• Tom Murphy
• Fri, 10/14/2011 - 15:18
• Comments

At the Lough Rea Hotel in East Galway last week, people from all over Ireland gathered to meet with each other, share notes and find out the latest developments in the Ireland Reaching Out (Ireland XO) project. The idea behind this is to utilize information stored in parish registries across the land to identify members of the Irish Diaspora and reach out to them.

Mike Feerick, Chairman of Ireland XO and an organiser of the event last week, says that one of the beauties of this massively distributed project is that, "Instead of trying to research the entire Irish Diaspora as one big ephemeral entity, what we are doing is breaking it down to two-and-a-half thousand parishes. Because if there are 60-70 million around the world that are connected to Ireland, every one of them has at least one connection to a parish in Ireland."

Although it has some support from the Irish government, Ireland XO is very much a grass roots project. At the event last week, attendees came from as far away as Donegal in the north west and Waterford in the south east.

The keynote speaker was the economist, broadcaster and author David McWilliams. As well as increased tourism and the chance to harness other helpful aspects of the Diaspora such as global business experience and the possibility of investment, David suggests that there might be greater, more immediate benefits closer to home in terms of self-empowerment for the people of Ireland themselves:

"One of the big problems in Ireland at the moment is that people do feel a little bit helpless. They feel that power is remote and there is very little we can do for themselves. I think if you galvanize the community with a goal such as this you can create all sorts of possible ramifications which are very hard to quantify. But there is an enormous, uplifting sense of being in control or even being in a tiny bit of control of your own destiny."

If you want to get involved, you can visit the the Ireland XO website.