The shifting nature of Irish identity was the theme of "The Irish Diaspora" conference in London at the weekend.
It was organised by the Irish Studies Centre at the University of North London in association with the British Association for Irish Studies.
More than 100 delegates attended themed workshops at the University of North London, where academics from Ireland, Britain and the US discussed issues such as "resistance and assimilation", race and ethnicity and diasporic identities within and outside Ireland.
In her discussion paper considering hybrid identities in diasporic communities, Prof Mary Hickman, director of the Irish Studies department at the University of North London, said it had taken immigration into Ireland in recent years to generate a discussion about Irish emigration.
Far from being a mono-cultural nation state, Ireland, she argued, was "a hybrid product, the result of a long history of unequal confrontations between a variety of cultures and socio-economic and political forces".
"Ireland as a hybridised national time-space perhaps differs from some others more in the success with which official imaginings of the nation have dominated public discourses than in the absence of real cleavages and differentiations of class, religion, gender, ethnicity etc."
Emigration as a term, however, did not suffice from the perspective of the Irish in Britain, she argued.
The Irish in Britain were not included in the "imagined nation" of the Irish diaspora by the Irish in Ireland.
The hyphenated identities of the Irish in the US, for example, did not extend to the Irish in Britain.
"There has never been a way to be Irish-British or British-Irish in England, Wales or Scotland in the manner in which people can claim to be Irish-American in a totally acceptable way."
Prof Hickman suggested people born in England to Irish-born parents used various phrases to represent their identity. Some said they were second-generation Irish, others half-Irish and half-British and yet others said they were Birmingham-Irish or London-Irish.
Prof Hickman argued that assumptions about the assimilation into the host community of Irish groups must be questioned, particularly in the context of intermarriage.
"Escalating rates of intermarriage between members of a diasporic group and those constructed as indigenous or between members of different diasporic/ethnic groups does not constitute assimilation but hybridity; in fact, intermarriage can be one of the main pathways to hybridity."
In a workshop entitled "Resistance and Assimilation", Mr Michael Curran, of the Irish Diaspora Project at Trinity College, said recent research looking at the Irish experience in Britain found most people were more concerned with securing travel rights for the elderly than complaining about the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
The "vast majority" of Britain's one million Irish were integrated, he said, but there was a higher incidence of mental health problems among Irish women living in Britain.
Dr Nessa Winston of the department of social policy and social work at University College Dublin suggested that experiencing a negative sense of Irishness impacted on the physical and mental health of the Irish in England.
Negative stereotyping of the Irish in England, traditionally due to a history of colonisation, and more recently due to the Troubles, was subsiding, Ms Winston argued.