Emigrants in Britain ‘neglected’ by State

LABOUR PARTY leader Pat Rabbitte yesterday blamed successive governments for neglecting the thousands of Irish emigrants in Britain who live in squalor and poverty.

Mr Rabbitte said governments here had failed to acknowledge in any tangible way this country’s responsibility to the generation of manual workers who supported their families in Ireland in poorer times.

He accused Foreign Minister Brian Cowen of “defending the indefensible” on the RTÉ television Prime Time programme, Forgotten Generation, which examined the plight of the neglected emigrants.