Introduction

Abstract

Eavan Boland’s poem ‘The Emigrant Irish’ (1986) calls for a collective remembering of the history of Irish emigration and the Irish diaspora, a history that Boland suggests has too readily been forgotten: ‘Like oil lamps we put them out the back, of our houses, of our minds’ (1995, p. 129). ‘The Emigrant Irish’ is the poem that famously inspired former president Mary Robinson’s 1995 address to the Houses of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament and Senate), ‘Cherishing the Irish Diaspora’, in which she drew special attention to the importance of ‘our love and remembrance on this island for those who leave it behind’ (Robinson, 1995). Robinson’s lighting of a lamp in the president’s residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, during her presidency, an act dedicated to generations of Irish people across the world, took up the challenge of Boland’s poem; it was a gesture that would prove to be a symbolic and timely move that resonated and coincided with an upsurge in interest in the Irish diaspora and diasporic identity from scholars and critics, as well as writers.