‘Germs’ in the heart of the other: emigrant scripts, the Celtic Tiger and lived realities of return

Abstract

During the 1990s and 2000s, the period coinciding with Ireland's economic and social transformation and ubiquitously referred to as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, the Irish nation transitioned from being an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving society. In association with this shift, considerable attention has been devoted to Ireland's new immigrant groups, including refugees and asylum seekers and more recently to migrant workers from new EU accession states. During the same period, inward migration was consistently comprised of significant numbers of former emigrants returning to Ireland; however, the place and experiences of Ireland's return migrants has received comparatively little attention from mainstream media sources and is a relatively recent development in scholarship on migration. Taking as its impetus Piaras MacÉinrí's (2001) call for scholarship that places Ireland's history of emigration alongside contemporary immigration, this paper critically explores scripts – media representations and discourses – on emigrants and emigration in the late 1980s and 1990s as they reflect in the lived realities of Irish migrants who returned to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. I argue that these scripts, which bestowed emigrants with characteristics that were subsequently gathered back into the social spaces of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger period, generated a social landscape that was complex to navigate and where lived realities – marked by a devaluation of the emigrant experience and displacement in return – illustrate the contradictions between the representations of emigration in the 1980s and experiences of return. Instead, the lived realities of return highlight the intricate linking of time and space in social exclusions from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Keywords:

• global modernity
• media representation/cultural production
• return migrants
• diaspora
• devaluation and displacement

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the women who participated in this study and who spoke candidly and passionately about their experiences as return migrants. I am grateful to the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies at Trinity College Dublin for support to ensure that data collection ran smoothly. Sincere appreciation goes to Pádraig Carmody and Peadar Kirby for their patience and editorial support with this contribution and special issue. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers for their critical insights and supportive comments on the paper.

Notes

1. In Lefebvre's theorisation on The Production of Space, dominant and taken for granted views in society correspond to representations of space and lived experiences can be aligned with spatial practices and lived, or representational, spaces (see Lefebvre 1991).

2. The five categories were: ‘EU-immigrant’, ‘work permit holder’, ‘return migrant’, ‘asylum seeker/refugee’ and ‘other’.

3. A total of 40 women were interviewed for the larger study; over half (n=25) were categorised as asylum seekers/refugees, six were immigrants from EU states, three were work permit holders and six were return migrants.

4. One of the participants returned to Ireland from the US in 1996, two had returned in either 2001 or 2002, and one of the women returned in early 2004.

5. All newspaper reports discussed here date from 1988 and are from The Irish Times or Irish Independent newspapers.

6. Participants’ names have been changed at their request in order to protect their privacy.

7. As one reviewer suggests, gender may contribute to this treatment and account for some of their experiences. Given the focus on women in this study, this dimension would be an interesting issue to examine in future research.