Internationalist Review of Irish Culture

The beginning of the twenty-first century reveals a very different Ireland than that of the late 1990s. If the last decade was one of economic prosperity then this decade promises to be one of immigration. The Central Statistics Office in Dublin projects approximately thirty-thousand immigrants per annum until 2021, a rate which even if not wholly met, will still mean a ground-breaking transformation of Irish society. It comes as no surprise that this is also a period when ‘Irishness’ and its authentic representation has been repeatedly brought under scrutiny. It could as easily be argued, however, that Irishness, as most national self-definitions, has a long and complex history, and is not a new phenomenon. While some may read this influx of foreigners as a moment of historical crisis for Irish identity, it is worth pausing over issues of Otherness through which the nationalist definition of Irishness arose. This essay returns to a key area within discourses of Irish identity, internationalism, in the light of present-day political and social changes in the country.