When Mary Robinson addressed the Oireachtas in 1995 on the subject of “cherishing the Irish diaspora”, the audience seemed underwhelmed. Robinson, then president, was conscious the speech was not going down well. “I felt it as I was speaking,” she later told her official biographers, Helen Burke and Olivia O’Leary. “I felt there was a resistance ... I have rarely spoken to a less responsive audience.”

Up to that point in Irish political or public discourse, “diaspora” had rarely been used as a term. Historically, Irish politicians had been reluctant to engage in debate about emigration as it encompassed sensitive matters of exile, dislocation, domestic economic and cultural failures, and responsibility for emigrant welfare. The scale of its impact was enormous, before and after independence: by 1891 at least 38.3 per cent of Irish-born people lived outside Ireland; more than half a million left between 1945 and 1960; and in the 1980s there was net outward migration of more than 200,000.

Robinson’s address also had an edge because of a contemporary suggestion that emigrants might be allowed to elect three Irish senators and because she questioned collective amnesia by quoting Eavan Boland’s poem The Emigrant Irish: “Like oil lamps, we put them out the back, / of our houses, of our minds”.

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