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Emigration is ‘back on the agenda’ E-mail
Written by Rachael Finucane   
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
THE issue of Irish emigration is very much back on the agenda according to experts speaking at the Conference on Irish Migration Studies, which took place at UL last week.
The major international conference was entitled ‘Neither Here Nor There: Writing the Irish Diaspora’ and brought together top class speakers from Canada, the USA, South America, Britain and Ireland to discuss the main issues at a time of rapidly increasing Irish emigration for the first time in 30 years.
“This is a very timely conference,” said conference participant Piaras Mac Einrí.
“With the rise of the Celtic Tiger in the last 1990s, an entire generation of younger Irish people grew up without the expectation of leaving Ireland; the annual pictures of tearful departures from ports and airports seemed a distant memory. The diaspora has been much less present in our minds these days but now, with the dramatic downturn in the Irish economy, it is back on the agenda.”
Tina O’Toole, UL Lecturer and conference organiser, agreed, saying that in “the most turbulent 20 years of change in Ireland since independence, we can say that we have experienced migration and diaspora in all of their many forms—people leaving, people coming here and leaving again, people looking back to their homelands, people embracing their new countries, people torn and ‘in between’ the two places”.
“Nowadays, the Irish in London and the Bronx have their counterparts among the Poles and West Africans in Clondalkin and Cork. Although many in Ireland are in denial about this, all face similar challenges—adapting to new societies, what to do about the legacy of their own cultures, what kind of ‘space’ they want to have between the old and the new, coping with prejudice and racism. Yet the individual’s experience is also specific and subjective and varies according to class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, culture and destination.”
 
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