“They Make Us Feel Like Family”: A Cultural Reading of the Irish Bed and Breakfast

“The Gathering” was a 2013 Irish event modeled after “Homecoming Scotland,” an initiative that sought to lure persons of Scottish lineage to visit the land of their forebears in 2009.¹ The aim of “The Gathering” was to invite back the 70 million members of Ireland’s “family” around the globe, marketed by such slogans as “We’re calling all Flynns, O’Malleys, Schweitzenburgs to visit us. . . .”² “The Gathering,” as one report noted, bore “an unapologetically simple mission: to welcome the Irish diaspora home.”³

Two words, “diaspora” and “home,” are noteworthy here. The former has only recently come to be commonly used to describe the massive out-migration from Ireland, especially in the era of the Great Famine.⁴ Since then, it has acquired status in the Irish government: the first minister of state for the diaspora was appointed in July of 2014. Diaspora has provoked several debates and approaches in Irish Studies.⁵ The Irish diaspora had been described by Mary Hickman as comprising those who possess “a collective memory and myth about the homeland [and] an idealization of the supposed ancestral home.”⁶ Diaspora is also, as the sociologist Rogers Brubaker reminds us, “a category of practice used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies and to appeal to loyalties.”⁷

The second word of note, “home,” forms part of the Irish diaspora’s collective imagination. Especially in America (but in other places as well), popular songs and stories have anchored ideal images of the concept of Ireland as home since at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. One need only think of lyrics like “In a cottage all covered with ivy, my Eileen is waiting for me” and songs like “Homes of Donegal” and “I’ll Take you Home Again, Kathleen” to understand how the Irish home—as well as the special people associated with it—have contributed to the sense of who the Irish abroad think they are. Arguably, this is what Breckenridge and Appadurai refer to when they state that diasporas “always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and time and create new maps of desire and attachment.”⁸

Because Irish emigration was often urgent and followed disruption, the notion of an Irish “home” gains significance for another reason: many descendants of those who left Ireland simply do not know from whence their ancestors came, although such knowledge forms part of “the minimal facts that most [other European] immigrants preserve.”⁹ Frequently one encounters those of Irish descent whose knowledge of their ancestry is discontinuous, fractured, and incomplete; due to this fact, many experience an “existential homelessness” and “a severe loss of stability, orientation, and sometimes, even identity.”¹⁰ A case in point is that of James R. Kelly, a Fordham University professor who told interviewers that his ignorance about his ancestry was more than troubling: “One of the nagging things was that I didn’t know who James Kelly was, my grandfather [and] I felt compelled to find out.”¹¹ Other reports of return to a diasporic homeland describe physical and emotional changes after travel to find their Irish ancestry: as the essayist Thomas Lynch wrote of his fascination with the land of his ancestors, “Ireland happened to me as a whole body experience, [a] blood-borne, core experience, an echo pulsing in the cardiovascular pulse of things.”¹² Many other descendants of Irish immigrants echo similar statements, and their words play a significant role in binding Ireland’s past to its present and shaping the imagery of “roots tourism.”¹³ For them, traveling to Ireland is understood as a kind of restorative wholeness, a profound sense of relief, what David McWilliams of Irish Reaching Out (IRO)—a program that invites descendants of Irish immigrants to return to their ancestral roots—refers to as the affective lure of identification and inclusion: “What we are seeing is a willingness on the part of the diaspora to become identified more closely with Ireland, and that, in itself, is crucial because...