My generation lived through the end of exile. We left Ireland before smartphones, social media, livestreams and FaceTime transformed emigration into a permanently connected experience. The digital revolution brought home closer than ever before, but it also complicated the question that has always faced emigrants: where do we truly…

First drafted during the Covid lockdowns of 2021 but left unpublished, this article remains as relevant today as it was then. The Brexit passport debate exposed a lingering tendency among sections of Ireland's intellectual establishment to question diaspora identity even while claiming to celebrate it. Ultimately, the debate was never…

By T.S.…

Once associated with a movement that challenged the legitimacy of Northern Ireland's institutions, Gerry Adams now advances Irish unity through open letters, civic persuasion, and appeals to democratic consent. Whether this represents a genuine transformation or a change in tactics remains disputed, but his methods increasingly resemble…

By Tim Flynn

History is often shaped by the survival of a single individual. Had events unfolded differently in August 1922, Ireland's twentieth century may have followed a radically different course. Instead of decades shaped by Éamon de Valera's constitutional nationalism, the Irish state might have been moulded by Michael Collins's…

Brexit was sold as a means of restoring national sovereignty and loosening ties with European institutions. Yet on the island of Ireland, it produced an unexpected outcome. Rather than weakening cross-border cooperation, it renewed political, financial and institutional support for it. In doing so, Brexit helped generate a new wave of…

By Tim Flynn

Ian Curtis is remembered as the voice of Manchester's post-punk revolution. Yet behind the Macclesfield mythology lay an Irish family story that connected him to the wider diaspora. Through his influence on a young U2, Curtis helped send a distinctly diasporic sensibility back across the Irish Sea,…

The execution of Major Nidal Hasan is highly unlikely to create the kind of martyrdom that emerged from the executions of 1916. Nor is Hasan remotely comparable to Patrick Pearse or the leaders of the Easter Rising. Yet the decision to televise his death raises an older question, one that W.B. Yeats understood better than most…

In the ages past, the musician was and still is, a prominent figure in Irish society; whether he be a harpist, a fiddler or a multi-instrumentalist musician like Paddy Moloney, they all took their places in society, including the royal households of the Irish nobility. Centuries ago they called…

Being of Irish heritage and an astronomer, astrophysicist and educator by profession, I have a particular interest in this story. As a founding member of Astronomy For Change (https://astronomyforchange.org) and the original author, I'm sharing it here on TWG. -- Tom…