Irish Emigration Quotes

Here are a vast number of people shipping off for Pennsylvania and Boston. Here are 3 ships at Larne, 5 at Derry, 2 at Coleraine, 3 at Belfast, and 4 at Sligo. I’m assured that within these eight years there are gone above 30 thousand people out of Ulster and the low part of Connacht.

My grandfather John came from Cork. I have six degrees of separation in Ireland.

I have often been asked, 'How is it that Ireland could formerly support a population of eight millions as compared with only five now?’ The answer is simple: Eight millions could still exist if the potato crop were a certainty, and if the people were now content to exist as they did then. But to the then existing population-living at best in a light-hearted and hopeful, hand-to-mouth contentment-there was a terrible awakening.

I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.

A thousand emigrants per day still leaving from our Irish ports, most of them with money. The runaway farmers have learned the trick of thrashing out their corn by night, leaving the straw neatly cocked, selling off stock and furniture and bolting, with heavy arrears due to the ruined landlords.

I think Irish people started to move to the United States - many things that were of consequence. And it was a tiny and mild event compared to what had happened 74,000 years ago.

Membership in the European Community, now the European Union, has enabled Ireland to re-find its sense of participation - cultural, political, social - at the European level. I think that also opens up possibilities for Ireland as a European country to look outward - to look particularly, for example, at countries to which a lot of Irish people emigrated, to our links - our human links - with the United States, with Canada, with Australia, with New Zealand. And to look also, because of our history, at our links to the developing countries.

Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.

We have long had emigration in Ireland. But the nature of emigration has changed. With ferries to Britain and the continent, as well as air travel, emigration isn't the cut­off it used to be. In addition, some of our young people are being educated to levels beyond our present capacity to provide the jobs they are qualified to do. So they go abroad. Many want to come back, especially when they have children they would want to be raised in the Irish society and in the Irish educational system.