The epistemology of erasure from Irishness: from Plastic Paddies, children of not real emigrants, to not real nationals and Ireland is full
Published in Irish Studies Review, January 2026.
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Abstract
Plastic Paddy, an epithet of derision and subjugation emerging during the 1980s/1990s, attained an international iconic representational status. In response, the paper suggests a critical intervention, A Critical Sociology of Diaspora Epistemology, enabling a re-reading of the complexity of socio-cultural relations between 1980s/1990s elite migrants and second-generation diaspora in Britain mediated by Irish state governance, regulation and bordering. A wider context is the complexities of displaced Irish anxieties’ captured in a state-mediated generational class-based internal nationalism that continues to be played out. The Republic’s post-Independence national(ist) stance of demographic and symbolic bordering/re-bordering – “we can’t all live on a small island” – resonates across public life. This includes: the 1950s generation “as not real emigrants,” the second generation as “not real Irish” and the 2004 Referendum removal of automatic entitlement to citizenship for Irish-born children as “not real nationals,” alongside populism’s (early 2020s) far-right slogans: “Ireland is full.”