Comment: Official Ireland wants a diaspora of visitors and investors

In the 17th century Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer wrote his thesis about a disease he had observed. It mostly affected young people sent abroad, but also those who led cloistered lives before travelling, who were stricken with an all-consuming desire to go home. In its most severe form, Hofer speculated, their illness may prove fatal. He coined a new term, combining two Greek words, nostos (return to native land) and algos (suffering or grief), for it: nostalgia.

Though medical practitioners no longer consider nostalgia an illness, Ireland, with its diaspora of around 70 million, is nonetheless a superspreader. Much of our national branding sells visitors, particularly those seeking to connect with their heritage, a fantasy of return, as though this country is, as Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House once put it, a Boston Wakanda. For decades we’ve sold an image of pre-modern refuge, somewhere to forget the complexities of life, if only for a week, or however long you can afford a hotel, now €174 a night on average in Dublin.

"First came the Vikings, then the Normans, then the Saxons, all of them found Ireland irresistible," said the vaguely lyrical-sounding voiceover of a 1990s American television advert inviting prospective tourists to visit.  “Think what a grand time we'll show you, especially since you're the only ones of the lot we actually invited." Viewers were told to call 1-800-SHAMROCK for a “free vacation kit”. 

Or consider an initiative like the Gathering, launched in 2013 by Fáilte Ireland. Its purpose was to call people of Irish descent home at a time of austerity and stagnation. This might have been worthy if tastefully pursued. But The Gathering was so nakedly cynical – with its website characterising Irishness as "quoting Father Ted" and "calling crisps Taytos" – that actor Gabriel Byrne, a cultural ambassador to the US, called it a “scam” and a “shakedown.”

The Gathering hasn’t happened again, despite raking in €170 million the 12 months it ran. But no need. The tourism industry, worth €9 billion to the economy in 2025, continues its appeals to nostalgia with increasing vulgarity. In one bleak commercial partnership, announced two years ago, Ancestry.com and Guinness teamed up, the latter having digitised 1.6 million employment records so the diaspora could “discover if Ireland’s most iconic brewery is part of their family legacy – just in time for St. Patrick’s Day”.

‘The Best of Ireland’

Our political establishment mostly offers this island as a novelty destination to the diaspora. It asks little of them – to spend their money in Temple Bar and to be invoked, when useful, as evidence of the “deep ties" that will attract more foreign capital.

Visiting Capitol Hill in March as part of our annual St Patrick’s day ritual, beckoning forth another harvest of foreign direct investment, taoiseach Micheál Martin briefly removed his face from Donald Trump’s hindquarters to tell the tale of Margaret Haughery, an industrious woman originally born into poverty in Leitrim, who, with sheer “grit” founded a business. It was through “her hard work, entrepreneurship and innovation and her dedication to giving back to her community,” that she “embodies the best of what it is to be Irish, here in the US and at home in Ireland”. His next sentence: “Today, across this great United States, more than 200,000 Americans go to work each morning in nearly 800 Irish-owned companies, operating in every sector, in every state.” Ireland, he reminded everyone, is the fifth largest foreign investor in the US.

But it wasn’t always like this.   

In his 2013 article “What's in a Name: The Dialectics of Diaspora and Irish Emigration," published in the Irish Studies journal Breac, David Lloyd wrote that Ireland’s conception of “diaspora" and our relationship to it is relatively new. For much of our history, he wrote, leaving Ireland was shameful – the welcoming language of "diaspora" arrived with prosperity.  

“The invocation of the Irish diaspora was nowhere more powerful than during the Robinson presidency that coincided with the emergence of the ‘Celtic Tiger,’ and its function was deeply implicated in the pursuit of Irish emigrant investment in Ireland,” he wrote. The Irish eventually blended in to most of the places they went, undermining the criteria for “diaspora” as some scholars understand it, which is defined by difficulty assimilating, of missing an out-of-reach homeland, rather than making it. 

Irish officials however pitch Ireland to Washington through those who made it.

The state’s latest diaspora strategy launched in July 2025 says Ireland will  “write the next chapters of this trade and investment story by investing further in the vital relationships and harnessing the invaluable connections, expertise and insights that can promote Ireland’s advantages for foreign direct investment, support Irish business access new markets and drive job creation and innovation”. 

In the City of Chicago

There are other ways the Irish diaspora can be engaged. 

A couple of years ago, towards  the end of the Biden administration, I went to Chicago. One of the first things I did was attend a demonstration in solidarity with Palestine. The presidential election campaign was ongoing and the Democrats were arming a genocide in Gaza. Their candidate, then sitting vice president Kamala Harris, refused to commit to ending it, offering only rhetoric about a ceasefire, a posture former Biden officials recently told the New Yorker enabled Israel’s atrocities.

I saw an elderly woman draped in a tricolour. After we said hello she introduced me to her husband, who was born in the 1930s, and was holding a sign saying STOP GOVT CRIME. As we chatted he handed me a sign that said, “Victory to the Palestinian resistance.” 

They were Irish American. A few days later we went to their apartment, in a high-rise overlooking the Chicago River, for dinner and drinks. They told me about their former life as activists working to end partition and how they were advocates of Irish republicans engaged in the fight against British rule in the north of Ireland.

Their home was filled with hundreds of books on Irish history. Their sense of Irishness was rooted in knowledge of the past and an understanding of a present political struggle – one in which they were participants. It was not forged, however much Official Ireland may wish it so, from marketing that refers to our partitioned island as “the ancient birthplace of good times”.

There is a legacy of Irish America supporting republicans – maybe most famously through the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), established in 1969 after the outbreak of the war euphemistically called the Troubles. Beyond fundraising for the republican movement it arranged tours that brought Irish Americans to places like Belfast and Derry where they could see the brutality of occupation firsthand.  

“Morally, we support the struggle of the Irish Republican Army against British terrorism and British colonial rule in Ireland,” said a young Martin Galvin, former director of PR for NORAID, quoted in a recent RTÉ documentary. “And we support that struggle. We support Irish freedom and realise that the only way the British are going to leave Ireland is for that fight to be successful.”

The organisation was muddled politically and sometimes downplayed efforts to draw parallels between Ireland's struggle and those of Palestinians, South Africans and Black Americans. But it was political, overtly so, and asked the diaspora to engage with something beyond giftshop kitsch.

Her exiled children

The provisional government of 1916 saw millions of emigrants – what we now refer to as the diaspora – living in the US as allies in securing Irish independence. This group even received a special mention in the proclamation read outside the GPO:  

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

The men who wrote those words wanted a sovereign republic. But Ireland is not. In the south we exist, as my colleague Eoghan McNeill explained on an episode of The Ditch: Party Line, in a polity colonised by foreign capital – whose tax returns place parameters on what is politically possible. The academics Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie have named the ideology responsible, “FDI nationalism", which conflates Ireland's interests with the interests of multinational corporations, for whom the state builds bespoke infrastructure at the expense of the general population. 

To the north, neoliberalism has been implemented as a means of consolidating what is called peace, with none of the promised “dividends" and no sign of a referendum on reunification – which, under the Good Friday Agreement, will be called at the discretion of the British government. In other words: the coloniser. 

None of this is what the diaspora is meant to think about. Because the likes of Micheál Martin and Simon Harris have no use for a diaspora that wants to help secure a state resolved “to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts”.  It is safer to keep them engaged in a transaction with an Ireland that has never existed – one designed, above all, to keep their gaze averted from the Ireland that actually does.