Three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave at some point in their lives, mostly for the shelter of the old colonial power, England. In 1957, the year before I was born, almost 60,000 people emigrated.22 This was the latest episode in a slow, relentless demographic disaster. In 1841, the population of what became the twenty-six-county Irish state was 6.5 million. In 1961, it would hit its lowest ever total of 2.8 million. By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born
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