To the four corners of the world

CORMAC Ó GRÁDA commends an ambitious and accessible overview of the Irish diaspora, seen through the ordinary people who travelled to countries all over the world to find new lives

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On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World by Sean Connolly Little, Brown, 496 pages, £25

 

Like the Irish diaspora itself, the literature on the topic is enormous. Of what is written, some is straight history; some is quantitative; while some dwells on particular sources, such as emigrant letters or banking records. Sean Connolly’s ambitious and highly successful synthesis embraces all these angles. Hitherto there has been no single go-to source about that diaspora in its temporal and spatial dimensions, spanning four centuries and four continents. Not far off is Tim Pat Coogan’s Wherever Green Is Worn (2000), but Connolly is more scholarly and fair-minded (if less humorous), and whereas Coogan’s focus is mainly on the “Green” (or Catholic) Irish, Connolly gives their Orange (ie, Protestant) brethren their due share. Indeed, more of the cameos in