Students Discuss "Ireland in Transition"

Ireland in Transition: From Emigration to Immigration was offered for the first time as a jointly listed course in Irish Studies and Sociology in Fall 2007. Mary P.Corcoran, a visiting Professor from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth taught the course which offered a sociologically informed overview of emigration out of and immigration into Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Students were given a general insight into the history of contemporary Irish emigration and its key demographic features. The transition to immigration that has occurred since the 1990s, was explored through analysis of the experiences of returning Irish emigrants and new immigrants groups in Ireland. The course raised issues to do with race, ethnicity and identity in the context of transnational communities, using Ireland as a particular case study. All students wrote a final term paper on a topic of their choice as part of the course requirements. Mary has selected four papers which are available on the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies website as examples of the breadth and quality of student work on the course.

Kate Dugan identifies the various factors associated with the Celtic Tiger economic boom that gave rise to high rates of immigration in the early years of the twenty-first century in Ireland. Sean Wieland looks explicitly at on particular immigrant group in Ireland, the Poles, and assesses their prospect for integration in the host society. Gwen Rugg’s paper explores the historical evolution of travelers as an indigenous ethnic group, and assesses their social location in Irish society today. Finally, Cynthia Curley’s essay focuses on the concept of Irishness and how it has gained and retained currency in the global marketplace of consumption.

Terry Eagleton Speaks at Keough-Naughton Institute

Race and Immigration
in the New Ireland

On Thursday, June 28, 2007, Ireland elected its first black mayor, Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian who arrived seven years ago as an asylum seeker. This event points to the rapid population change the country is experiencing. Ireland has undergone profound changes in the last decade, not simply by reversing a long history of emigration, but also by attracting hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, many of these from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. The arrival of over 207,000 Poles alone in the last decade is changing the face of the Irish nation and the Irish Catholic Church. The world accepted the Irish. Will the Irish accept the world? That is the question the Notre Dame Keough-Naughton Institute conference on Race and Immigration in the New Ireland (October 14-17) will address. Register.
More Information and complete schedule.