On the 30th of April and the 1st of May, the 4th Global Irish Civic Forum took place at Croke Park, the home of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Around the tables were roughly 250 participants gathered at Croke Park, including representatives of diaspora organisations from across the world, honorary consuls, sports clubs, business networks, cultural bodies and welfare groups, alongside Irish government officials. The Forum launched the Government’s new Diaspora Strategy, which will orient Ireland’s engagement with its diaspora from 2026 to 2030. This relationship is one of the most carefully built sets of state-diaspora institutions of its kind anywhere in the world, and it has become a central pillar of how Ireland presents itself abroad economically, culturally and politically.
Article 2 of the Constitution, as amended after the Good Friday Agreement, says that the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad. Since 1998, this idea has been at the foundation of significant political work, giving every government since a clear mandate support the global diaspora and diaspora engagement as a national priority. This work began in 2002, when a Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants set out what the Irish state should be doing for the Irish abroad. A series of decisions followed that, taken together, are remarkable for a country of Ireland’s size and led to Ireland being recognised as a global leader in diaspora engagement.
The Irish Abroad Unit was set up in 2004 inside the Department of Foreign Affairs, along with the Emigrant Support Programme, which has since funded many different programmes, from welfare services for older Irish to Gaelic football clubs. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the ESP for diaspora community organisations: in little more than 20 years, the ESP supported more than 900 organisations in 51 countries with grants of over €265 million. By 2009, in the depths of the financial crash, the government convened the first Global Irish Economic Forum at Farmleigh, asking successful members of the diaspora to help with the economic recovery and shaping Ireland’s international image. Three more Economic Fora followed in 2011, 2013 and 2015.
2015 was a particularly significant year in Ireland’s relationship with its diaspora. In that year, the government published “Global Irish”, the country’s first formal diaspora policy, shaping the government’s strategy from 2015 to 2020. The same year saw the inaugural Global Irish Civic Forum, which brought together more than 140 diaspora organizations and clearly highlighted that diaspora engagement was not just an economic project, while still recognizing the central role of the diaspora in Irish recovery. Jimmy Deenihan had become the first Minister of State for the Diaspora the previous year. Two subsequent Fora followed in 2017 and 2023. The next milestone was the “Global Ireland: Diaspora Strategy 2020-2025”, built on more than thirty public consultations held in Ireland and in cities from Atlanta to Auckland, Singapore to San Francisco.
The 2026 Policy was shaped through a similar process, scaled up for a different moment. In 2025, Tánaiste Simon Harris and Minister of State for International Development and Diaspora Neale Richmond launched what the government called the first ever Global Irish Survey, an open call for Irish people and organisations abroad and those who have recently come home to share what they want from the next five years of diaspora policy. Alongside the survey, consultations were held with Irish community groups and stakeholders across the world and at home. At the time, the Tánaiste spoke publicly about wanting to hear from as many voices as possible, on the basis that Ireland and the world look very different now from how they looked when the last strategy was published in 2020. The findings of the survey, carried out by the Dublin-based consultancy The Diaspora Institute, were presented at Croke Park by Dr Martin Russell.
The Global Irish Survey reveals how the diaspora itself demands a deeper engagement with Ireland, and how it sees itself as a central actor for Ireland’s future. On the government’s side, diaspora engagement is “fast emerging as a public policy priority to help truly secure Ireland’s future” (p. 71). We already had some clues about the current Government’s approach to diaspora. The 2025 Action Plan on Market Diversification leans on diaspora as a key partner in delivering on the government’s trade, tourism and investment objectives in priority markets. Similarly, the 2026 International Sports Diplomacy Strategy highlights the role of GAA clubs and diaspora-led events as ways to promote Irish culture and strengthen its international image.
Both documents fed into the new Diaspora Strategy, and both suggested a government that increasingly collaborates with diaspora communities and sees them as pivotal allies when it comes to promote and shape perceptions about Ireland worldwide. This fulfils the commitment made in the Programme of Government for 2025, and underlines how diaspora engagement has become a public policy mainstay. Policymakers and scholars call this “diaspora diplomacy”: the practice of states and diasporas cultivating relationships and collaboration with each other towards economic, political and cultural goals that neither could pursue as effectively alone. The very idea is included in the cover of the new Diaspora Strategy, which is presented as “Diaspora Diplomacy in Action”.
The 4th Global Irish Civic Forum brought all of this into focus. The new Diaspora Strategy launched at the Forum builds directly on the previous Strategies and on the findings of the Global Irish Survey, framing Irish Diaspora as a key partner in business connections, exporting Irish culture and values, and projecting Ireland’s image worldwide. The Civic Forum and the Strategy paid a particular attention to younger diaspora and minority groups within the diaspora, demonstrating an attention to diaspora not as a monolith, but rather as a diverse community. Importantly, the Strategy launched a new Global Irish Diaspora Directory, designed to allow diaspora organisations to find and connect with each other. That marks an important shift. For most of the last twenty years, Ireland’s approach to diaspora engagement has been largely vertical, structured around the relationship between the Irish State and its diaspora. The new tool allows diaspora organisations to build their own networks across borders, rather than only routing those connections through Dublin. It is a recognition that diaspora diplomacy is not only about how a state speaks to its people abroad (and vice versa), but about how different diaspora organisations and communities can speak to each other.
What this twenty-four-year history shows is how the role of the diaspora in Irish public life has evolved. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Irish abroad were seen as a resource for the peace process. After 2008, the focus shifted to economic recovery, with the Farmleigh Forum and the Global Irish Network mobilising diaspora figures to help rebuild the Irish economy. Today, the diaspora is seen as an all-round partner, working with Ireland to promote Irish culture, build business connections, and shape Ireland’s place in the world. The Forum at Croke Park, the Survey, the new Strategy, and the Diaspora Directory all feed into this framework. Ireland’s relationship with its diaspora is increasingly two-way, increasingly horizontal, and increasingly understood as something the diaspora helps to shape rather than something done to or about it. For a country whose history has been written as much by those who left as by those who stayed, that is no small achievement.
