Diaspora Issues
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
============================================================

Helen McEntee (FG), Meath East

I thank the Deputy for raising this question. The Government launched its new diaspora strategy at the global Irish civic forum on 30 April. It was launched by the Minister of State, Deputy Neale Richmond. He has led the largest ever consultation with the Irish abroad, with over 27 in-person meetings around the world. This included Oireachtas Members. We also hosted the first ever online consultation, the global Irish survey, which received some 10,000 responses.
Since then, the Minister of State has promoted the strategy in Britain, the US and Canada. When any of us travel abroad, we are promoting the strategy and indeed our diaspora. November will see the Asian launch in Hong Kong during the Asian Gaelic Games. The response to the strategy has been overwhelmingly positive, with the communities recognising that the 23 commitments the strategy is built around highlight the challenges but also the opportunities they have highlighted through their engagement prior to its launch. The strategy reflects our commitment to a new and unprecedented relationship with the Irish abroad. No matter where you go, depending on who you speak to, people would say there are anywhere between 30 million and 70 million Irish diaspora. We have a huge number of people to engage with. We will shortly publish an action plan setting out how we will deliver on the commitments up to 2030. The work is already under way.
In advance of the opening of the 2027 immigrant support programme, which will be in December, engagement with key stakeholders and service providers is ongoing to ensure the emigrant support programme remains to existing and emerging needs for the most vulnerable. We are working to support capacity development in some of the organisations. This specific request was made during the consultations, recognising the role of the GAA and how important it is for our overseas communities. Discussions are under way with the GAA on refreshing the global games development fund. I was in New York last week, where I engaged with many of our diaspora and saw the appetite among them for supporting our trade and economic priorities. It is welcome to see a set-up for engagement from diaspora business sectors more broadly. I will touch on more points later.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01