Wherever Green is Worn: the story of the Irish diaspora Tim Pat Coogan Hutchinson, 746pp, £25 ISBN 0091750296 The Catholics of Ulster Marianne Elliott Allen Lane, 642pp, £25

Eighty years ago, the funeral of Terence McSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork and a leading figure in the IRA, took place in London. He died in Brixton Prison, having been on hunger strike in protest at the establishment of military courts during the Anglo-Irish war. The procession that followed McSwiney's coffin to Euston Station, from where it was to be returned to Ireland, brought the charged emotion of a distant conflict to the streets of the metropolis. For many in the crowd, it was the first time they had seen the green, white and orange Sinn Fein flag. Foreign correspondents in London were amazed by the spectacle of an officer of the aspirant Irish republic, which had declared itself at war with England, being given the equivalent of a state funeral, complete with rebel flags and uniforms, as well as all the necessary assistance from the police and the city authorities. In the Daily News, the republican sympathiser Robert Lynd wrote of the procession as an animated history lesson: "London, I think, learned more Irish history yesterday than it had ever learned before."

Contemporary descriptions of McSwiney's funeral provide revealing vignettes of an emigrant community, publicly defined by political turmoil in the home country. The Irish sociologist Liam Ryan has described emigration as central to the Irish experience of being modern. And there is, indeed, something hauntingly modern about McSwiney's procession: a troubled corner of a great empire coming to life on the streets of the capital city.

The best explanation for today's presence of millions of people throughout the world who like to think of themselves as "Irish" is the Great Famine: between the mid-1840s and the early 1850s, more than a million people left Ireland. But the second wave of Irish emigration, between 1870 and 1914, coincided with the new age of travel, encouraged by steam-powered ships and the absence of legal barriers. This was the era of international population movement, when Irish, Germans, Poles and Italians became, in sheer scale, world-class migrants.

Unfortunately, a sense of comparative international perspective is missing from Tim Pat Coogan's account of the Irish "diaspora", which is marked by a wearying notion of pride. Reading this unwieldy mix of narrative history and unsatisfactory travelogue, you could be forgiven for imagining that the Irish were the only people who emigrated anywhere. Moreover, many of Coogan's assertions betray a lack of confidence of the kind not shared by a modern Irish generation. He tells us, for instance, how the Irish around the world have proved themselves to be "an incredibly good nation". But which migrant people haven't? In Kenya, Coogan meets a patrician brother who trained some of that country's best long-distance runners. This isn't enough in itself - he must go on: "Many of the world's top sport journalists attribute Kenya's resurgence in distance running to this Irish brother." (No source is given.)

Coogan cannot extricate himself from the kind of romantic nationalism examined by Marianne Elliott in her absorbing study of the formation of Catholic identity in Northern Ireland. An Ulster Catholic herself, Elliott identifies with her own culture without having repeatedly to insist on its intrinsic worth. She explains that, just as anti-papism has become a feature of the Northern Irish Protestant identity, so many Catholics derive a vicarious security through identifying with a kind of mystical Irishness. But for Coogan, who is at least critical of the hold exercised by "Mother Church" over many emigrants, being Irish amounts to no more than being Catholic, and to nurturing a petty antipathy to the British, which, in truth, amounts to an inferiority complex.

Coogan acknowledges that one of the means by which the Irish scattered themselves around the world was as servants of the British empire. And yet he describes himself telling schoolchildren in Soweto, South Africa, that the Irish were, in general, not in Africa as imperialists. Which is true? Coogan seldom grapples with such contradictions. He refers to a policy paper prepared by the department of foreign affairs in Dublin, in which Irish foreign policy is described as being "about much more than self-interest. For many of us, it is a statement of the kind of people we are."

Many of us would like to imagine members of the Irish diaspora as rebels rather than reactionaries, more heroic than stoic. But a new appreciation of Irish emigrants can only be measured against the experience of other peoples who, like them, migrated. The untold story of the Irish diaspora is the space that lies somewhere between failure and success, between the coffin ships and the White House. Coogan fails, too, to address the effect of the diaspora on Ireland itself. Without mass emigration, there would have been much more social tension in the home country, particularly over land; emigration was a tool of social control for those who didn't have to leave.

Yet, almost from the inception of an independent Irish state, politicians decried emigration as a great national blight, which independence would help to solve. Ireland took a long time to idealise its emigrants. Only in the past ten years - since the former president Mary Robinson placed a symbolic candle in the window of the presidential residence, designed, if not to entice people home, at least to reassure them that they were not forgotten - has "the diaspora" become a term of common currency. Perhaps the modern epitome of the diaspora was the unprecedentedly successful Irish football team, which was managed by an Englishman, Jack Charlton, and included players born in London, Glasgow and Barnsley.

Interest in the diaspora broadly coincided with the beginning of an extraordinary period of prosperity in Ireland. The rate of emigration has been falling for the past seven years, many Irish abroad are returning and the population of the Republic is at a record high (although it is still short of that at the time of the famine). Ireland has become an attractive place in which to live, and more and more immigrants are arriving by the day.

As president in 1995, Robinson said that history had given Ireland "a moral viewpoint and a historically formed compassion on some of the events happening now". But there is little evidence to suggest that emigrants' memories of the days when they were confronted by signs reading "No blacks, No Irish, No dogs" has made Ireland a more hospitable place to outsiders than anywhere else. Indeed, quite the contrary.

In Wherever Green is Worn, Coogan writes dreamily of how "one day, demographic forces, the sheer energy of the Celts, will subsume the present Unionist majority" in Northern Ireland. But his posturing is undermined by Elliott's more rational analysis. In particular, Elliott is superb at conveying how comforting, and yet how constricting, a Catholic Irish identity can be. Catholic Irishness prescribes a fixed script to follow, a code by which to live, from which leaving Ireland may be, after all, the only way to escape - and improvise.

Maurice Walsh is a BBC foreign correspondent

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website