First published in the Times of London.
Ah, “the Irish diaspora”. A wild and unwieldy group of which I have been a member since 2015. Few categories of people are trickier to quantify or define. This should make us tricky to appeal to, too, but naive politicians and political hopefuls try all the time.
The latest example of this comes to us from Dragon’s Den panelist Peter Casey, the third man to vault from one gameshow to another: this year’s presidential race.
Earlier this week Casey told Leitrim County Council that €300 million could be raised by the sale of passports to one million members of “the diaspora” for €300 a pop.
“No. He was serious,” was the reply of one political correspondent to an incredulous follower on Twitter. Disabusing people of the fictive air surrounding the worst of the ideas advanced by this round of presidential aspirants has the potential to become a full-time job.
Casey seems to interchangeably view the Irish diaspora as an homogenous, charmed group of passport-holding strivers worthy of baiting back in and affording particular privileges, or as a homogenous, stricken group of descendants eager to buy their way back in for arbitrary sums of money.
In reality, most of us lie somewhere in-between. As an Irish citizen living abroad, of course I would like the president to factor in my interests, however potential or distant. I’d like to think I would not have difficulty opening a bank account when I return to Ireland, or finding a home, or a job, or a school place for my child, or a vital sign in the villages I love.
But do I feel a remote desire for an Irish diaspora social network, as Casey has proposed? Or a four-week, state-sponsored Gaeltacht programme for Irish youths? Do I want to “connect” with Peter Casey, or with Ireland, on any terms other than my own? I do not.
In 2016, on LinkedIn — stay with me — Casey published an article with the given headline “Many emigrants today give back in investments as well as paying taxes to Ireland”. It is one of several articles posted by him to the social network (alongside such classics as “Kerry broadband: 'Not good enough’” and “Tipperary needs a boost”).
The posts were well received by Casey’s following. Indeed, encouraging responses from an array of seeming diaspora types may have accelerated his eventual pivot to politics. “I’ll be rooting for you!” wrote one. “I wish Peter Casey was running for the President of the United States!!” wrote another.
It’s Atlanta and Australia where Casey is said to have gained much of the insight imparted in the first-person article. But, to me, the tone is off. One paragraph opens with: “Ireland is and has long been a global ‘brand’”. The right to vote in Casey’s words is, of course, “the franchise”.
In a press release put out just this week, he suggests the diaspora needs to be “leveraged”, an indistinct process that sounds like it could be painful. The subject of the release was US president Donald Trump’s November visit to Ireland.
To be pro-business or to do business in parts of the US is to consort closely with people who like and support Trump. Casey seems to valorise the United States, and by connection, its president. It happens.
“Chill out,” said Casey (I’m paraphrasing). “By all means disagree with the man’s policies, but remember that he is the President of America and treat his office with respect,” the release reads.
Ireland’s neutrality is irrelevant and outdated, per Casey, who is advocating for the end of non-combatant status for the state while urging resident opponents of Trump to neutralize their opposition to him.
A “warm welcome” to a leader like Trump is — taken against the pandemonium and horror he has lately and flamboyantly wrought on America — tantamount to support. This tack seems bound to be unpopular with the Trump-averse Irish electorate.
It would probably go down well with swathes of Irish-American Republican voters. But as Casey has been at peculiar pains to point out, they don’t have a vote. I don’t either, but if I did, I think I would prefer to elect an attentive insider occasionally looking out to a dazzled outsider looking back in.