One of the minor side effects of millennium fever is that, up to now, we've been largely spared the "What were the 1990s all about?" retrospectives which usually accompany the end of any decade. But when people do start to look back on these curious 10 years, surely one of the things they will notice most will be the increasing fascination with what has come to be known as the Irish diaspora.
They may see The Irish Empire, a major five-part documentary on the subject starting on RTE 1 next week, as valuable source material, because, in its own way, this multinational cultural product tells us as much about Ireland in 1999 as it does about the history of Irish emigration.
Commissioned by RTE, the BBC and the Australian channel SBS, The Irish Empire is a polished production which explores the experiences of "the Irish abroad", from the monastic settlements of the early Christian period to the prepackaged theme pubs of today.
Unlike last year's Disney-produced series, The Long Journey Home, which focussed primarily on the experience of the Catholic Irish in the US, The Irish Empire takes a broader view, not just in including the emigrant experience in Britain and Australia, but in taking pains to point out the often underplayed role of Ulster Presbyterians in North America.
As the programme points out, more than 50 per cent of Americans who describe themselves as being of Irish descent also describe themselves as Protestants, but the word "Irish-American" is still synonymous in the popular imagination with Catholicism. In later programmes, the continuation of Irish sectarian tensions in emigrant communities in England, Canada and Australia is examined, along with the influence of Catholic missionaries and Protestant evangelicals.
But, as one contributor points out, just because the old, simplistic narrative has been revised and revisited doesn't mean that the mass Catholic migration of the past 150 years is any less important. The peculiarities of the Irish emigrant experience in the 19th and 20th centuries - the very low rate of return to the native country, the unusually high proportion of women among the emigrant population - are examined in later programmes.
Irish women who have lived most of their lives in Britain talk about their sense of being neither from one place nor the other. (As always seems to be the case with documentaries on this subject, it's the first-generation emigrants to Britain who seem the most sad and lost of all the Irish overseas, although the series attempts to uncover the largely untold stories of Irish economic success in Britain.)
Of course, the significance of some of these events is still contested. The contention of academic and cultural critic Luke Gibbons in the series, that downplaying the psychological impact of the Famine is akin to ignoring the effect of slavery on African-Americans, contrasts with Fintan O'Toole's criticisms of Irish "victim culture". O'Toole, who acted as script consultant on the series, argues that the real victims of the Famine were those who died and those who left, but that the resulting displacement opened up opportunities for the emerging Catholic middle class in the 19th century, who had a vested economic interest in continuing emigration.
This tension between different readings of the Irish emigrant experience is one of the elements which lifts The Irish Empire out of the rather romanticised grand narratives of some previous documentaries on the subject, particularly those produced or financed by Americans, although one might wish at times that the revisionists and post-revisionists of different hues who pop up throughout the series might have been offered the opportunity of engaging directly with each other, rather than in 30-second soundbites to camera.
But the Irish/British/Australian nature of the project also allows for the consideration of such potentially thorny subjects as the enthusiastic participation of Irish soldiers and administrators in 19th century British colonialism.
SO, for whom is The Irish Empire made? The broadcasters appear to have achieved a reasonable balance between the needs of their respective audiences: this is neither a navel-gazing exercise in Irish identity politics, nor a misty-eyed vision of where grandad came from. It's more an examination of differing constructions of "Irishness" and what they might mean at the end of the 20th century, whether in Omagh, Sydney or Boston.
The opening and closing programmes, directed by Alan Gilsenan (Australian director David Roberts and Irish director Dearbhla Walsh are responsible for the other programmes in the series), make explicit these intentions, weaving archive footage of more traditional images of rural Ireland with symbols of modernity and urbanism both here and abroad. In a way, these handsomely shot juxtapositions of old and new, traditional and modern, have become the accepted visual currency of Ireland's presentation of itself to the world in the 1990s, in everything from Riverdance to Father Ted.
In contemporary terms, emigration becomes as much a metaphor as a physical reality, so that poet Eavan Boland can describe the older generation here as "exiles from the new Ireland". Gilsenan himself was one of the instigators of this visual style - his memorable 1987 documentary, The Road to God Knows Where, expressed the anger and emotional displacement of young Irish emigrants in the 1980s in a polemical montage of urban bleakness at home and blankness away. A decade on, it's fascinating to see how similar images are now deployed in the service of a quite different story, one of economic success, cultural fluidity and technological empowerment.
One wonders whether, in another 10 years, these images, and the place of the migrant in Irish culture, will have taken on yet another resonance.
The Irish Empire begins at 9.30 p.m. on Monday on RTE 1
