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For the first time since the mid-1990s, emigration from Ireland is exceeding immigration. But although the recession may speed up this trend for a while, the more diverse society created by a decade of rapid immigration is not about to disappear

IN FEBRUARY 1995, as commemorations to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Famine were getting underway, the then president Mary Robinson made a powerful address to a joint sitting of the Dáil and Seanad. Taking up one of the signature themes of her presidency, she appealed for an imaginative broadening of notions of identity and belonging in ways that would allow them to accommodate the messy and complex narrative of Irish emigration. Just as the Famine commemoration was a moral act, she said, “our relation in this country to those who have left it is a moral relationship”.