Emigrant stories make great Christmas gifts
Friday, November 28th, 2008There have been plenty of emigration-related publications this year that would make delightful Christmas gifts. Several Irish centres have produced oral histories detailing the lives of emigrants to America and Canada, as well as the stories of those who have returned to Ireland.
Here’s the rundown of this year’s publications:
“Memory Brings Us Back: Irish Stories of Farewells and Fortunes”: This film by Derek Woods is the followup to “While Mem’ry Brings Us Back Again” – the 2006 hit book, produced by New York’s Aisling Irish Centre, detailing the lives of older Irish emigrants living in America. This DVD tells the stories of ten men and women who left for America between 1929 and 1965. With music by Joannie Madden, this film is sure to be a treat.
Order both the DVD and the original book at the Aisling Irish Community Centre’s website.
“Coming Home” – Frances Browner, the editor of “When Mem’ry Brings Us Back Again”, has returned to Ireland and compiled the tales of 36 emigrants who returned to their native land thanks to the help of the Safe Home organisation. Safe Home reports that this is a hot seller for Christmas. Their website says, “Frances Browner has conducted thirty-six fascinating interviews that highlight the heartache of leaving home; the struggles and successes of survival in a new land; the joy, and sometimes trauma, of returning.”
Buy it at the Safe Home website.
“A Story to be Told”: This gorgeously produced book tells the stories of 129 emigrants to Canada in their own words. Edited by Eleanor McGrath and with photographs by William C. Smith, this book reveals the diversity of the Canadian Irish experience, telling the tales of artists, mothers, a labour leader, a bus driver, a dance teacher, an actor, an engineer, an accountant. Their Irish identities are diverse as well, with tales of people from what seems like every possible background: rural farmers; Belfast Protestants and Catholics; Lithuanian descendants; Jewish Dubliners; American-and English-born, Irish-raised emigrants.
Many of them express love for both Ireland and their adopted home of Canada: “Today I am a very proud Irish Canadian who is blessed to call two of the greatest places on the planet home”, says one interviewee in a sentiment echoed by many others – although some express greater loyalty to one country or the other. A moving book and a great addition to the increasing library of oral history books.
Order the book from the Liffey Press.
For another Canadian treat, Ottawa’s Irish Drop-In Group has created a wonderful miscellany called “Memories of the Past: Stories and Recipes from Ottawa’s Irish Drop-In Groupâ€?. The eclectic collection of reminiscences, poems, jokes, photographs and more is a splendid insight into the lives of the 40+ seniors in the drop-in group, which meets every week at Margaret Mary’s Church in the south end of the Canadian capital. This book has the most ‘home-produced’ feel, but with about 60 recipes, including for such traditional favourites as barm brack, colcannon, champ, porter cake, beef stew, and soda bread, this spiral-bound volume has much to offer.
See the website for the Irish Society of the National Capital Region.
For a musical treat (albeit a commercial one), check out “The Irish Scattering” from Galway traditional singer and musician Sean Keane. Available as both a CD and a DVD, the music tells diverse tales of Irish emigrants through the centuries, including the travels of Irish monks, Irish settlers in Montserrat, Irish soldiers abroad, and the Ulster-Scots in America. The CD features 16 songs; the DVD of the live performance features 28 songs with music and dancing from some of Ireland’s finest practitioners.
Buy it at Sean Keane’s website.
Any suggestions? Post them in the comments below.
Barak Obama’s heritage challenges myths
Monday, November 24th, 2008A Queen’s University Belfast professor uses the election of Barack Obama as the launching pad for a discussion of Irish-American myths in an article in this weekend’s Irish Times.
Brian Walker points out that formerly held notions of Irish-American identity have been greatly challenged in recent decades, as studies have revealed the extent to which the Irish American community is Protestant. He points out that it had been assumed that the slight majority of Irish-Americans who are Protestant were thought to have been Scots-Irish, but the 1990 US census only showed about 5 million people calling themselves Scots-Irish, or 12% of the Irish-American community.
While there are several reasons for this, Walker highlights Barack Obama’s Irish ancestor, Fulmouth Kearney, who was a member of the Church of Ireland in Moneygall, Co. Offaly. Walker notes that the presence of Church of Ireland members among the Irish diaspora is too often overlooked.
Read the entire article on the Irish Times website:
Irish Diaspora in Scotland group launched
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Irish organisations in Scotland are joining together to form a new umbrella group that will be launched this week. The group, the Irish Diaspora in Scotland Association, Â is aimed at bringing together Irish groups with members from multiple generations of Irish emigrants and descendents.
The IDSA includes among its members the following:
Gaelic Athletic Association (Cumann Luthcleas Gael), Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann IrishTtraditional Music Association), Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), Feis Glaschu, Celtic Supporters Association, St Patrick’s Festival Committee Coatbridge, Erin’s Ways Blantyre, An Sceal, Irish in Scotland History Group, Irish Famine Commemoration Committee, Coatbridge Irish Genealogy Project, Croy Historical Society, St Helen’s Irish Céilà Club Glasgow, Crois na Ceilti Set Dance Club, Glasgow Set Dance Club, Garngad Irish Heritage Group, Croy Welfare Development Trust An Coimisiún le Rincà Gaelach and Comhdháil Na Rince Gaelacha.
From their mission statement:
The Irish Diaspora in Scotland Association (IDSA) exists to preserve, esteem, promote and celebrate the past and ongoing history and culture of Irish migrants and their offspring in Scotland. The Association endeavours to provide support, direction and articulation for organisations and individuals who recognise and value their Irish origins, heritage and identities whether born in Scotland, Ireland or elsewhere. Further, the Association exists to contribute to a society where all national and ethnic origins and identities are valued and treated with equality of respect, recognition and representation. To this end the Association seeks to contribute to the efforts of individuals and groups in Scotland who are against racial and religious prejudice.
The group is being launched at a civic reception on Friday, 21 November 2008 in Glasgow City Chambers. The group says the launch will be attended by Irish government representatives, numerous MPs and local councillors, rerpresentatives from ethnic minority groups, Â and members of the business, sporting and academic communities.
See the group’s website at IrishinScotland.com.
“World wide webs” diaspora book published by Australian think tank
Monday, February 18th, 2008“World wide webs: diasporas and the international system” has been published today by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an independent think tank based in Sydney, Australia. The paper by Michael Fullilove looks like a significant contribution to the field of Diaspora Studies.
From the website:
In this paper, Michael argues that diasporas (communities which live outside, but retain their connections with, their homelands) are getting larger, thicker and stronger – with important implications for global economics, identity, politics and security. Michael compares diasporas to ‘world wide webs’ emanating from states, with dense, interlocking, often electronic strands spanning the globe and binding different individuals, institutions and countries together. World wide webs offers a fresh take on globalisation which raises difficult questions for national governments, including the Australian government.
Download “World wide webs” from the Lowy Institute website.
Voting rights article featured on IrishEmigrant.com
Monday, February 11th, 2008IrishEmigrant.com is carrying an article from Ean on its website, on the issue of emigrant voting rights. The article notes that many immigrant groups are now able to vote in their home countries from Ireland, a fact that is reported positively in the Irish media. It contains an overview of the diverse ways in which the over 100 nations that allow emigrant voting have managed the issue, and discusses the effect of the likely move toward Seanad reform on the number of Irish people who will have some say from abroad.
Here is the text of the article.
Expat voting, global style
By Noreen Bowden
There was intense media interest in Ireland this week over the Super Tuesday vote in the US. The excitement was evident in the amount of media coverage afforded those Irish residents who cast their ballots as part of the Democrats Abroad primary election. More than 250 American citizens showed up to vote in Dublin at O’Neill’s pub, as for the first time ever the Democratic party was sending delegates from abroad to the convention. In essence, we were being treated as the “fifty-first state”.
As someone who was delighted to join the pub crowd in casting my ballot on Tuesday, I noted the fact that there was no negative commentary from Irish observers about the fact that we were exercising our rights to an emigrant vote – a topic which has been highly controversial in Ireland. In asking a few of the journalists and students who had come to observe the situation, most of them conceded they hadn’t made the connection between Americans voting from Ireland and the fact that Irish people don’t similarly get to vote once they have left the country. We in Ireland have come to accept it as a matter of course that immigrants here have a say in their home elections – in recent months, it’s not just the Americans who have been voting, but also the Poles and the French. The votes of all three have been widely covered by the Irish media – and I have yet to see any critical coverage or suggestion that these emigrant voters were in any way damaging to their home nations.
Currently, there are around 115 countries and territories – including nearly all developed nations – that have systems in place to allow their emigrants to vote. And the number is growing. Even countries with very high rates of emigration, such as Italy, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico have recently allowed their expats to vote.
Ireland is in a highly unusual situation in our increasingly globalised world, in not allowing the majority of its overseas citizens any say in the political process. Members of the armed forces and the diplomatic services are able to vote in Dail elections, while only NUI and Trinity graduates can vote in the Seanad. There is no law to prevent emigrants from voting; there is simply no law to facilitate it.
Many people within Ireland are at first leery of allowing emigrants to vote, pointing out that, with such a high number of emigrants abroad, Ireland would be overwhelmed. Others point to Ireland’s system of proportional representation, and suggest that elections in close constituencies could be held up waiting for a box of votes to arrive from Boston or Berlin.
Still others, in an odd inversion of the eighteenth century’s American Revolutionary rallying cry for democracy, proclaim, “No representation without taxation” – an argument seriously undermined by the fact that no other nation seems to link expat voting with expat taxation. In fact, the US(which does not explicitly link the two) is the only developed nation that requires its citizens abroad to pay taxes on money earned abroad, and even then the only people affected are those making over $85,000.
Some suggest that Irish people abroad quickly lose touch with the country, and can’t stay informed enough to vote responsibly. This argument will no doubt seem nonsensical to anyone who has been reading the Irish Emigrant for any part of the last twenty-one years. Plus, we don’t require voters within the country to pass a current events test, so how do we know that our voters at home have been brushing up on the issues?
The fact is that there is a wide variety of solutions for the emigrant voting conundrum, and every country has dealt with the issue in a different way. It’s not an all or nothing proposition. While a 2006 study found that 65 countries allowed external voting for all, 26 countries placed restrictions on which of their expats could vote, making the right conditional on the length of time they have been away, their intent to return, or their location. A few countries disqualify citizens from voting after a certain period of time – the UK allows expats to vote only for the first 15 years away, for example.
Some nations restrict voting to only certain types of elections – the most commonly allowed voting is for national and presidential elections. It is less common to allow emigrants to cast their ballots in local and regional elections, or for referendums.
Most nations require that their emigrants vote in the last constituency where they lived, while others vote for specific emigrant representatives. Nine countries, including France, Italy and Portugal, reserve seats in their parliaments for those abroad.
The forms of voting are also diverse – some require voters to do so in person, at either consulates or embassies or by returning home to cast the ballot; others allow voting by mail or fax, a handful by proxy, and some by a combination of the above methods.
It may be time for Ireland to begin examining the diversity of compromises and solutions that other nations have arrived at. Ironically, the fact that emigrant numbers are declining may make the idea of an emigrant vote more possible, as voters at home will be less threatened by a smaller number of emigrants, and as the nature of emigration becomes increasingly more of a temporary phenomenon. These decreased numbers will be one of a number of factors eroding the level of opposition to emigrant voting.
In addition, the prospect of Seanad Reform is in view again, and the most likely outcome appears to be the extension of the right to vote by all third-level graduates, not just Trinity and NUI graduates. Presumably, reformers will continue to allow those third-level graduate Seanad voters to vote whether they are at home or abroad. This will greatly increase the number of emigrants who can vote – but the long-term effect may be even greater. Authorities will have to come up with a national system that will allow them to register voters from abroad, and to decide on how an overseas election will work. In doing so they will be setting up the structures that could pave the way for more widespread emigrant voting in the future.
Noreen Bowden is a New Yorker who lives in Ireland and is the Director of Ean, the Emigrant Advice Network. Do you have an opinion about whether you should be able to vote from abroad? Let Ean know, by writing to Noreen Bowden at info@ean.ie
For more information on Ean, visit www.ean.ie
Published on Irish Emigrant.com, February 2008.
See Ean’s factsheet on emigrant voting rights.
Have an opinion on the matter? Drop a line to Noreen at info@ean.ie, or use the comment feature below.
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