Abstract

In this paper I examine the migratory experiences of a sub-group of Irish emigrants, namely, the transnational professional elite. The paper explores a number of themes that emerged from interviews with a sample of returners, who travelled to live and work in Britain and North America in the 1980s and returned to Ireland in the 1990s. I will argue that the migratory process as experienced by these returners is framed within a discourse of modernity that is both contradictory and ambivalent. Those contradictions and ambivalences will be explored though an analysis of the returners self-identity as it is expressed in relation to work, ethnicity and homecoming. I conclude that their insider/outsider status in both the host society and the society of origin, traps them in a liminal space wherein they must confront the contradictions and ambivalences that lie at the heart of late modernity.