The Irish Diaspora: A Primer by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

direct state intervention into popular Northern Irish culture. Sport, according to the authors, arouses nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, and sectarianism—as well as having the capability to strengthen affection and communication. Yet sport is hardly Northern Ireland’s most important battleground. It is pointless, the authors say, to look to sport and leisure to resolve cultural division, when such other elements of civil society as the school system continue to foster divisiveness. —David J. Waters The Irish Diaspora: A Primer by Donald Harman Akenson, pp. 319, Toronto: P. D. Meany Publishers, 1993, $38.00. With chapters about Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, The Irish Diaspora details the Irish migration to the English -speaking world between 1815 and 1920. To demonstrate the applicability of his argument that region-specific studies of the Irish should be framed within the broader context of the entire Irish diaspora, Donald H. Akenson establishes characteristics of a “normative” Irish migration in regard to age, class, gender, marital status, religion, regional origins for the time period, and then maps the migration to each country against this norm. Variations in the migrant streams to particular countries—such as the low socioeconomic stauts of nineteenth-century emigrants to the United States, or the large number of well-educated Irish professionals who went to South Africa—are then revealed not as “Irish cultural traits,” but as linked to concrete social and historical contingencies. Akenson’s strategy thus enables him to systematically debunk common myths about Irish migrants—such as the idea that most early Irish emigrants to Australia were convicts, or that Roman Catholicism handicapped the Irish in the “New World.” At the same time, the strategy reveals where there are omissions in the data for particular countries, especially for the United States and Great Britain. Akenson suggests these omissions can be supplemented by data from other areas—another argument in favor of a diasporic , rather than nation-based, approach to Irish studies. This readable, highly informative book participates in and furthers several scholarly controversies. Akenson, for example, defines being Irish as: “a woman or man, boy or girl, who either was born in Ireland or was a permanent resident of Ireland before embarking for some New World” (8). This includes “both Catholics and Protestants, Kerrymen, Ulstermen, descendants of Norman invaders and of Scottish planters as well as of earlier Celtic invaders, speakers of English as well as speakers of Irish Gaelic” (7). Akenson’s definition challenges analysis that persists in treating only Catholics as truly Irish, and sidelining Protestants as anomalies. Akenson’s approach usefully suggests that to ignore the Protestant Irish is both to miss the quintessence of Irish Catholicism, and to stereotype Irish Catholicism to an ahistorical religious identity rather than one linked to complex and specific arBOOK REVIEWS 173 ticulations of an Irishness forged in opposition to British rule. It is also to overlook a sizable, important part of the Irish population. Excluding Protestants from studies of the Irish diaspora is particularly problematic in the context of the United States, where, according to Akenson, a majority of people claiming Irish ethnicity today are in fact Protestant. Thus, insistence on treating only Catholics as truly Irish constitutes “an historigraphical omission of astounding proportions” (221). Akenson’s definition of Irishness clearly opens up new lines for scholarship. Nonetheless, several issues key to conceptualizing an “Irish diaspora” remain unaddressed by the definition and within the book. If Irishness involves being born in or reared under the influence of Irish society, then the “Irishness” of a secondor third-generation Canadian- or American-born and -reared person with some degree of Irish ancestry becomes questionable. So what constitutes the “Irish diaspora ”? And how can one conceptualize an Irish diaspora, linked to concrete social and political experiences that reverberate across countries, without “diaspora” becoming a trendy, ethnocentric, or nostalgic affectation—and one which may be used, for instance, like the revived Irish-American ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s, to defuse hard questions about racial inequality in the United States? Linked to this is the question of how Irishness functions not just as an ethnic but also a racial identity, within varied diasporic contexts. Akenson’s...