The diaspora is for life, not just for Christmas. Ingratiating platitudes are hard to avoid during the season of goodwill and cheap sentiment but there is something especially nauseating about the chirpy condescension with which our political establishment often addresses the overseas Irish at this time of year. There are a multitude of reasons why Irish people choose to emigrate and why so much of the populace has done so for generations. At the root of all these reasons are political failures of one sort of another. It is therefore an act of brazen audacity for the creators and/or guardians of Ireland’s systematic dysfunction to wax lyrical about the global scattering of Irish emigrants and their descendants, or the “diaspora” as our grandiloquent leaders invariably…

Source: The Times December 30, 2017 00:03 UTC