St Patrick’s Day has morphed from being a celebration of the Irish abroad to becoming an opportunity to raise Ireland’s commercial and political profile, even in places where Ireland usually has little presence. Nonetheless, wherever the day was celebrated, members of the Irish diaspora were present.
As traditional emigrant destinations decline in popularity, Irish people are spread ever more widely across the globe. Irish language classes in Hanoi, and significant numbers living in the Gulf states, are examples of this trend.
Census returns over the last century and a half, across a range of countries, paint the changing picture of Irish emigration, both in terms of scale and the destinations chosen.
The Irish-born population peaked in 1871 at 8.7 million, when almost 40 per cent of them lived abroad. Today, the Irish-born numbers have shrunk to under five million, and only 15 per cent live abroad, the lowest proportion in two centuries.
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The US and Britain were the main destinations for our 19th century emigrants. In 1871, almost a quarter of Irish-born people lived in the US, and 10 per cent in Britain.
British Empire destinations were also popular in Victorian times, and Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada remain so today. A 1901 census of the (British) empire showed that almost 10,000 Irish people were living in India, 155 in Hong Kong, and even nine men and a woman on Ascension Island.
While emigration continued at a high level into the 20th century, the number of Irish-born people living abroad began to fall when the huge generation of post-Famine emigrants died. By 1921, the proportion of Irish-born people living abroad had fallen to 30 per cent, with the US share down to 17 per cent.
Emigration to the US was severely curtailed in the 1920s, so in the interwar years, Britain was the most important outlet for those who wanted to escape poor economic prospects in Ireland. The UK remains the top choice today, but only 6 per cent of those born in Ireland and aged between 20 and 34 are now living there.
The shares of younger Irish emigrants living in the rest of the EU, and in Australia or New Zealand, both now exceed the share in the US.
[ Irish emigration has changed. Now it’s claiming my friends in their 40sOpens in new window ]
Since the second World War, Ireland has experienced periods of economic turbulence, interspersed with better times, which saw successive waves of Irish migrants moving backwards and forwards between Ireland and foreign destinations.
Since the 1970s, return migration has been an important feature of the Irish experience, so that the overall emigrant share of the Irish-born population has fallen over time.
Poor economic performance in the 1950s saw emigration soar. By 1961, once again 30 per cent of the Irish-born population were living abroad. But in the late 1960s and 1970s, many came back as the Irish economy modernised and prospered.
The economic challenges of the 1980s led to a second wave of emigration, followed by a return as the Irish economy lifted off in the 1990s. The economic crash of 2008 brought a further short spurt of emigration, followed by returns as the economy recovered.
Census 2022 illustrates this phenomenon of temporary emigration – one in five of the Irish-born population aged 35-64 were returned emigrants. Of the 100,000 Irish people aged 20-34 living abroad, almost 10 per cent returned to Ireland in the census year.
The stock of emigrants abroad is changing continually, with many of them returning to Ireland after a temporary sojourn abroad to be replaced by younger siblings or cousins. Because so many of us have first-hand experience with relatives living abroad, or have lived abroad ourselves, it may explain why anti-immigrant rhetoric has not, to date, found much fertile ground.
[ Highly educated emigrants are more likely to returnOpens in new window ]
The Irish experience of widespread temporary migration is fairly unusual internationally, although successful eastern European economies are experiencing something similar.
Not surprisingly, most Irish-born children live in Ireland. However, there are 18,000 Irish-born children in Poland and Lithuania.
Like our own homing pigeons, many eastern Europeans who came to work in Ireland, following EU accession in 2004, have returned home as their own economies have taken off, bringing their Irish-born children with them.
A consequence of lower emigration and return migration is that, today, the Irish-born abroad are disproportionately elderly. Only 14 per cent of people born in Ireland aged between 20 and 34 live abroad, compared to 22 per cent of Irish-born people aged over 65.
Over time, with the ending of mass permanent emigration, the number of elderly Irish-born people living abroad will continue to fall. Some of these left a harsher Ireland which makes the recent agreement that mother and baby home survivors in the UK can now receive the compensation due, without threat to their welfare payments, very welcome.
