Diaspora, Migration and Identity

‘Whose diaspora, whose migration, whose identity?’ (Mac Einri and Lambkin, 2002) remain uncomfortable questions in post-partition Ireland. For although the concept of diaspora has proliferated in academic discourses of migration and identity since the 1990s, most often its application in the Irish context as a ‘victim’ diaspora (Cohen, 1997) has referred principally to the large number of famine emigrants, mostly Catholics and successive chain migrations of that group, primarily to the United States from 1845 to 1870. The migration of Protestants from Ireland has tended to be set apart in an often partisan and somewhat marginalised literature on the Scotch-Irish that focuses on their eighteenthcentury emigrations from Ulster to North America, generally underplaying the complexities of denomination, ethnicity and class composition of the group. However, recent scholarship on emigrant letters, family histories and transnational ‘Protestant’ institutions, such as the Orange Order, has contributed towards a better understanding of Protestant migration and a more inclusive definition of diaspora in the Irish context from a denominational perspective. Of late, the term ‘diaspora’ has been applied specifically to Irish Protestants (Jenkins, 2005; MacRaild, 2005b); Ulster migrants (Fitzgerald, 2006); Ulster- Scots (Baraniuk and Hagan, 2007); and Northern Ireland (Cooper, 2009; Trew, 2010).

It is perhaps worth noting at this juncture that it is the image of the Flight of the Earls in 1607 – of people leaving Ulster – that is most often taken to symbolise the beginning of the modern Irish diaspora. Indeed, historical migration patterns for the province of Ulster are similar to general trends in the rest of Ireland; the principal diff erence owing to greater immigration in the seventeenth century due to the Ulster plantations. An examination of the numbers concerning emigration flows from Ulster is instructive.