The Irish diaspora is changing.
For decades it was largely associated with Irish-America, but emigration patterns have shifted, with Australia now towering over the US as a destination for Irish emigrants. Around 13,500 moved from Ireland to Australia - compared to 6,100 to the US - in the year to April 2025.
Australia is also fast catching up with the UK as a destination for Irish emigrants: 15,200 moved from the State to the UK in 2024. Some European Union nations and a number of other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, are also seeing a strong growth in Irish emigrant communities.
Meanwhile, a growing group has become known as Ireland’s “affinity diaspora”. These people have no hereditary link to Ireland but do have a connection such as having worked or studied here – and a consequential deep appreciation for Irish people, places and culture.
RM Block
One enthusiastic member of the affinity diaspora is Polish woman Beata Wojtachnio. “I still feel a sense of longing for Ireland,” she says from her home in the suburbs of Krakow, Poland, to which she returned six years ago. “I feel Irish deep in my heart,” she adds, having spent 15 formative years here from 2004.
Wojtachnio was part of a wave of Polish people who arrived in Ireland following the country’s entry into the EU on May 1st of that year.
Her years spent living in Galway were important ones, with two of her three children born there. Her son (17) and daughter (13) are both dual citizens). Wojtachnio did not have good English when she arrived and, like many Polish emigrants at that time, she bolstered Ireland’s service industries, working in B&Bs, restaurants, hospitals and factories.
Over time, she learned to speak English fluently and, in later years in Ireland, developed a creative and business outlet – setting up a photography studio where she took photos of newborn babies.
Thousands of Poles returned home as their nation’s economy developed. In Wojtachnio’s case, she went back a changed person and feeling deeply connected to Ireland. “I brought back kindness above all. I learned to smile at people the way the Irish do. I’m often bothered by the typical Polish tendency to complain. But I’m open and warm and I owe that to Ireland,” she says.
“I’ve also become less fearful. Sometimes I trust people too much, which is something I picked up in Ireland.”
She continues to visit friends in Ireland regularly and wrote her master’s thesis on the Celts. She also developed a fondness for Irish music and enjoys the occasional Guinness.
Irishness is a key part of her children’s identity too, and Wojtachnio insists this is about more than simply having an Irish passport: “That bond will stay with them forever.” When speaking English, “they have an Irish accent and have even received awards in language competitions”, she adds.
When Polish people first came to Ireland in significant numbers in the mid-2000s, their “whiteness” and “Catholicism” were often cited as the reasons they appeared to find integration into Irish society relatively easy.
Law student and activist Nyawanga Iníon-Dubh Owuor was born in Kenya to an Irish mother and grew up in Nairobi.
While preserving Irish culture through language and music is important to Iníon-Dubh Owuor, she also stresses the importance of extending the Irish diaspora culture “beyond what we know”.
“It is very easy to miscommunicate the idea of being ‘Irish enough’, because there is no such thing as ‘I am more Irish than you’,” she told a Global Irish Civic Forum event in Croke Park last Friday. The Forum is a Government initiative led by the Department of Foreign Affairs that brings representatives from organisations supporting the diaspora worldwide together to discuss issues of common concern.
“As decades go by, we are having a wider distinction between a nation and a state, as defined by boundaries on a map,” Iníon-Dubh Owuor said.
“A state is a territory marked by some borders. Whereas a nation is a feeling and a belonging and a purpose: shared values, common interest, common history, shared future.”
The diaspora “cannot be looked at as one holistic unified body”, she said.
Neale Richmond is Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs with special responsibility for International Development and Diaspora. He says of Ireland’s connection to its new diaspora: “We have to constantly look to evolve it, enhance it and in some ways, redefine it . . . our diaspora is changing.”
Richmond published Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy 2026-2030 last Thursday. He says in preparing the document, Nairobi, Kenya was the location for the first of dozens of in-person consultations held with members of the diaspora. It was chosen “deliberately”, in order “to push out the boundaries”, he says.
The Department of Foreign Affairs also held consultations in locations such as Lagos, Nigeria and Warsaw, Poland.
There are opportunities for Ireland in central and eastern Europe, which is geopolitically and economically important for Ireland, says Richmond. “This isn’t just about Irish communities in traditional regions,” he says.
These days, Richmond notes, only one US member of congress or senate has an Irish parent, while four recent prime ministers in the EU spent time studying in Ireland.
Global power structures are shifting on a seemingly weekly basis. But the crown jewels of Ireland’s soft power – the biggest weapon of a militarily neutral nation – its diaspora, is also going through a rapid metamorphosis.
Ireland has traditionally used its diaspora to bolster its economic and geopolitical credentials. For many years, the centre of that diaspora diplomacy lay in Irish-America, where interventions of those whose parents or grandparents had emigrated are often credited with paving the way to the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
“When we go into very difficult meetings on an economic basis, on a geopolitical basis, we lean on our diaspora network,” Richmond says. He believes the new diaspora can provide “economic opportunity” in a “changing world”.
The US power structure has been turned on its head, with isolationist economics now in favour there, while policies of openness and diversity are being downgraded. With political sands shifting, Ireland is looking towards less traditional areas.
Immigration reform has been high up the Irish-American agenda for many years – something Richmond admits is off the table at the moment. But the “reverse diaspora” has received a boost under the administration of US president Donald Trump, as some people with Irish ancestry seek to move to Ireland. A record 18,910 US applicants sought Irish citizenship through the foreign birth register in 2025. In previous years, Brexit caused a similar a wave of applications for Irish passports from Britain.
Some people who identify as LGBTQI+ were among those who left Ireland in large numbers previously. They emigrated when unemployment was high, but also at a time when homosexuality was illegal and publicly condemned by the Catholic Church. It was not decriminalised until 1993.
The gay diaspora
London-based screenwriter Amy Clarke is bisexual. Originally from Cork, she refers to: “All these people who ran away from Ireland and felt they couldn’t live there because it was illegal to be gay.”
Many of them “grew up in a world filled with shame” but later found acceptance in London, she says.
Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote in 2015. On visits home, Clarke now sees “massive leaps” from her experience of Irish society in her teenage years, when she felt there was “no chance of being anything other than straight”.
But remembering and owning the “dark shadows from our past” is also important, she says, especially at a time when “the world is backsliding on rights”.
Clarke received funding through the emigrant support fund to write a play called Mammy’s House, documenting the largely untold Irish queer experience of the Aids crisis in London. The play was the idea of her co-creator Derek Murphy, an actor/producer from Cork.
They interviewed Irish LGBTQI+ diaspora who lived through the time in preparation for the play, and that process itself was cathartic. “The one common line of emotion through every person was a sense of relief, that someone finally wanted to listen, to hear it,” says Clarke.
She was “very mindful of having humour”, seeing it as a characteristic Irish response to a tragedy – that sense of cracking a joke to make other people feel more comfortable.
One of the diaspora strategy’s commitments is to further represent LGBTQI+ stories.
For many people, Irishness has not always been an inclusive identity. For Clarke, this wasn’t just about her sexuality. She was born in the UK and moved to west Cork with her English parents when she was eight weeks old. In Ireland, she was often asked “what her accent is” and “where are you really from?”. People can be “very quick to tell you where you should be from based on how you sound”, she says.
The multi-heritage diaspora
For London-based music producer and DJ Arveene Juthan, who grew up in Dublin with an Irish mother and a South African-Indian father, his Irishness was not always accepted by others.
Juthan’s father was a member of the apartheid-opposing African National Congress (ANC). He came to Ireland during the late-1960s/early-70s, met Juthan’s mother – who was from Westmeath – and stayed.
Growing up in Dublin, Juthan says he was embraced by the small but “close-knit community” of South African Indians. Some members of the Irish diaspora with multi-heritage roots may be inclined to focus, for example, on their Afro-Caribbean or Asian backgrounds rather than those of their Irish parent. This is a pattern Juthan says he has seen. People of multi-heritage backgrounds can be less likely to emphasise their Irishness, he believes, “because they just don’t see the representation”.
Juthan feels his path was easier than others with more than one heritage. While he did experience “bouts of racism”, he feels it helped that he became a 6ft 2in man, playing lots of sports. With a Westmeath mother, uncles playing GAA and experience footing turf in the bog as a child, it was easier to relate to more “traditional” Irishness.
He is a member of the Emigrant Services Advisory Committee, which has been given a €50,000 fund as part of the diaspora strategy. This will be used to reach out to members of the Irish diaspora with multiple heritage and to train diaspora support groups in looking out for diversity. He finds hope in the strategy and says that “even using the words multi-heritage instead of mixed race” shows him there is an openness to change in official Ireland.
“It’s about trying to raise awareness that there’s more than people from classic Irish backgrounds,” says Juthan.
While working on the music for a track on the Kneecap album Fine Art, he met his London neighbour – producer and rapper Jelani Blackman – who was also working with the Belfast hip hop group. Juthan says he was taken by surprise when Blackman told him his mother was of Irish descent. ”I had no idea, because being in the UK he was focused on the Afro-Caribbean side of his heritage.“
Irish representation needs to be “cultivated”, particularly with younger people, Juthan says. While he loves more traditional Irish “celtic mysticism” music, it can “be hard to identify with it when you don’t see yourself represented”.
“Culture is key” to bringing in a wider version of Irishness, he says, citing artists such as Jazzy, the Dublin musician of Jamaican descent.
There is an “intrinsicness”, an emotionality and a sensitivity in Irish music “that goes to the core very quickly . . . something that triggers me in a positive way”.
Juthan is organising the 333 Festival in Ranelagh, Dublin in November, featuring Japanese Irish and LGBTQI+ DJs. “That’s the way you change,” he says. “It’s very easy to be afraid of something you’ve never experienced.
“In the back of my head, I’m always trying to think about representation, what it looks like, how it feels. It’s not just ticking boxes.”
Irish creativity is widely accepted as having a moment globally, from music to film. With the likes of CMAT and Fontaines DC breaking through internationally, it presents an opportunity to reach the Irish diaspora with a “multi-ethnic heritage”.
“Their Irishness is a modern Irish,” which embraces immigration, Juthan says.
In work with emerging artists, he notes an increase in diversity. He recalls working in the basement of D1 records on Parnell Street (the techno label founded by Eamon Doyle) and watching the street evolve, as African immigrant families opened shops. Now, as children of this generation of immigrants grow up, some are getting into music. It’s “an easier thing” for someone without connections to get into than, say, the upper echelons of law, says Juthan.
The latest diaspora strategy is “a good start, we just have to follow through”. He hopes Ireland’s growing cultural credentials will be a help. The Irish story “is such a great one to be proud of and this makes it easier for people to say they’ve an Irish grandmother”.
It’s important we see the diaspora as an asset with the power to shape Ireland’s agenda in the world
— Dr Martin Russell
But with racism and the far right on the rise, the Global Irish Forum last week heard warnings from Sligo native and former World Health Organisation executive director Mike Ryan.
He warned of the “toxic nationalism” and the “hijacking” of the Irish flag by the far right. “We’re celebrating our culture and our diversity,” he said. “We’re not celebrating our whiteness or our Irishness or the degree of generations.”
Ryan presents a vision for the positive force that the Irish diaspora can be in the world.
He called on the diaspora to stand up for these values which young people seek and for the kindness missing in the world.
“We can do that as a global network of people. We can represent that to the world,” he says.
For all the talk of “team Ireland” and looking forward, Ryan reflected on the importance of looking back and remembering the “brutal history” of immigration for “generations and generations”.
The young professional diaspora
This clash between the older perception of Irishness and its newer, more modern form, was addressed by departing Glamour magazine editor Samantha Barry. She said she had a strong backlash from third- and fourth-generation Irish women when she wrote an editorial celebrating Ireland’s abortion referendum and raising concerns about rights being taken away in the US. “They told me I didn’t represent Irishness and the Irish for them.”
She spoke of how differences between older and modern Irishness may be one of the challenges that lies ahead for an evolving version of the Irish diaspora.
Dr Martin Russell, of The Diaspora Institute, analysed the 10,000 survey responses across 25 countries from members of the Irish diaspora forming the backbone of the Government’s strategy. He says the data is clear: “There is no such thing as the Irish diaspora, there’s hundreds and they’re different.”
The key challenge is “engaging with the younger diaspora”, with one of the main asks involving access to existing diaspora organisations. It is important to ask how we can support the next generation”, he says.
Russell points to a “crisis of belonging” in today’s world, and the diaspora “begins and ends with a sense of belonging”.
With geopolitical shifts leaving diasporas across the world exposed, it’s time to activate this belonging and a different type of diaspora diplomacy, he says.
“It’s important we see the diaspora as an asset with the power to shape Ireland’s agenda in the world,” he adds.
Whether or not Ireland can harness the breadth of ambition and potential in the wide net it has cast in this more inclusive vision of the Irish diaspora, only time will tell.
