We're not alone in hosting a global homecoming

The Gathering is inspired by similar schemes in Israel, Scotland and India. Have they worked there?

The idea for the Gathering dates back to October 2011 and the Global Irish Economic Forum, a two-day brainstorming session in Dublin Castle at which delegates considered the country’s economic revival.

The “festival of festivals” for the diaspora is an ambitious concept – and, following Gabriel Byrne’s comments this week, a controversial one – but it’s not unprecedented. A number of countries have reached out to their diasporas through initiatives designed to encourage tourism and foster international connections.

India hosts Non-Resident Indian Day, and tens of thousands of young Jews travel to Israel each year as part of the Birthright programme. But the Irish initiative is modelled most closely on the Homecoming, Scotland’s 2009 celebration to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth.

Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, said at the time: “The year of Homecoming is about reuniting Scots and friends of Scotland . . . allowing them to share the pleasure and pride of our culture and heritage.” The programme revolved around five main themes: whisky, golf, great Scottish minds and innovations, Burns himself, and the country’s culture and heritage. The Scottish diaspora is estimated to number 50 million people.

Plans to repeat the Homecoming in 2014 indicate, to some degree, its success. Barbara Clark from VisitScotland, one of the organisers, says the festival generated an additional £53.7 million (€67.3 million) in tourism revenue and attracted more than 95,000 visitors from an initial core budget of £5.5 million (€7 million).

With a core budget of €5 million, Tourism Ireland hopes the Irish festival will attract 325,000 extra visitors and bring in about €200 million.

Clark says the Scots “learned a lot in terms of working with our diaspora”, and certain aspects will not be repeated in 2014, in particular a two-day Edinburgh-based centrepiece event, incidentally called the Gathering, which the Scotsman newspaper described as a “fiasco”.

Rather than stage a similar extravaganza, Ireland’s Gathering will instead attempt to group various existing festivals and events under the one banner.

But some are unconvinced that Gathering 2013 amounts to anything more than a gimmick. Earlier this week the actor Gabriel Byrne, Ireland’s former cultural ambassador, dismissed the initiative as a “scam” that amounted to a “shakedown” of the Irish diaspora.The project’s director Jim Miley, however, rejected the claims, saying the festival was aimed at a bigger target group than first-generation Irish exiles. “There is a vast diaspora of 70 million people, with connections with Ireland that are very complex. We have not reached out to them in the past.”

Diaspora engagement

Kingsley Aikins, the head of Diaspora Matters, a Dublin-based consultancy firm that advises governments on diaspora engagement, believes Ireland will benefit from the venture. Rather than the quick fix of tourism, the Gathering will provide an opportunity to build “networks with people who wouldn’t be connected with Ireland”.

Aikins believes the Gathering will be more inclusive than Scotland’s Homecoming. “It’s not quite a clan gathering . . . We are appealing to every citizen and village to do something.”

Following Byrne’s comments, Minister for Tourism Leo Varadkar also defended the project. “The response to the Gathering has been really great in America,” he said. “A huge amount of work is being done to really connect with the Irish overseas.”

Last March, during a visit to London, Varadkar said Ireland lagged way behind Israel and India when it came to engaging with its diaspora. “Israel is the gold standard in many ways,” agrees Aikins. The Taglit Heb, or Birthright, programme brings about 45,000 Jews between the ages of 18 and 26 to Israel each year. It’s a more focused, targeted affair.

“India is an interesting one,” says Aikins, “but up until 2002 they had nothing.” For a long time there was apathy between the country and its diaspora. That dissipated following a series of initiatives which “created a sense of global Indians”.

The Indian government introduced an overseas citizenship of India scheme, and its TiE global entrepreneur network, on which the Irish International Business Network is modelled, is now the largest of its kind. And although the country doesn’t hold a year-long gathering per se, it does celebrate Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, or Non-resident Indian Day, every January.

But look hard enough and just about every country harbours a strong sense of diaspora. In August Grenada, the minuscule Caribbean island nation, held Grenadian Homecoming 2012.

In the long term, says Jim Miley, the Gathering “lays a platform for diaspora marketing, which Ireland hasn’t done before” and which offers “knock-on benefits for investment and business”. The Notre Dame/Navy game, for example, attracted a large number of “high net worth” individuals. “If you were hanging around the lobby of the Merrion or Shelbourne hotels, there was some serious business being done,” he says.