ABSTRACT
In general terms, this study suggests that a degree of misunderstanding about the networking process arises because many writers have presumed an existent, or significantly formed, Catholic identity among Irish migrants arriving in new lands. This assumption fits the assertions of contemporary nationalists and inflates Irish solidarity and notions of a corporate sense of identity.2 To this effect, nationalists' tours of the United States have tended to be considered in the contexts of fund-raising (as an index of transnational solidarity), as generators of psychological and political support for the national movement at home, and, most recently, as part of a nascent globalisation seen through the transatlantic transmission of information.3 In the present contribution, Charles Stewart Parnell's tour of North America in early 1880 is considered for the way that the networking between Ireland and the American diaspora, reveals a largely ephemeral communal identity. Parnell's trip allows us to elucidate theoretical paradigms which, in turn, structure our reading of these complex phenomena. This linkage of theory and a specific form of ethnic networking yields a fresh dimension to the debate about migration. Finally, the analysis also offers a new angle on the curious phenomenon of a resurgence or expansion ofIrish 'ethnicity' or purported 'new Irishness' in the United States and elsewhere from around 1960.
