Growing up in south Co Dublin and attending school in Mount Anville, Jackie Gilna credits her father for giving her the broadest possible appreciation of Irish culture. Wherever possible, the family were exposed to their farming heritage.
“My dad was from Longford. I was that Dublin jackeen. My grandmother would say how awful it was that I was being brought up in the city, and I would be made to drink the milk from a cow. But that brought me closer to an Irish experience than I would not have experienced in Dublin.
“We were also brought all around Ireland, and my dad told me, ‘You will not leave these shores until you know every corner and you are an ambassador for your country’.”
Earlier immersion in Irish culture was a formative influence, she says, in a career that has been shaped around promoting Ireland abroad and bringing the diaspora closer. Gilna, the founder of We Are Global Irish, is on a mission to harness and grow networks of Irish communities throughout the world to support each other, places where businesses and professionals can come together to share information and help each other in practical ways.
We Are Global Irish was launched in 2024 as a private sector company complementing the work of State agencies. As well as networking and introductions, it provides a range of practical business supports and publishes a monthly online magazine called the Irish Exchange.
The business is registered in Canada and, while the largest element of the Irish diaspora is in North America, the venture has a global reach, she says.
“One thing that stands out to me was that the world we live in as the Irish abroad is very fragmented but, when you bring people together, everyone knows someone who knows somebody; there’s only a couple of degrees of separation.
“We have State agencies who do phenomenal work, such as Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, for example – the envy of other countries – and we work closely with them but there needed to be something in the private sector.”
Gilna’s corporate career took shape in the Netherlands and later Canada, where she moved with her Canadian husband and their familyin 2000. For more than three decades she worked mainly with small and medium-sized businesses, helping them establish, structure and reshape for growth.
“The diaspora didn’t really exist in the Netherlands. It was too close to home. When you come across the pond here, however, the notion of being Irish is very different … Canada didn’t dilute my Irish identity. It gave me the distance to understand its value, commercially and culturally.”
In a forerunner of what she was to do later, Gilna helped establish the Irish Chamber of Commerce in Ottawa at the invitation of the then ambassador and says that listening to Irish people abroad over the years gave her an understanding of their desire to contribute to Ireland.
She is very grateful to Canada for giving her the opportunity to build an independent career, build new connections, stay connected to Ireland and to add value between both countries. In this, she is in good company: some 4½ million people in Canada claim some Irish DNA, according to census data.
Asked about the current strains in relations between Canada and the United States, and prime minister Mark Carney’s desire to form closer relations with the EU, Gilna is characteristically diplomatic. She says that, ultimately, the fundamentally strong historic and good neighbourly relationship between Canada and the United States will endure but that forging closer relations with Europe also makes sense for cultural as well as more obvious economic reasons, given the strong European roots of much of the population.
She and her family have enjoyed life in the Canadian capital, where the climate varies enormously. “It can get into the minus-30s in winter but with blue skies and crisp snow. A calmness comes over us in those months. In the summer we enjoy high temperatures from May to September.
“In Ottawa you can be who you are. You don’t have to blend in and be Canadian, so it’s not a melting pot and that’s a cultural difference between here and other places.”
Canadians can be risk averse and polite. There is a different style of doing business from the way it is done in Ireland, she says. Anyone doing business with Canada also needs to factor in the wide regional divergence between different parts of this vast country.
“In Ireland we operate at a fast pace and the craic comes into everything, as professional and all as we are in our engagement. However, Canadians like to take things a bit slower, and they take time to adapt to our humour and our way of doing business.”
While there are economic opportunities for Irish people wishing to find a home in Canada, she cautions anyone interested in this to do their homework thoroughly in advance, not to underestimate the challenges and, most importantly, “don’t arrive without a job”.