MSMN Analysis
Explainer based on published census, diaspora-policy and cultural-export materials — not a community canvas and not an exclusive interview package.

Second-generation Irish audiences in Europe: citizenship, habit, and the missing shelf

MSMN’s earlier diaspora-festivals piece asked how Irish film weekends turn production into audiences abroad. This piece is the household half of that sentence. Across the EU there are people who hold Irish citizenship through a parent or grandparent, people born in Ireland who now raise children in Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona or Paris, and people who are Irish in the way a second generation is Irish: language half-remembered, sport followed, a Christmas RTÉ Player login, a passport that still works after Brexit. They are not a festival mailing list. They are a European audience that Irish cultural policy keeps describing and streaming catalogues keep underserving.

The useful distinction is between heritage events and habitual viewing. A St Patrick’s weekend screening is a civic success. A second-generation viewer who can find a second Irish title in October is a market.

What the published numbers actually say

Ireland’s diaspora arithmetic is famous and slippery. The Department of Foreign Affairs’ Irish Abroad Unit has long used a working figure on the order of 3.8 million Irish citizens outside the State, a number that includes a very large Northern Ireland share and should not be read as “people in Chicago who like Riverdance.” OECD and UN stock figures used in comparative diaspora research have put a high share of Ireland-born adults outside the country at any one time. The twentieth-century destination was Britain; the twenty-first-century map is wider. Spain has been the largest EU destination in older UN estimates; Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Nordic capitals are now ordinary Irish cities of work, not emergency exits.

Census 2022, looking the other way, records the return traffic. Irish citizens moving home in the year before the census came most often from England and Wales, then Australia, with the United States, Canada, the UAE and EU states including Spain, Germany and France also on the list. People who had ever lived abroad for a year or more are no longer a UK-only story. Since 2000, return and arrival have been more European and more global. That matters for second-generation audiences: a child raised in Kraków or Lyon by Irish parents, or a child in Dublin with a parent who spent the 2010s in Berlin, already has a bilingual media diet. They are not waiting for a diaspora film festival to tell them Europe exists.

Citizenship law is the quiet infrastructure. Irish citizenship can still be claimed through a grandparent born on the island. That legal fact, not a marketing slogan, is why “second generation” is a policy category and not only a feeling. The Government’s Diaspora Strategy 2020–2025 and the Emigrant Support Programme treat subsequent-generation Irish identity as something the State will fund: cultural and heritage outreach to schools and community groups, Irish-language initiatives, arts and festival infrastructure abroad. The ESP, running since 2004, has supported more than 900 organisations in 53 countries and issued more than €265 million in grants. Its published guidance is blunt about what that money is for — venue hire, publicity, identity projects — and what it is not for, including artists’ fees. Culture Ireland, separately, pays for Irish arts to travel. The two pipes are easy to confuse. ESP is community and heritage. Culture Ireland is professional presentation. Second-generation viewers sit on both sides and on neither platform homepage.

Europe after the British default

For two generations, “Irish abroad” in media terms meant Britain: Irish post offices in London, RTÉ Radio on long wave, later Player geo-gates, GAA clubs as social infrastructure. Freedom of movement and the post-2008 and post-2010s waves changed the map without changing the catalogue. A second-generation Irish teenager in the Netherlands is inside a Dutch-and-English streaming market that will show them US and UK work by default and Irish work if a prominence rule, a festival, or a parent’s nostalgia search intervenes.

That is the same small-market discovery problem CRESCINE describes, with a twist. Diaspora audiences are often treated as a guaranteed export. They are not. Second-generation taste is local. A Berlin-Irish household watches German public television, US streamers, and whatever Irish sport or music still feels like home. An Irish-language title that needs a subtitle is competing with the language of the schoolyard. English-language Irish drama should travel more easily and still disappears behind the American shelf that Observatory catalogue work keeps finding in Ireland itself.

Screen Ireland’s membership of European Film Promotion and Culture Ireland’s touring support are built for first presentation: a premiere, a tour, a pavilion. They are weaker at the second month, when a title needs to be a search term in a city that already has too many. Diaspora festivals — the subject of the earlier pack piece — concentrate attention for a weekend. Second-generation daily life is a Tuesday.

Sport and music remain the informal prominence system. A GAA stream, a touring Irish act, a football international on a public-service player: those are how many second-generation households still meet Ireland without buying a festival pass. Screen policy that ignores those live and audio pipes will keep over-predicting festival conversions.

What would count as serving that audience

Three public tests follow from the published policy, not from a community interview MSMN did not do.

One: Can a second-generation household in the EU find Irish work without already knowing the title? Where to Watch Ireland is a domestic aggregator. There is no equivalent “Where to Watch Irish” for a Lisbon or Leipzig subscriber. Prominence rules under the AVMSD help European works as a legal class. They do not light “Irish” as a class. A European works row can be French-heavy and still compliant.

Two: Do ESP and Culture Ireland still treat subsequent generations as audiences, not only as heritage pupils? The Diaspora Strategy’s language on first and subsequent generations is clear. The risk is that funding follows St Patrick’s weeks and Irish Studies modules while habitual screen culture stays unmeasured. A school visit that teaches a reel is useful. A catalogue that never offers a second title is the failure mode.

Three: Is citizenship-plus-Player the whole offer? RTÉ Player, TG4 Player and IFI@Home geo-availability are the practical pipes for many households. They are also a reminder that public-service media is still how a lot of Irishness travels. If licence-fee politics thin the domestic schedule, the second-generation shelf thins with it. That is a European media-freedom point as much as a sentimental one.

A further wrinkle is language in the second generation. Irish-language policy at home — TG4, the Leaving Certificate, Gaeltacht broadcasting — does not automatically follow a child to Lyon. ESP guidance names Irish-language initiatives among fundable heritage projects. Culture Ireland can tour a production. Neither creates a Tuesday-night Irish-language row on a French streamer. English-language Irish drama should be the easier export and still loses to the American default that Observatory catalogue work keeps measuring, including inside Ireland. Second-generation households are the audience that would notice if “Irish” became a findable class rather than a March theme.

They are also a two-way pipe. Census 2022’s return numbers from Spain, Germany and France describe parents who bring European viewing habits home. A child in Dublin whose other living room was Berlin is already a European viewer. Cultural policy that only counts the outbound Irish is counting half the second generation.

Second-generation Irish audiences in Europe are not a soft diaspora story. They are a test of whether Irish cultural export is a weekend or a habit. The State has spent two decades funding identity infrastructure. Streamers and public players still decide the Tuesday night. The unfinished work is to treat those households as European viewers with a specific search problem — not as a parade that funds itself.

Sources

• Department of Foreign Affairs, Emigrant Support Programme: https://www.ireland.ie/irish-diaspora/emigrant-support-programme/
• Department of Foreign Affairs, How to write a good ESP application: https://www.ireland.ie/en/irish-diaspora/emigrant-support-programme/how-to-write-a-good-esp-application/
• CSO, Census 2022 Profile 5 — Immigration: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpp5/censusofpopulation2022profile5-diversitymigrationethnicityirishtravellersreligion/immigration/
• CSO, Census 2022 Profile 5 — Citizenship: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpp5/censusofpopulation2022profile5-diversitymigrationethnicityirishtravellersreligion/citizenship/
• Culture Ireland: https://www.cultureireland.ie/
• Screen Ireland, European Film Promotion: https://www.screenireland.ie/promoting/european-film-promotion
• CRESCINE, Policy Recommendations for Building Future Audiences: https://www.crescine.eu/policy-recommendations-for-building-future-audiences