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Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora
Tim Pat Coogan
Tim Pat Coogan's *Wherever Green Is Worn* is a sweeping, globe-trotting survey of the Irish diaspora — the tens of millions of people of Irish descent scattered across the world by famine, poverty, and ambition. Coogan, a prominent Irish journalist and historian best known for his biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera, travels from Liverpool and London to America, Australia, Argentina, the Caribbean and beyond, tracing how the Irish carried their identity, grievances, and gifts abroad. Published in 2000, it is part history, part reportage — opinionated and expansive. The scale means it sometimes skims, but the ambition is the point: to treat the scattered Irish as a single, world-shaping story. For anyone curious about how a small island left such an outsized mark, it is a rich starting place.
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The author
Tim Pat Coogan (born 1935) is one of Ireland's best-known historians and journalists, for two decades the editor of the Irish Press. He is the author of widely read books including The IRA, biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera, and The Famine Plot — a body of work that is popular, forceful, and often frankly nationalist in sympathy.
The book
Wherever Green Is Worn, published in 2000, sets out to map the Irish diaspora in full. Coogan travels country by country — Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, the Caribbean and more — combining potted history with on-the-ground reporting on how communities of Irish descent have fared and how they remember home. It is less a tight thesis than a vast, personal tour.
How it has aged
Its breadth is both the strength and the weakness: no single country gets exhaustive treatment, and some judgments are colored by Coogan's convictions. But as a panoramic introduction to the global Irish story it remains valuable, and few books attempt the same reach.
For more context
It pairs naturally with Thomas Keneally's The Great Shame and with more focused histories of Irish emigration to particular countries.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Tim Pat Coogan
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Year
- 2000
- ISBN
- 0-312-23990-4
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places