Irish people were the main source of surplus British labour in the 20th century, according to Dr Mary Hickman, director of Irish Studies at the University of North London. She said analyses of emigration had been very limited, despite its centrality in Irish life. On Irish emigration to Britain there had been a notable silence, as if it were not considered emigration at all, compared to those who went to the US.
More Irish-born people live in London than anywhere else in the world except Dublin and Belfast, she told a seminar organised by the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at the Scattering conference in University College Cork.
There had been much recent commentary on the heterogeneity of the Irish in Britain, including Irish Protestants and the middle class. It implied a uniformly good record of assimilation and that the Irish people should be grateful for the opportunities for social advance. But she believed they "are more likely to encounter hostility. It is easier to be Irish in the US than the UK".
The "big story" was of displaced Irish peasantry migrating to British industrial cities as a Catholic working class. All the evidence showed that most emigrants to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s were still "concentrated in the lowest and most menial jobs and had experienced absolutely no social mobility".
Irish people had encountered a systematic racism, part and parcel of a British nationalism from which they were excluded. "Even if Northern Ireland was solved it would not eradicate anti-Irish racism, which has been underreported and under-recognised."
This had led to the search for recognition of the Irish as an ethnic minority in Britain, a demand she supported.
Dr Hickman praised the work of the current and previous Irish ambassadors in London, for their inclusive involvement with all the Irish representative groups. She said their predecessors had been more selective and had excluded many groups. It was important that Mr Ted Barrington had led the criticism of the TV soap, Eastenders, as a matter of confidence as an EU member, not from a sense of victimhood.
It was necessary, Dr Hickman argued, to develop policies that would ensure emigration did not remain such a central feature of Irish life in the next century. It would involve political will to give employment high priority in public policy.
More effective networks should be created between Irish people in Britain and Ireland. Policies to assist people returning were needed and provision made for emigrant votes. Discrimination against returned emigrants should be confronted.
Responding to her paper, Father Paul Byrne, director of the Irish Episcopal Commission for Emigrants, said he had been "appalled by the total apathy" that had followed President Robinson's Oireachtas address on the Irish diaspora in February 1995. It was as if it was not a matter of national importance.
There appeared to be no political will to create a comprehensive Irish policy on emigration, to deal with the central fact that there were a million native-born Irish people living abroad, Father Byrne said.
Existing policy was ineffective and dispersed among a plethora of different departments. The challenge was to prevent involuntary emigration.
This would necessitate decentralisation of government and counselling services to create life-skills to deal with global culture.
The ending of net emigration did not mean that involuntary emigration was not continuing, especially among the young. Much more money needed to be devoted to caring and helping agencies. The network of Irish people abroad had never been harnessed properly, as Israel had done.
Another respondent, the journalist and author, Mr Tim Pat Coogan, who is writing a book on the Irish abroad, deplored a statement by the Taoiseach that votes in Dail elections for emigrants were not realistic because so many seats were decided by 500 votes. "This is precisely what votes are for, to change attitudes and change power," he said.
The joint chairman of the seminar, Mr Noel Dorr of the Department of Foreign Affairs, recalled that when he was ambassador in London in the years 1983-7 the then minister for foreign affairs, Mr Peter Barry, had regularly visited London and met Irish representative groups, as had embassy officials.
He said not all Irish people in Britain supported the demand for recognition as an ethnic minority, since many had assimilated successfully.
In a keynote paper on the Irish in the British empire, Dr David Fitzpatrick of Trinity College Dublin said the Union and emigration combined to give Irish people an extraordinarily wide range of roles within it, whether as rebels, shoneens, mediators, collaborators or willing imperial participants.
In a paper on Irish political identity Mr Paul Gillespie, foreign editor of The Irish Times, said the Irish diaspora should be seen as a major resource going into the 21st century. It could provide a bridge between the local and the global, multiply international influence and open up channels of communication and economic contacts. But a great deal more would have to be done, he said, to cherish the diaspora by creating institutional links which could bind it together more effectively.
This would be made easier by a settlement in Northern Ireland, which would give priority to multiple rather than single identities and citizenships.
More than 100 papers were presented to the conference, which was attended by several hundred people, many of them visiting academics. The conference inaugurated the Irish Centre for Migration Studies in UCC, which will organise continuing research and be a focus for lobbying and publicity on the Irish diaspora.