In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND The Irish Landscape after Emigration j Andrew Kincaid It is impossible to separate the history and culture of Ireland from the experience of emigration. While Ireland is not unique in having seen many of its own leave on account of the arduous circumstances of poverty and eviction, the country stands apart in the sheer number of its losses. Ireland is the only country in Europe to chart a decline in population every single year from 1840 to 1960, dropping from eight million to three million over that period.1 What most scholars of the Irish diaspora have focused on are the routes and channels through which the outward flow moved, and the effect that these dislocated throngs had on new environments. But every immigrant was also an emigrant, and for every mark made in a new country, a space was left behind; a trace remained in Ireland. These absences had their own presences, and they had to be dealt with: emotionally, politically, and even spatially. Up until very recently, emigration was discussed in Ireland as a tragedy that had its roots in trauma. For anyone who went to school in Ireland before the recent economic upturn, the famine was taught as the defining moment in Irish history, the primeval event from which all ills had sprung—the most long-lasting being, of course, massive emigration.2 For a whole series of politicians and historians who emerged in the wake of the famine, the British were to blame for this catastrophe: said nationalist John Mitchel in 1854, “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”3 For Mitchel, who considered himself “the historiographer of defeat and humiliation,” the famine and its aftermath could puncture holes in arguments for laissez-faire economics and Malthusianism.4 For subsequent 34 ANDREW KINCAID generations of Irish anticolonialists, one leading goal of the nationalist project was to provide the economic prosperity and independence, indeed the modernization and industrialization, necessary to stop emigration and to make sure that nothing like the famine ever happened again. Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, proclaimed, “A free Ireland would not, and could not, have hunger in her fertile vales . . . Ireland has resources to feed five times her population.”5 Despite the obvious psychological and cultural ill effects of the famine and emigration, Irish nationalist leaders have always been able to appropriate the meaning of the famine for their own political agendas. Catholic priest John O’Rourke, in his 1875 History of the Great Irish Famine, amended Mitchel’s socialist radicalism to argue that the famine was not just the product of the English, but of the Protestants within Ireland as well.6 Today, in republican areas of Belfast, brightly painted murals ask the viewer to connect the dots between the famine and the hunger strikes of the 1980s. The argument is a chronological one: there is an unbroken chain of resistance centered around the common cause of British colonialism. Whether one agrees with this interpretation or not, it is, undeniably, another literal way in which the famine has been corralled into narrative-making. What all this adds up to is a way of looking at emigration—up until recently, an irrefutable way. The tragedy of the famine gave rhetorical shape to emigration. But beginning in the 1990s, that rhetoric changed. The 1990s gave rise to the Celtic Tiger, and with it, a new aggressive spirit of economic entitlement was born. As nationalism became postnationalism, those who wished to see Ireland’s new prosperity as a permanent upswing needed to reshape the narrative of emigration—its causes and consequences. While postfamine emigration could never be redeemed, the ongoing, contemporary problem could be. Throughout the 1980s, there was another large-scale exodus of young Irish citizens. In 1987, just before Ireland’s economic takeo ff, Brian Lenihan, a leading politician, declared in a Newsweek interview, “We should not be defeatist or pessimistic about [emigration]. We should be proud about it. After all, we can’t all live on a small island.”7 A second politician remarked that “the way forward is to invest in children and give them the skills to compete anywhere in the world.”8 What had happened to allow these pro-emigration statements to be made? How was it that leading public figures were no longer saying that emigration was something that had to be stopped, something that required all of Ireland’s national energy just...

Share