Gerard O'Regan: 'We, of all people, should understand what lies behind the need to emigrate'

Moving abroad no longer creates the same fissures of old. Stock Image: Getty Images

Gerard O'Regan

Great Blasket Island these winter days is an abandoned place, embracing the sound of its own silence in seasonal gloom. The summer visitors have gone. Old homesteads remain in mute testimony to the shifting sands of time.

As the Noel Grealish-prompted immigration row simmers, the story of the Blaskets is part of Ireland's very own saga. It remains almost impossible to comprehend the sheer outflow of humanity from these shores. An estimated 10 million Irish people have emigrated since the early 1700s.