Far from being a backward race, the Irish have been one of the most future-oriented peoples over the past 150 years, "The Scattering" conference on Irish migration has been told. Prof Declan Kiberd, chair of Anglo-Irish studies at University College Dublin, told the conference in Cork that the Irish were unique among emigrant groups in that they chose to abandon their native tongue and learn English in their homeland.
"To give up a language and learn another would become one of the defining experiences of modernity for many persons in the 20th century, but for hundreds of thousands of Irish this happened in the 19th."
Not necessarily modern by nature, the Irish were among the first to be caught up in "a modern predicament".
"To have begun life in a windswept valley of west Mayo and to have ended it in Hammersmith or Hell's Kitchen was to have experienced the deracination and reorientation that would be for so many millions the central `progress' of the 20th century."
If so many emigrants had not left Ireland, Europe might have ended up looking like the Third World today and the Third World might look more like Europe.
The conference, the largest such gathering of scholars on the subject of Irish migration held in the State, concludes today. A seminar organised by the Department of Foreign Affairs looks at contemporary Irish migration, while later sessions are dedicated to the European and world contexts of Irish migration.
A number of speakers will address the more recent phenomenon of migration to Ireland by refugees, asylum-seekers and economic migrants, and the challenges posed by this trend.