page_title: Irish diaspora
section_title: Definition
hierarchical_section_title: Irish diaspora / Definition
caption_attribution_description: English: Road from Falcarragh SE to R251 - Bridge of Tears I only know this bridge as the Bridge of Tears. This is the spot where emmigrants continued onward across the bridge and up the hill to the right, as the start of a very long walk to get to the ships that would take them to America and/or Canada, and where their family members remaining in Ireland would part with them and return to their homes. The Gweedore area of Donegal was hard hit by the famine and home evictions.
context_page_description: The Irish diaspora refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.
  The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages, but it is only possible to quantify it from around 1700: since then between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. This is more than the population of Ireland at its historical peak of 8.5 million in the 1840s. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool; those who could afford it went farther, including almost 5 million to the United States.
  After 1765, emigration from Ireland became a short, relentless, and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans who claim Irish as their primary ethnicity.
  As recently as the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of Irish emigrants spoke Irish as their first language. This had social and cultural consequences for the cultivation of the language abroad, including innovations in journalism.
context_section_description: The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. The diaspora, broadly interpreted, contains all those known to have Irish ancestors, i.e., over 100 million people, which is more than fifteen times the population of the island of Ireland, which was about 4.6 million in 2011. It has been argued the idea of an Irish diaspora, as distinct from the old identification of Irishness with Ireland itself, was influenced by the perceived advent of global mobility and modernity. Irishness could now be identified with dispersed individuals and groups of Irish descent. But many of those individuals were the product of complex ethnic intermarriage in America and elsewhere, complicating the idea of a single line of descent. "Irishness" might then rely primarily on individual identification with an Irish diaspora.
  The Government of Ireland defines the Irish diaspora as all persons of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases where they were registered as Irish citizens in the Foreign Births Register held in every Irish diplomatic mission. Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller—some 3 million persons, of whom 1.47 million are Irish-born emigrants. Given Ireland's population of 4.85 million, this is still a large ratio.
  However, the usage of Irish diaspora is generally not limited by citizenship status, thus leading to an estimated (and fluctuating) membership of up to 80 million persons—the second and more emotive definition. The Irish Government acknowledged this interpretation—although it did not acknowledge any legal obligations to persons in this larger diaspora—when Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland was amended in 1998 to read "[f]urthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage."
  The right to register as an Irish citizen terminates at the third generation (except as noted above). This contrasts with citizenship law in Italy, Israel, Japan and other countries which practice jus sanguinis or otherwise permit members of the diaspora to register as citizens.
  There are people of Irish descent abroad (including Irish speakers) who reject inclusion in an Irish "diaspora" and who designate their identity in other ways. They may see the diasporic label as something used by the Irish government for its own purposes.
caption: The Bridge of Tears (Droichead na nDeor in Irish) in West Donegal, Ireland. Family and friends of emigrants would accompany them as far as the bridge before saying goodbye, while the emigrants would continue on to Derry Port.
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