When Roddy Doyle published The Commitments in 1987, being Irish seemed straightforward. The word "Ireland" conjured up images of green, rolling, and sparsely populated hills; wooly sheep; and pints of Guinness. To these images, The Commitments added unemployed youth, liberal use of profanity, and a few more pints of Guinness. In the past couple of decades, economic and political changes have brought about considerable change in Ireland, and Roddy Doyle has given us a peek in his newest book, The Deportees and Other Stories.
The new Ireland is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, and as a result, people from less wealthy parts of the world want to live there. According to Doyle's introduction, ten percent of the population of Ireland was born elsewhere--an interesting situation for a country that has experienced a net population loss more than once. With this influx of newcomers, what does it now mean to be Irish? Doyle explores this question from varying points of view in eight stories that were originally published as serials in Metro Eireann, a multicultural newspaper started by two journalists originally from Nigeria.
The common characteristic in all the stories is the interaction between someone born in Ireland and someone who has come to live there. Among these are an Irish father who confronts his own racism when his daughter brings a Nigerian man home for dinner, a government worker looking for a way to test for Irishness, and a young man who goes to New York to search for the African-American grandfather he's only heard stories about. The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always thought-provoking, and, perhaps, uniquely Irish.
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