What's in a Name: The Dialectics of Diaspora and Irish Emigration

The sudden, if predictable, transformation of Ireland from its brief moment as an island of immigrants back into what for so long it always was, a nation of emigrants, demands the re-interrogation of a term that for a brief time came to seem a natural way to address Ireland’s global migrations. The application of the term *diaspora* to people of Irish descent living outside Ireland is, after all, of relatively recent date and replaces a term that has been quite resonant in the Irish vocabulary, namely, emigration. What is the cost, and what are the possible gains, of displacing a term that has colloquial resonance and some political charge as well as a considerable degree of social scientific and cultural history behind it?