August 22, 2007
The New Ireland Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST There was a fascinating article in last week’s Sunday New York Times about Ireland, which finds itself in an unfamiliar position as a magnet for immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa. From the potato famine of the 1840s until recent times, the chief export of Ireland has been its people. Unable to sustain themselves at home, over half of the country’s prefamine population of eight million either died or picked up stakes, with most migrants choosing between the United States, Australia, and Canada. Like other newcomers to America, most Irish émigrés left Eire in search of economic stability, for want of political freedom, or to join family and friends. But in its songs, literature, folklore, and politics, the Irish-American disapora envisioned itself as an exilic culture. According to this rendering of history, the Irish were victims of criminal acts on the part of English and American Protestants, designed to drive them from their homeland. The potato famine itself became the central theme of this narrative. Though many historians agree that the blight owed in large part to a lethal combination of outmoded agriculture, overpopulation, and natural disaster, as well as to the stubbornly laissez-faire economic policies of the British government, for generations of Irish-Americans it would be remembered as a deliberate would-be genocide perpetrated by willful English neglect. The Irish-American disapora was thus a special sorrow to be borne with equanimity. It bore great possibility, but its causes were tragic. Today, Ireland’s booming economy has attracted workers from Poland, Lithuania, Nigeria, and other countries, turning an exilic nation into a polyglot society, much like our own. Some demographers believe that if growth continues at a steady pace, Ireland’s population will reach prefamine levels in 25 years or so. From an economic standpoint, this could be good news for the Irish. Whereas other Western European countries are aging because of sluggish population growth, Ireland’s median age is holding steady at 33. A higher ratio of workers to retirees translates to a more secure social welfare state and reduces the need for higher taxes to support retirees’ benefits. How Ireland deals with its new immigrants culturally, socially, and politically is another matter. From the days of Jean de Crevecoeur, whose 1782 tract, Letters from an American Farmer, celebrated the new nation’s heterogeneous roots, Americans have liked to think of themselves as a nation of immigrants. It hasn’t always worked smoothly, as the crude caricatures of the antebellum Irish that once filled the pages of Harper’s Weekly well demonstrate. But writers like Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot,” and Horace Kallen, who developed competing ideas about cultural pluralism, helped perpetuate a national self-image that largely embraced the concept of immigration, if not always immigrants themselves. Ireland is a different case in point. Its history and self-image are rooted in exile and emigration. Acculturating large numbers of people from elsewhere will require a great deal of national reinvention. What will it mean, half a century from now, to be Irish? Will the famine years become part of the collective self-consciousness of the newcomers and their families, or will immigrants to Ireland seek to weave their own narratives into Irish history, much as Irish immigrants did in their adoptive home of America? One can only hope that the Irish, whose ties to the United States run deep and strong, will look to our example both to see what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong.
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