[BRIEF NOTE] The Latvians of Ireland, and Ireland and Latvia

A posting taken from my blog, for your amusement.

***

<lj user="garmacottar">, writing from the city of Limerick in the
southwest of Ireland, <a
href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/832985.html?thread=2694873";>commented</a>
that "[a]ll my housemates are Latvians of Russian ethnicity, and they're
the closest in numbers I know to the Poles, while I know no Latvian
Latvians." This isn't an anomaly, since Andris Straumanis' May 2005
article for <a href="http://www.latviansonline.com";>Latvians Online</a>,
<a
href="http://latviansonline.com/columns/article.php?id=1029_0_9_0_C";>"School
may be spark for Latvians in Ireland"</a>, suggests that Ireland is now
one of the major centres of the Latvian diaspora.

<blockquote><i>Thousands of Latvians--perhaps 20,000 and growing--are
now living and working in Ireland. Despite the astonishing number,
Ireland has no <I>latvies¡u biedriba</I>, no Latvian society, and
seemingly little structure to social and cultural life. But that could
be about to change.

[. . .]

Irish government statistics say about 2,300 Latvians live and work in
the country. Ivars Lasis, the first secretary in the Embassy of Latvia
in Dublin, puts the number at almost 10 times as many, and says more are
coming every day.

"In principle, all of Ireland is scattered with Latvians," Lasis said.
Many are in Dublin, but they also are found in the southern city of
Cork, in the northern city of Donegal and throughout the countryside.

Before Latvia regained independence, Ireland never had a strong Latvian
community. It was not a favored destination for the Displaced Persons
after World War II. Even the <I>veclatviesi</I>, the Old Latvians who
for economic and political reasons left their homeland in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries,
avoided the Emerald Isle. Vilberts Krasnais, who in his 1938 book
<I>Latvies¡u kolonijas</I> catalogued Latvian communities the world
over, didnâ??t even mention Ireland.</i></blockquote>

In the past half-century, the Republic of Ireland has become one of the
wealthiest countries in the world, attracting a <a
href="http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=260";>not-insubstantial
but unexpected</a> wave of immigrants in the process. Ireland's model of
economic development has been <a
href="http://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/hanley_archive/hanley30old.html";>raised</a>
as a model for many of the countries which recently joined the European
Union. As Paul Treanor pointed out in his <a
href="http://members.chello.nl/p.treanor/lithuania-ireland.html";>typically
idiosyncratic comparative survey</a> of Ireland and Lithuania, though,
Ireland's relatively peaceable 20th century history must be sharply
distinguished from the genocide-scarred histories of all of the Baltic
States. Ireland, roughly comparable in size with Latvia, has managed to
escape its poverty. Will Latvia, with its sharp ethnolinguistic
divisions and profound poverty, manage to replicate the Irish path in
the next generation? Will, in other words, writers for the website Kivu
Online (scheduled to be launched in spring of 2029) be able to use
cut-and-paste to plagiarize Straumanis' article? I submit that the
question remains open.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/833557.html

--
R.F. McDonald
r_f_mcdonald@xxxxxxxx
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

"What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
the same God?"

- Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763
.

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