Total gridlock: US and Irish holidaymakers crossing the Atlantic to see how the other half lives

Joe McNamee talks to industry leaders about the steady rise in US-Irish tourism

With close to 42 million Americans claiming some Irish ancestry — that is, more than one in five white Americans, and one of the top three ancestries, second only to German-Americans — the relationship between the world’s most powerful and richest country and our own little rain-drenched rock on the very western fringes of Europe is both special and unique, all the more so for the very obvious disparities between the two.

For a population that is infinitely more transient than its Irish equivalent, so often less embedded in specific localities, eminently capable of radical upheavals over the course of a single generation, the freedom to up sticks and start afresh somewhere else being a fundamental embodiment of the American Dream, it is hardly surprising so many of those 42 million Irish-Americans seek to rediscover their psychic roots in the ‘Old Country’.