ABSTRACT
A television series on the Irish world-wide entitled The Irish Empire was produced in 1999 for RTE, the BBC and SBS. This is no physical empire, but an empire of the imagination, a virtual empire, whose followers outnumber the native population by over fifteen to one. The series offers an opportunity to consider new questions about the relationships between memory and constructions of an Irish global 'ethnoscape' via the trope of Empire. This chapter addresses several questions relating to Empire and memory. It is divided into two interconnected parts based on each of these programmes, and examines the workings of the trope of Empire through the focus in the series on diasporization as the site where memories circulate and reimaginings of the national takes place. It is the doubleness of Ireland's subject and object status in relation to the British and US Empires which produces the tensions that help to keep memory alive.
