"AREN'T WE CITIZENS OF THE WORLD?": IRISH DIASPORA AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN DEIRDRE MADDEN'S ONE BY ONE IN THE DARKNESS, ANNE DEVLIN'S AFTER EASTER, AND NUALA O'FAOLAIN'S MY DREAM OF YOU Michaela Schrage-Früh Introduction Emigration and exile are experiences inextricably entwined with traditional notions of Irish identity. However, while most Irish emigrants turned their back on Ireland for mere survival, rendering its history of migration a story of individual and national woe, 1 Irish migration history of the 1980s and beyond suggests a different story. In a transnational and global age the term "emigration" has been replaced with the more positively connoted concept of an "Irish diaspora." This idea not only encompasses all descendents of Irish emigrants, but also the members of the so-called "new wave" migration in the wake of the Celtic Tiger. Accordingly, in her inaugural speech in 1990 Mary Robinson declared: "There are over 70 million people living on this globe who claim Irish descent. I will be proud to represent them" (Gray, "Unmasking" 220). Robinson's extension of her representative function beyond the Republic's borders is emblematic of a "global imagined community" (Gray, "Unmasking" 220), characterised by cosmopolitanism, hybridisation as well as economic and cultural interconnectedness. The image of the young and educated "high-flying emigrant" rapidly became the symbol of a new economically booming Celtic Tiger Ireland. As Breda Gray points out: "By the early 1990s the media in both Britain and Ireland were suggesting that for many young Irish adults, 'London, not Dublin [was] becoming their capital city'" (Gray, "Ethnicity" 65). 2 What is more, the term diaspora suggests a career-oriented generation of migrant yuppies who, thanks to the latest technologies and means of transport, are continually connected to their home country, altering and expanding the idea of "Irish identity" and its place in Europe and the world (cf. Gray, "Unmasking" 223). Migration is experienced as less permanent and, by implication, less painful than in former centuries. In the 1980s and '90s, therefore, Irish migrants appeared as transnational commuters rather than emigrants or even exiles. As Robert Cohen enthusiastically 1 As Liam Greenslade points out with respect to the Irish Famine years of 1845-49: "Caught in an economic double bind that resulted in mass starvation, for the Irish emigration became the only viable means of survival" (204). 2 Gray is quoting from P. Popham, "The London Irish," The (London) Independent Magazine 101 (11 August 1990): 18-21.