Irish national identity was forged in emigration before national integration was complete

Evidence

Though Ireland is but a small island, the integration of the Irish peoples was by no means an accomplished fact by the time of the Great Famine and the major emigrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century. Indeed, some students of the emigrations are quite specific as to the regions, local cultures, dialect groups, and occupations from which successive emigrants were drawn and how these particularities influenced historical movements. The Irish peoples had been in the process of achieving a national identity and a national culture since the Norman-led conquest. They had not done so when the time came for the mass relocation that has marked their collective history for the past 200 years. Theirs is, then, a national identity deeply marked by the Irish dispersion. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 266

Categorization

• XREF: This line — a diaspora that precedes and frames national identity — parallels the African diaspora condition Robinson develops later in the book as the ground of the Black radical tradition; the Irish dispersion here foreshadows the Black Atlantic. — connects to: Ireland’s Catholics were a colonially constructed racial caste before emigrating — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 130