EXTRACTS, President Michael D. Higgins, Reflecting on
Irish Migrations
Reflecting on Irish Migrations: Some issues for the
Social Sciences
Michael D. Higgins, Uachtarán na hÉireann, President of
Ireland at NYU Glucksman Ireland House, Thursday, 3rd May 2012
I am delighted to be in Glucksman Ireland House in New
York University, one of the highest ranking academic Irish Studies Centres in
the U.S. Those of us who value the importance of Irish Studies and in
particular, the importance of its accessibility in the wider Irish Diaspora,
owe a deep debt of gratitude to the late Lew Glucksman and Loretta Brennan
Glucksman. I am especially, pleased that Loretta is with us today...
... I am very much a supporter of the view put forward by
Patrick O’Sullivan that Irish migration studies has to be an interdisciplinary
exercise and I applaud his every efforts to give meaning to this through his
six volume edited series – The Irish World Wide History, Heritage, Identity
which of course has been succeeded by further scholarship and this had led to
revisions which he has acknowledged. Nevertheless, his views on how the Irish
migrations might best be studied were important and his delivery on these with
the six volumes in the 1990s was a real contribution.
The rewards of a multi-disciplinary approach to Irish
migration are, I repeat, rich. Yet as Patrick O’Sullivan has pointed out this
has been difficult to achieve. His paper Developing Irish Diaspora Studies: A
Personal View in New Hibernian Review in 2003 spelled that out:
“No one academic discipline is going to tell us
everything we want to know about the Irish Diaspora. The study of migration,
emigration, immigration, population movements, flight scattering, networks,
transnational communities, diaspora – this study demands an interdisciplinary
approach.”
Patrick O’Sullivan made his significant contribution at a
time when migration theory and migration studies were being contracted back to
individual disciplines or allowed an eclectic existence within what was
regarded as core subjects which, it was often asserted by their leading
practitioners did not need the discomfort, or the challenge of
interdisciplinarity.
... I believe that an inclusive scholarship would have
benefitted from such an interdisciplinary approach that while reflecting a
respect for the different tools of analysis in different disciplines at the
same time was able to draw on the benefit of transcending boundaries. This
argument has been well made by Patrick O’Sullivan in his state of the field
article on Irish Diaspora Studies to which I earlier referred.
It may be that what has to be overcome by scholars is the
fear that by a particular approach to migration we are seeking to colonise it
at the expense of other approaches, or that by failures to regard such a study
of migration all the more valuable because, as Edward Said would put it, it
exists in the interstices, we allow it to be relegated to an exotic or eclectic
existence as an afterthought in a department that travels under a different and
more grandiose title. Patrick O’Sullivan is very complimentary to the
scholarship of NYU Glucksman Ireland House as exceptional in avoiding such
pitfalls...
...Patrick O’Sullivan noted in the general introduction
to his series the fact that Everett S. Lee’s theory of migration had had little
influence on Irish migration studies. I agree with Patrick O’Sullivan that the
general scheme in Lee’s work might have enabled us to conceptualise Irish
migration within a larger and more general framework of migrant theory. I was
aware of this in Manchester and felt it was a quite valuable approach in
correcting some of the over-determined features of the Push-Pull model.
SOURCE
http://www.president.ie/speeches/reflecting-on-irish-migrations-some-issues-for-the-social-sciences/
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