Irish emigration in the 1970s: The ‘problem’ discourse of political elites

Introduction

To uncover meaning about significant policies, concepts, ideas, or philosophies about nation – realities of national cultures – it becomes central to examine our cultures’ historied discourses about national identity. Stories about nationhood are structured differently depending on who tells them – whether in private homes, in newsmedia records, or as a matter of public debate dictated by those in positions of power. As discourse analyst Teun A. Van Dijk (1993) suggests, the relationship between elite discourses of governments and media and ‘everyday’ discourses that take place in our homes and communities is a mutual one; that is, ‘political definitions of ethnic events and issues may in turn influence public debate and opinion formation, which – again, through the news media – in turn influence and legitimate policies and legislation, thereby closing the full circle of … influence’ (p. 50). Ruth Wodak et al. (2009 [1999]) similarly agree that there are ‘reciprocal relations between the models of identity formulated by the political elites or the media and those forged in “everyday discourse”’, or what they term ‘the recontextualization of elite discourse’ (p. 4). However, Van Dijk (1993) acknowledges that ‘the thrust of the process is predominantly top–down: in ethnic affairs, it is primarily the administration and the politicians who define the ethnic situation and set the terms and boundaries of public debate and opinion formation’ (p. 50; emphasis added).

Thus, there is an established relationship between the discursive construction of national identity and the discourses used by political elites (see Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 72). It is then appropriate to explore, through analysis of discourse, what readings, history, and ‘visions of the political present’ (Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 73) – or past – such elite discourse puts forward. As Wodak et al. (2009 [1999]) suggest, political elites – specifically, politicians and policymakers – provide public models of national identification, which in turn discursively shape the political, ideological, and historical choices of what national identity is appropriate at any given moment in private discourse. ¹ Similarly, Van Eemeren (2010) suggests that political deliberative discourse genres, such as parliamentary debates, depend on the persuasion of third-party audiences in the form of the general public (despite their ‘real addressee’ (p. 148)). As a result, such communicative exchanges represent a larger political project of preserving a democratic political culture. They therefore therefore warrant close attention to the strategic maneuvering used by elite political speakers. Van Dijk (1993) calls for a closer look into elite discourse genres such as bureaucratic discourse (p. 289), discourse which plays a ‘crucial role in the organization of the western nation’ (Iedema, 1998: 482). As Heer et al. (2008) illustrate in their examination of German and Austrian national narratives of the Wehrmacht, a collective ‘making sense’ of political pasts necessarily ‘results from communicative processes [and] struggles for hegemony and debate … [whose] end product will be a historical account around which a consensus can be constructed, a history which can serve as a unifying national narrative’ (p. 8). Given the degree to which national narratives are constructed around the notion of ingroups and outgroups, ‘continuity in the collective self-image, integration of the most important social groups[,] and the projection of an acceptable image to the outside world’ (Heer et al., 2008: 8; see also Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 55–60), we might extend our examination of such models of identification to what types of identity one might have access to upon chosen or forced expulsion from a nation, or emigration.

Irish emigration, the discourse-historical approach, and the importance of topoi in political discourse

While the subject of Irish migration abroad is certainly not new, the bulk of scholarship written about Irish emigration focuses on prominent decades of emigration, in regards to either famine migration (Miller, 1985) or post-war migration up to the early 1970s (Delaney, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006; Travers, 1989). Little scholarship focuses on the decade of the 1970s, primarily because on all accounts, this decade represented the first in Irish history since the famine to result in positive population growth (Delaney, 2000: 28), and notably, scholarship about this period focuses primarily on the Troubles as dominating the political sphere (see Ferriter, 2005: Chapter 8). While Irish emigration is often explained simply in economic terms, historians acknowledge that it is a much more complex phenomenon, involving social and psychological attitudes, opinions, and beliefs (Delaney, 2000: 272–273). Using a discourse-historical approach, I examine the agenda-setting function of Irish political elite discourse of the late 1960s and 1970s that invokes Irish emigration abroad, in order to more fully understand the impact elite discourse has on setting the terms of debate, or on public and private attitudes.

The discourse-historical approach – which blends traditions from critical theory, classical and new rhetorical analysis, argumentation theory, British discourse analysis, German ‘politicolinguistics’, and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 32–35; see also Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Wodak, 1995, 1996; Wodak and Meyer, 2001) – is concerned not only with the dialectical relationship between discourse and social practice, but also with how such discourse can give rise to particular social conditions over time, placing much of its focus on the historical moment. One of the most comprehensive examples of the discourse-historical approach is in Wodak et al.’s (2009 [1999]) study of Austrian national identity. The authors clearly lay out their methodological analysis of public and private discourse in the following ways: (1) identification of thematic content areas of their data set; (2) analysis of micro- and macro-level discourse strategies (strategies of ‘construction, perpetuation or justification, transformation and demontage or dismantling’; Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 33); (3) analysis of argumentation schemes, or topoi, as they relate to micro- and macro-level discourse strategies (i.e. topos of comparison; topos of threat; topos of consequence); and (4) analysis of the linguistic means of realization of discourse strategies (i.e. the use of metaphor, rhetorical questions, referential vagueness) (pp. 30–47).

Elsewhere (Clary-Lemon, 2010, 2012), I have examined both thematic content areas and discourse strategies of semi-private and public discourse about Irish emigration in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing specifically on their similar use of constructive discursive strategies, strategies whose ‘dominant social function’ is ‘constructing something, e.g. discursively establishing groups …, or an image of oneself, or an identity, and so on’ (Benke and Wodak, 2003: 121). The first phase of analysis concerned 15 oral history interviews with Irish immigrants to Canada who emigrated during the period 1967–1975 (Clary-Lemon, 2010); the second phase, the analysis of media discourse in 147 articles in the Toronto Globe and Mail during the same historical period (Clary-Lemon, 2012). In both instances, how discursive choices enabled or constrained particular national or diasporic identities was examined. This third phase of research looks to situate these semi-private and public discourses within the agenda-setting function of political elites, arguing that elite discourse of the late 1960s and 1970s had an immense impact on discursive possibilities to construct private identities.

In phases one and two of this research, it was noted that oral history interviews (semi-private discourse) about Irish ethnocultural club membership in Winnipeg, Manitoba contained five thematic content topics which overlapped with similar thematic content areas in public discourse contained in the Globe and Mail, primarily in the areas of the discursive construction of collective political histories, and common cultures, and in narratives of separation from home (or emigrant narratives). In this third phase of research, the data set consists of 113 archival documents that range from political speeches to policy acts, press releases to political letters to excerpts of Irish media discourse representative of political debates surrounding Irish emigration in the 1960s and 1970s. Both thematic content areas and linguistic means of realization were noted for this phase of research; however, in the interests of space and given the overarching emphasis within the data set on strategies of perpetuation and transformation rather than on construction (Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 39–40) used by Irish elites, I have chosen to look closely at both particular argumentation schemes, or topoi, and particular metaphors commonly used to support those topoi, within the data.

As Heer et al. (2008) note, ‘national narratives generally possess a smoothing and mitigating character’ (p. 8), and narratives given by political elites in institutional fora must often persuade third-party audiences by various strategic maneuvers (Van Eemeren, 2010), taking on a particular character of ‘smoothing and mitigating’ that many are familiar with. Central to political discourse strategies are rhetors that must convince their multiple audiences of their preferred conclusions even if the details in support of those conclusions may be found wanting, with a particular emphasis on forming legitimacy for specific arguments about the nation to be taken up by others. Thus, an analysis of Aristotelian topoi ² – ‘the principles that reveal the internal organization of arguments’ (Rubinelli, 2009: vii) – allows us to break down specifically implicit messages located in particular political arguments. As Reisigl and Wodak (2001) explain, topoi are

warrants or ‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument(s) with the conclusion, the claim. As such, they justify the transition from the argument to the conclusion (Kienpointer 1992: 194). Topoi are not always expressed explicitly, but can always be made explicit as conditional or causal paraphrases such as ‘if x, then y’ or ‘y, because x’. (p. 110)

Because the ultimate use behind topoi is the persuasion of an audience (see Van Eemeren, 2010: Chapter 5) (and in this case, non-elite audiences), I am more interested in general topoi, regardless of their fallaciousness or reasonableness – indeed, what is interesting about examining topoi is that the reasonableness of the argument being presented is rarely at issue, given the way that arguments may be deductively collapsed by their use (Dyck, 2002: 109). Ensink and Sauer (2003) note that ‘discourse functions on the basis of both explicitly provided information and presupposed information’ (p. 12); thus, examining the use of political topoi in particular may partially reveal how circulations of private and media discourse take up the implicit arguments provided in deliberative elite political discourse, and how they create legitimacy and set boundaries for particular arguments in other, non-elite arenas.

Because the data set was gleaned from national archives, it is necessarily both incomplete and imbricated in an interpretive re-telling of historical moments. In choosing representative samples from the corpus to show here, it should be noted that individual texts each come from differing historical periods, actors, and contexts, and that rather than try to create a coherent timeline of history or narrative events, I aim instead to view them together in order to ‘glean information about collectively shared immanent ideologies and attitudes’ (Heer et al., 2008: 11; see also Martin and Wodak, 2003). To some degree, then, what follows is a ‘discourse on history; a discourse in which we shall see references and pointers to a variety of historical time-frames; a discourse which combines historical materials in one seemingly coherent act’ (Blommaert, 2005: 136). Yet I also aim for the analysis of these texts to locate a ‘discourse from history’, or ‘one that advocates a particular position’ (p. 36), given its emphasis on the discourse-historical approach and the distinction of politically elite discourse from other types of discourse.

Thus, these thematic clusters of discourse might be seen as a contemporary part of a larger corpus of emigrant narratives, collected both in the present day (see Ní Laoire, 2002), and as part of larger sociological and governmental interview- and survey-based studies and reports undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s to understand Irish emigration as a phenomenon (see Curry, 1975; Hannan, 1970; Jackson, 1967; Newman, 1964). ³ Together, these sources constitute a larger body of work on private attitudes toward emigration, and work together to construct an image of a particular national or diasporic identity. While the attitudes and opinions of political elites during this era have also been captured broadly (see Delaney, 2000, 2006; Lee, 1989; Travers, 1989), this current work represents the first close analysis of the language used by political elites to frame emigration used in the 1970s. While contributing to the broader body of work on post-war Irish emigration, this piece at the same time argues that, despite Enda Delaney’s (2000) assertion that ‘rhetoric denouncing emigration was a rarity’ (p. 62), emigration was overarchingly addressed as a problem in this historical period. Certainly, political discourse of the time recognized a more nuanced approach to emigration as a phenomenon (in large part thanks to the Government of Ireland’s 1956 report Emigration and Other Population Problems), and it was often lamented in the 1960s the unchanging public attitudes toward migration (Delaney, 2000: 156). Yet a look into the common tropes and rhetorical schemes of politically elite discourse of the 1970s suggests that the fallback position of the Irish government hinged, in fact, on the assertion that emigration was bad for Ireland, or what I term the ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse.

It is important to note here that most scholarship in the area of Irish emigration is done in areas of history, geography, and politics; as such, little is overtly concerned with discourse as such (though many scholars look closely and rhetorically at political texts). My aim here is to help close the gap between history and discourse studies by addressing Blommaert’s (2005) call for ‘discourse analysis to address historical dynamics as part and parcel of their scholarly practices’ and encourage ‘historians to consider discursive dynamics as part and parcel of theirs’ (p. 137). In using the discourse-historical approach, I invoke a Foucauldian sense of the term discourse to mean ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment’ (Hall, 1992: 291). Stuart Hall (2001) explains that this view of discourse is ‘not purely a linguistic concept’; rather,

discourse … constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. Just as a discourse ‘rules in’ certain ways of talking about a topic, defining an acceptable and intelligible way to talk, write, or conduct oneself, so also by definition, it ‘rules out’, limits and restricts other ways of talking, of conducting ourselves in relation to the topic or constructing knowledge about it. (p. 72)

We might, then, read all talk and text about emigration as a topic as one discourse; however, more specifically, in terms of the body of government and bureaucratic discourse making up this data set, the ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse existed (and still exists) as a way of defining and producing knowledge within the larger set of possibilities of talking about emigration proper. As an overarching discourse on emigration, ‘emigration-as-problem’ creates the rules for what it is possible to say (or write) about emigration, and ‘rules out’ other possibilities and ways of talking, thinking, or writing about it. Thus, a Foucauldian sense of discourse explains how Irish policymakers in the 1960s could lament negative public attitudes toward emigration (Delaney, 2000: 256), while at the same time reifying a discourse structure that constructed emigration as a threat to the Irish state for years to come.

The ‘problem of emigration’

The ‘problem of emigration’, detailed as such in the Irish governmental majority report entitled Emigration and Other Population Problems (Government of Ireland, 1956), overtly reveals the pattern of discussion of Irish emigration housed in the discourse of political elites in the 1960s and 1970s. The overwhelming reliance on ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse is revealed in a host of ways in the data set, and has its roots deeply embedded in Irish history. The theme of emigration as a problem, as made explicit by the report, we may attribute perhaps to Blommaert’s (2005) suggestion that ‘moments of crisis may create conditions for greater explicitness [resulting in] “hidden transcripts” rising to the surface of public discourse’ (p. 137). By the time the report was made public in 1956, it represented a six-year culmination of expert reflection on an Irish phenomenon that began with famine migration in the 1850s, and which, in a decade 100 years later, saw 400,000 more Irish leave their homeland – for many, a representation of crisis that had long plagued the nation. The 1956 report may even be extended to the present day, in which 33,100 Irish migrated elsewhere in 2012 alone (MacÉinrí et al., 2013: 105), and in which ‘75% of the Irish population believes emigration is having a negative effect on Ireland today’ (p. ii).

The island of Ireland has struggled since 1189 with direct intervention and involvement by the British, suffering division, displacement, and mass killing at the hands of Britain. This long history of rule by afar exists prominently in the Irish psyche; as Pauric Travers (1989) suggests,

The classic description of England as the never ending source of all … [Irish] grievances was taken up and applied to all of the problems of Ireland, social and economic as well as political. Poverty, famine, emigration and insanity were all directly or indirectly attributed to the Act of Union [of 1801] and the link with Britain. (pp. 318–319)

This conception of emigration as negative and at the hands of the British exists no more apparently than in the historical period surrounding the Great Famine between 1845 and 1852, when between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left Ireland. Political writer John Mitchel is famed for writing ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine’ (Duffy, 2007: 312). This very much has linked all emigration to de facto colonial rule, and, from its beginnings, linked emigration with the threat surrounding British rule and the complications of Ireland’s independence. Because so much popular, personal, and historical discourse about emigration is intimately tied to the rule of the British, it has become nearly impossible to view Irish emigration without this contextual element. This fact very much complicates traditional ingroup–outgroup assumptions often made by public perceptions of migration (see Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 55–61) because Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom, while Southern Ireland constitutes its own republic. ⁴

The significance of the Government of Ireland’s 1956 Emigration and Other Population Problems report is detailed by Irish historian Enda Delaney (2006), who notes that the report, compiled by a commission of experts, suggested ‘that after 25 years of self-government [the report itself] represented a tacit acknowledgement that the causes of emigration could no longer be put down to the effects of British misrule, a central theme in earlier nationalist thinking’ (p. 55). In fact, the report detailed the causes of Irish emigration as complex, unattributable only to economic factors, and socially contextual; it went so far as to assert that ‘not all emigration is bad’ (p. 138). Despite this contextual and measured approach to explanations of Irish emigration, as Delaney (2000) notes, the Irish government of the 1960s generally still ‘acknowledged the centrality of the reduction of emigration as an objective for Irish economic policy … the reduction of [which was] the “acid test for governmental policy”’ (p. 62). Delaney (2000) suggests that the government acknowledged emigration as more complex and that ‘the traditional nationalist condemnation of movement out of the country as a “bad” thing was no longer viewed as an appropriate position for political leaders to adopt by the 1960s’ (p. 63). While ‘unequivocal condemnations’ (p. 63) of emigration were indeed, as Delaney (2000) argues, rare, the overarching metaphors of threat and battle, as well as the inverse connection of ending/stopping emigration as a positive political and economic goal for Ireland, appear consistently throughout political addresses of both the late 1960s, as emigration decreased, and the 1970s, when Irish emigration halted for the first time in over a century. In fact, relying on ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse was used as a political tool for framing the 1973 debate over Ireland joining the European Economic Council (EEC). The data suggest that this was still the overwhelming discourse used by elites to describe emigration, in part because the success or failure of party platforms rested on their ability to stem the outflow of Irish people (see MacÉinrí et al., 2013: 107), or at least make it seem like they could.

Charteris-Black (2009) argues that metaphors serve particular ideological functions in political communication: they establish ethical integrity to prove that speakers have the right intentions, they communicate political arguments to construct ‘right thinking’, they heighten emotional impact on the part of the audience, and they communicate ideology and political myth in order to ‘tell the truth’ or a ‘set of truths’, all in order to form legitimacy for the political message (p. 113). As David Ralph (2009) suggests, ‘The [Irish] debate on emigration can be divided into three distinct but overlapping strands: emigration as exile; emigration as opportunity; and emigration as part of a diasporic, quasi-ecumenical consciousness’ (p. 196). Ralph notes that the exile metaphor dominated Irish thinking well into the 1980s. Even though political elites of the 1960s and 1970s knew that emigration was a complex phenomenon (noted particularly in Minister for Health Donogh O’Malley’s 1966 St Patrick’s Day address) (see Delaney, 2000: 257), the discourse of emigration was still spoken or written about in terms of a measure of success or failure, tied to the popular historic metaphor of ‘emigration as exile’. Van Dijk (1993) suggests that this is a strong feature of politically elite nationalist discourse; as he asserts, issues such as ‘immigration, settlement, housing, unemployment, education, and cultural integration are all presented as fundamentally problematic, rather than as a positive challenge or contribution to the country’ (p. 285). The observance of politically elite discourse that paints emigration as bad is not, as Kerby Miller (1985) points out in Emigrants and Exiles, a ‘rational’ take on the phenomenon:

There seems no reason inherent in either the actual circumstances of most emigrants’ departures or the material conditions of … life which automatically translat[e] … into a morbid perception of themselves as involuntary exiles, [or] passive victims of English oppression. For, viewed objectively, they had made a rational response to both structural changes in Irish society and to the promptings of their own ambitions for the better material life which recent scholarship indicated they generally achieved. (p. 7)

In many ways, the ‘irrationality’ of the exile metaphor makes sense; regardless of actual fact, it ‘tells the truth’ about the political myth of the history of emigration in Ireland, and encourages a kind of ‘thinking right’. Nonetheless, it seems this conundrum is what stumped Irish politicians and led them to comment on the potency of negative public attitudes toward migration ‘in the national psyche’ (Delaney, 2000: 273). Thus, the focus on the actual content of political speeches and bureaucratic reports in a decade of decreased Irish emigration and an examination of particular topoi and metaphor – when the ‘moment of crisis’ is generally over and when it is likely that ‘hidden transcripts’ no longer rise to the surface of public discourse, but instead are buried again in implicit statements and metaphoric language – becomes paramount in order to examine the nature of agenda setting in the emigration debate itself. In the sections that follow, I detail the two main strategies of argument used to construct the ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse, the topos of threat and topos of consequence, both located as argumentation schemes within what Wodak et al. (2009 [1999]) term ‘strategies of perpetuation’ and ‘strategies of transformation’ (p. 33). The former is a discursive strategy that has the social function of ‘try[ing] to maintain and reproduce already established groups, images, or other discursive artifacts’ (Benke and Wodak, 2003: 121); the latter ‘aim[s] to transform a relatively well-established national identity and its components into another identity the contours of which the speaker has already conceptualized’ (Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 33). In so doing, I also examine patterns of metaphor that emerge within these topoi, noting, as De Landtsheer (2009) and others do (e.g. Musolff, 1998, 2010, 2011; Musolff and Zinken, 2009), that ‘metaphors have considerable political effects’ (De Landtsheer, 2009: 61).

Emigration-as-problem: Topos of threat

The main topoi used by Irish political elites to frame emigration echo Wodak et al.’s (2009 [1999]) findings, which showed that the discourses of political and media elites were characterized by their use of perpetuation and transformation strategies used by politicians in order to provide a unified Austrian national identity (p. 200). If we assume that topoi are not always expressed explicitly, but instead are used to provide a believable warrant in an enthymematic statement, such as allowing us to construct an implicit ‘if–then’ statement within an argument (Dyck, 2002: 109), we can unpack some of the basic rules of political elites’ larger arguments to their ‘natural’ conclusions, using these inferred topoi and the conclusion rules implied in their language. Thus, we might imagine the defensive maneuvering of the topos of threat around emigration to be represented by the conclusion that ‘emigration is a problem/is bad’, and warrants for that conclusion to be represented by negative attributions (what Wodak et al. term antimiranda, ‘low-value words’ (p. 39)), negatively connoted metaphors, and links to other negative concepts like unemployment. The following examples were culled from the corpus as they represent prototypicality of this topos.

Emigration-as-problem: Topos of consequence

While the topos of threat is achieved primarily through the use of low-value words and phrases and metaphors that connote negative situations, the topos of consequence is achieved through somewhat differing means in reasoning. This often either/or strategy relies on a problem-solution arithmetic that supplies a particular inverse reasoning about emigration, positing the end of emigration as the positive and happy solution which will solve a variety of problems, or a linear line of argument that suggests emigration itself is the problem, and that stopping it is a solution (or once stopped, problem solved). In Wodak et al.’s (2009 [1999]) terms, there is an ‘emphasis on a necessary difference between now and the future’ (p. 40) in this transformative strategy that works to move an audience to accept the positive future possibility – and indeed potentiality – of ending the problem of Irish emigration. In regards to the 1973 EEC referendum, emigration is used as a threat, a kind of argumentum ad baculum (Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 40) or appeal to the stick, in which emigration (the consequence of a ‘no’ vote) is the stick. This framing works together in the following representative examples, which illustrate not only the ubiquitousness of this kind of reasoning, but also its appearance in multiple genres of elite discourse: policy reports, press statements on presidential (Taoiseach) speeches, and speeches by ministerial government officials:

Note that these examples similarly use the same means of realization as the topos of threat; examples 1 and 3 invoke metaphors of battle and bodily illness; emigration is associated with the negative concepts of lack of employment and lower living standards in example 3; in example 1, emigration poses the threat of involuntary action; in example 6, emigration is associated with failure rather than success. In these cases, we might think of negative metaphors, connection to negative concepts, and antimiranda as doing the work of establishing both elite ethical integrity, for example ‘having the right intentions’ of denouncing emigration, and communicating a specific ongoing political argument about emigration-as-problem, or ‘thinking right’, in order to ultimately support the construction of a particular political ideology and ‘tell the truth’ (Charteris-Black, 2009: 113).

In the majority of the examples, elite speakers emphasize the topos of consequence (i.e. ‘something follows as a direct result of something else’ [Wodak et al., 2009 [1999]: 451]) by emphasizing either a ‘difference between then and now’ or an emphasis on a ‘necessary difference between now and the future’ (p. 40). Example 7 makes a clear causal contrast between the decline of emigration then (in the 1960s) and the prosperity of the nation at present (in 1979); similarly, examples 3, 4, and 6 point to a clear division between emigration as a negative element and ‘a thing of the past’ and the necessary following of a vitality and success both at present and in the future.

In these examples, emigration is often implicitly, rather than explicitly, a problem, because in most cases it is presented as ‘vanishing’ or ‘a thing of the past’ and thus not something that the public should be worried about at present. At the same time, however, speakers are asserting that the public should be ever-vigilant. This subtle framing gives rise to Delaney’s (2000) assertion that ‘rhetoric denouncing emigration’ – outright – ‘was a rarity’ (p. 262); it appears that such denunciation was done in terms of substitution, or an examination of emigration’s (negative) consequences, and the positive outcome of its cessation. Here, one of the main forms of realization of this topos is to attribute positive outcomes with stopping emigration – the government ‘secure[s] a decrease’ (example 1); a ‘decline of net emigration … was a clear reflection of the new prosperity’ (example 7). As emigration ceases, we are made aware of ‘vitality’, ‘confidence’, ‘success’ – and, should we vote for the EEC, either we enjoy the ‘advantages and opportunities’ of doing so, or we are faced with emigration as a consequence.

It is clear from the range of examples that the government acknowledged and framed emigration-as-problem discourse using a variety of argumentative strategies even when emigration was not at its height in Irish politics, media, or common consciousness. The question emerges, then, why would the government perpetuate the myth of emigration as negative – a threat or a problem – even when it did not appear to be an immediate threat to the nation-state?

Perpetuating the problem myth

The previous discussion suggests that the political elite were anything but ambivalent on the subject of emigration. Even as MD McCarthy, former director of the Irish Central Statistics Office, criticized ‘Irishmen’s’ penchant for giving ‘expression to value judgements and … bas[ing] those rather indiscriminately on moral, sociological, economic, and sentimental considerations’ (Delaney, 2000: 262), it is evident that McCarthy could have easily been speaking about his fellow bureaucrats’ use of rhetorical and argumentative strategizing on the subject of emigration as well. So why, on the one hand, did the government recognize the need, as Sean Lemass claimed in 1960 (Department of the Taoiseach, 1962, 1966), to ‘think deeply’ (Delaney, 2006: 63) about emigration and its complexities, while at the same time perpetuating emigration as a problem? As Benke and Wodak (2003) remind us, perpetuative strategies of argument that have the social function of maintaining and reproducing the status quo and argumentative strategies of transformation seek to move audiences forward towards accepting or anticipating a particular kind of future. Clearly, thinking negatively about emigration served a particular function in the Irish national psyche, one that bears some speculation. Although not an exhaustive list, two possibilities arise: the use of emigration-as-problem to support a strawperson argument and the use of emigration-as-problem to defend the historic notion of Irish exile.

Conclusions: Areas for further research

The findings of the discursive analysis of ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse throughout the Ireland of the 1970s emerge in tandem with contemporary research on emigration. Gray (2013) argues that in twenty-first century discourse on Irish emigration, ‘discourses of emigration as tragedy might signal anxieties regarding a failure of Irish social reproduction within the boundaries of Ireland’, noting that such a discursive boundary ‘structure[s] and limit[s] the ways in which emigration can be understood and talked about … performatively reproduc[ing] particular kinds of discussions, meanings, and imaginings while rendering others impossible’ (p. 22). While Gray’s focus is on the complexities of twenty-first century ‘Skype-generation’ emigrants which have given rise to new discourses of emigration (including the ‘Generation Emigration’ project), she nonetheless points clearly to the impact of overarching negative discourse on emigration, arguing that ‘emigration can only be understood in relation to the repeated posing of choice versus necessity and tragedy versus “the way of the world”’ (p. 22). The contemporary research of geographers MacÉinrí et al. (2013) further suggests that, despite the complex reasons for current Irish emigration, the role that history has played in reproducing the phenomenon is not easily forgotten; indeed, the authors conclude that, at least for Southern emigration, the

seamless [historical] narrative of emigration as tragic, historically ordained, central and continuing, is itself connected to nationalist narratives of victimhood as well as to broader debates about construction of the new State … the emigration narrative is one which continues to exercise a powerful but sometimes distorting impact on public discussion of emigration today. (p. 108)

The analysis presented here suggests that we cannot divorce the ways in which politically elite discourse about one thematic – emigration – colours discursive options both in time and space, and also sets the terms of debate for semi-private discourses about Irish identity at home and abroad. Looking closely at elite discourse in historical periods that seem to have ‘solved the problem’ – that is, in periods of emigration decline – allows us to see a contextual contribution to the ‘seamlessness’ of a national narrative that continues to shape public attitudes and opinions in a top–down fashion, allowing us to uncover implicit but acceptable conclusion rules hidden in ‘reasonable’ discourse.

If we accept that politically elite discourse can set the terms of debate in public and private discourse, then pushing to understand the ‘emigration-as-problem’ thematic is of the essence when it comes to examining the historic and contemporary corpora of emigrant narratives and experiences currently in existence. Further research into the ways that elite discourse translates into that of the everyday is certainly needed. To what degree does the discursive constraint of talking, thinking, and writing about Irish emigration as a tragedy affect the notion of past or contemporary ‘exiles’? To what degree can public attitudes shift under these constraints? How have private narratives of separation from home or immigrant ethnocultural group membership abroad, narratives of collective political histories or common cultures, and constructions of hybrid immigrant identities been shaped by ongoing discursive constructions of emigration by political elites? As Lentin (2001) argues, ‘interrogating the Irish “we” cannot evade interrogating the painful past of emigration, a wound still festering because it was never tended’ (p. 4). I would argue that a closer look into the connections between elite and private discourses would force us to move beyond the consistent metaphors of pain and battle in order to understand and change long-standing regulations of language practice.