One, and so on. In November 1997, building on the networks put in place for The Irish World Wide I started the Irish-Diaspora list – in essence moving communication from paper to email, and making communication practically instant, and cumulative. In computer jargon an email ‘list’ is ‘traditionally’ called a ‘list’ because a piece of software on a mainframe computer keeps an actual list of the email addresses of the people who are part of the group, and who are entitled to send and receive email messages through that group. Increasingly commercial organisations are abandoning the word ‘list - and using words like ‘community’ or ‘network’ or ‘group’ instead. This expanding of the meaning of these existing words brings its own problems. Generally the scholarly community continues to use the word ‘list’. The Irish-Diaspora list was started with no resources, other than a small team of volunteers. Technical problems we have solved, one by one. For example, existing archiving solutions were very expensive, in terms of time, money and expertise. The obvious solution always was a database with its own email address. With the assistance of Dr. Stephen Sobol, of the University of Leeds, we were able to create just that – we now have more than 4 years of Irish-Diaspora list messages and discussion in a password-protected, searchable database, accessible through http://www.irishdiaspora.net/. This database is in itself an extraordinary research resource, and is constantly used by scholars who are members of the Irish-Diaspora list or by approved scholarly ‘guests’. A development of the same technology allows us to display material on the Web through a simple Copy & Paste procedure. That Web site also allows us to ‘host’ and display the work of other Irish Diaspora scholars – often these offer considerable research resources, like the Guide to Irish Military History by Paul Walsh or the Bibliographic Guide to the History of the Irish in South America by Brian McGinn. In fact Brian McGinn’s Guide offers a case study of what can be accomplished. In March 1999 Brian McGinn, a very able independent scholar based in Washington, USA, sent me his brief Bibliographic Guide to the History of the Irish in South America. He and I decided to take things further. In April 1999 I circulated his draft Guide to interested scholars, some members of the Irish-Diaspora list, some not, seeking additions and comments. By the end of April Brian McGinn had collated all this new material, and in May 1999 we published the complete Bibliographic Guide on the web. Within one month the shape of Irish Diaspora Studies, world-wide, had been changed – we could see what had been written about the Irish in South America. More important, as one eminent scholar pointed out, we could see what had not been written – encouraging him to undertake an important study of Irish settlement in Brazil. The Irish-Diaspora list has members spread over 5 continents. The number of members tends to hover between 200 and 300 – not a huge number, but in fact representing a substantial proportion of the people in the world who have a scholarly interest in the study of the Irish Diaspora. As our rubric says, we are especially useful to ‘more isolated’ scholars – and amongst these I would include myself. The basic rule for all email discussion groups is: ‘Bad conversation drives out good.’ The Irish-Diaspora list is ‘moderated’: all messages are checked for content, tone, suitability, before being distributed. Some would regard this as censorship – I regard it as creating a safe place in which scholarly discussion can take place. You cannot really be Irish unless you… At the beginning of the year 2001, the Public Record Office, the National Archives of England and Wales at Kew, made freely available on its web site the entire census records of England and Wales for the year 1901. So great was the interest in these hundred year old records that the system was immediately overwhelmed, crashed, had to be withdrawn and redesigned. This year, 2002, a more cautious, limited system is at last in place. The Public Record Office was simply not prepared for the amount of interest there now is in access to archives and records, and the interest, throughout the world, in family history and genealogy. If ethnic identities tend to coalesce around leisure activities, then exploring identity has in itself become a use of leisure time. Ever scholar of diaspora and migration who has a Web presence will regularly receive literally hundreds of emails asking for help with a family history query. Usually these enquiries come from people who are at the earlier stages of constructing their family history, or who have encountered problems – and who are simply not aware of the standard methods of the family historian, and the difficulties of family history. Family history is, in fact, the most expensive, time-consuming kind of archival research. By now I have a standard reply to such enquiries – explaining the limitations within which my little research unit must work, the difficulties of family history and so on. Usually people simply need to be made aware of guidance, networks and resources elsewhere – on the Web Rootsweb, GENUKI, or the many local family history societies and clubs. But also visible on the Web you will see a proliferation of commercial and expensive family history resources. There is another theme that I have not laboured in this paper: the Irish Diaspora as something to be commercially exploited(39). But there us something more profound here. I would ask the reader to look back over the material outlined in this article, at the complexities, confusions and the plain nonsense. And then imagine an individual person, an Irish person or a person of Irish heritage, trying to understand themselves, their families and that heritage. Is it really reasonable to ask that person to enter and explore that maze without a map? The scholarly network, which I tend to think of as irishdiaspora.net – because that is the domain name – has no funding to speak of. It depends on the good will of its members, and will survive as long as it is useful. It has no power – but it does have influence. Patrick O’Sullivan, Bradford (Yorkshire, England), november 2002. |
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Notas (2) The key text is, of course, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. The quotation from Copernicus is in Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, Harvard University Press, 1957. (3) My own statement can be found in Patrick O'Sullivan, 'General Introduction', in IWW1. But see, for example, Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds, Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, Routledge, London & New York, 2000, Preface, p. vii, 'Migration is a subject that cries out for an interdisciplinary approach…'. (4) Moti Nissani, 'Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity: The Case for Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Rsearch', The Social Science Journal, 1997, Volume 4, Number 2, pp 201-216, is a helpful summary of the arguments. (5) John Mitchel, Jail Journal, Sphere Books, London, 1983, p. xvii. The original text was written from 1848 onwards, when Mitchel was transported to Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) for 'treason-felony'. (6) Quoted in Patrick O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, UNSW Press, 3rd edition, 2000, p. 269. (7) Patrick Quinlivan, 'Hunting the Fenians,' in IWW3. (8) Patrick O'Sullivan, 'The Irish joke', in IWW3. (9) And see the discussion in Michael Weiner, ed., Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, Routledge, London, 1997. (10) Frank Neal, Black '47: Britain and the Famine Irish, Macmillan, Basingstoke & London/St. Martin's Press, New York, 1998. Under the English system, the office of the coroner enquires into any cases of sudden or unexplained death. In Ireland, during the Famine crisis, the coroner's court system more or less collapsed, overwhelmed by numbers and undermined by politics. In England and Wales the coroner's courts solemnly continued to investigate each and every death. When members of Irish families, fleeing the Famine, collapsed and died in England, surviving members of the family would be fed and nursed back to health - and would give evidence to the Coroner, thus bequeathing to us first person narratives of their experiences. (11) For example, Patrick O'Sullivan, 'The Irish joke', in IWW2, or Christie Davies , 'The Irish joke as a social phenomenon' in John Durant and Jonathan Miller, eds, Laughing Matters: a serious look at humour, Harlow, Longmans, London, 1988. (12) The essential guide is David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, nationalism and culture, Manchester University Press, 1988. (13) Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1995 - original edition 1978. For Said on Ireland see his Nationalism, colonialism and literature -Yeats and decolonization, Field Day, Derry, 1988. (14) Moritz Julius Bonn, wandering Scholar, Cohen & West, London, 1949. (15) As a young man Davitt had been a member of the Fenians in England, he had served a lengthy prison sentence, and, on release, he had - with extraordinary selflessness - thrown his weight behind the figurehead leader of Irish parliamentary nationalism, Charles Parnell. The standard study of Davitt's early life is T.W. Moody, Davitt and Irish revolution 1846-82, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982. See also the more recent Carla King, Michael Davitt, Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 1999. (16) On Borges: the key text is the 'Theme of the Traitor and the Hero' (Tema del traidor y del héroe) but also important are 'The Shape of the Sword' (La forma de la espada) and 'The Garden with Forking Paths' (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan). (17) There is a considerable literature on cinematic representations of Ireland. But I say to students: Do not expect to learn much about Ireland and the Irish; do expect to learn much about the demands of genre. On 'film noir', for example, see John Hill, 'Images of Violence', in Rockett, Gibbons and Hill, Cinema and Ireland, Croom Helm, London, 1987. (18) Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick's Day, Routledge, London, 2002. See also Sallie A. Marston, 'Making difference: conflict over Irish identity in the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade', Political Geography, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2002 - the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization had been denied a place in the parade. (19) There is a considerable literature on the Irish language movement: see Tony Crowley, The politics of language in Ireland, Routledge, London, 2000. See also the controversial work of my colleague Reg Hindley, The death of the Irish language: a qualified obituary, Routledge, London, 1990. (20) Cited in Karen P. Corrigan, 'For God's sake teach the children English': emigration and the Irish language in the nineteenth century, ' in Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., IWW2. (21) Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, Fontana, 1985 , p.568 - original French edition 1975. (22) I deal with these issues in more detail in my Introduction to IWW5, Religion and Identity. (23) Patrick O'Sullivan, 'Introduction: Religion and Identity', IWW5, p. 8. (24) The quotation is from William V. Shannon, The American Irish (New York: Macmillan, 1963, p. 27. See the discussion in O'Sullivan, 'Introduction', pp 6-9, IWW2. (25) These issues are discussed at greater length in Patrick O'Sullivan and Craig A. Bailey, 'London and the Union: Ireland's Capital, Ireland's Colony', in Bruce Stewart, ed., Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society under the Act of Union, Princess Grace Irish Library 13, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 2001. (26) See, for example, Irish leader Eamon de Valera's St. Patrick's Day speech of 1943 and his oft-quoted version of the 'Ireland that we dreamed of': 'the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.' Quoted in Terence Brown, Ireland, A Social and Cultural History, Fontana, London, 1981, p. 146. (27) See the discussion Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds., A Military History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 1996, especially the editors' own chapter, 'An Irish military tradition?'. See also Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State security in divided societies, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980. (28) The first of these has been published, Patrick J. Bracken and Patrick O'Sullivan, 'The Invisibility of Irish Migrants in British Health Research', Irish Studies Review, Vol. 9, No 1, 2001. (29) See Note 1, above, for an outline of The Irish World Wide. (30) I am always asked, which academic disciplines did NOT contribute to The Irish World Wide? I found nothing of relevance within psychology. And I was not able to persuade the folklorists to become involved - which will seem surprising, since Ireland has much folklore about emigration (for example, the 'American Wake', which transfers to the departure of the emigrant for America customary practices around death. ) I think there is something here to do with the rush to universalism within both disciplines, psychology and folklore as anthropology. (31) The Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862, was the American Civil War battle in which the Irish Brigade, in the service of the North, advanced to destruction against a well-defended Confederate position. In 1988, in the USA, a representative of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement commented on the fact that only 800 Irish people per year were allowed to enter the United States: 'That number is less by 120 the number of Irishmen who died storming Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, in defence of this union…' See the discussion in O'Sullivan, 'Introduction', p. 4, IWW1. (32) Gerda Lerner, The majority finds its past: placing women in history, Oxford University Press, 1979. (33) So I am told by Graham Davis, who has developed Irish Studies at Bath Spa University College, England. Graham Davis has embarrassingly summarised my ideas, far better than I have ever been able to, in the exploration of the Irish in the historiography of Texas which led to his book. See Graham Davis, 'Models of Migration: The historiography of the Irish pioneers in South Texas', Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XCIX, 3, 1996, and Graham Davis, Land! Irish pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas, Texas A & M University Press, 2002. And, once again, we see problems of loyalty presented to a migrant community - some Irish remained loyal to their adopted country, Mexico, others sided with the Texas revolution. (34) Two recent books about Irish migration are precisely predicted by the theory: Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Anchor Books, 1996; Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, Brandon Books, 2000. (35) William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. (36) Kevin Kenny, 'Teaching Irish-American History', Journal of American Ethnic History, Volume 21 Number 4, 2002, with comment by Jay P. Dolan (Chicago), Marion R. Casey (New York) and Timothy J. Meagher (Washington). Kevin Kenny is based in Boston, and is the author of an excellent recent work of synthesis, The American Irish: a history, Longman, Harlow, 2000. (37) See http://www.nyu.edu/pages/irelandhouse/. (38) See http://migration.ucc.ie/. The book is Andy Bielenberg, ed. The Irish Diaspora, Longman, Harlow, 2000. (39) There are two figures that are bandied about, the '44 million Irish' in the USA, and the '70 million Irish ' (people of Irish heritage or descent) throughout the world. Type those two phrases into a web search engine, and you will see exactly what I mean by 'something to be commercially exploited'. I have not been able to work out how those figures were constructed. |
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ÚLTIMA REVISIÓN: 12/03/2003
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