Readers Blog: America needs to remember its own story

It is ironic that, on the day the Irish Hunger Memorial, which faces the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, reopened, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, introduced legislation sponsored by two Republican senators, which will “... favour applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy.”

Something snapped in my Irish spine when I read that Republican senator, Tom Cotton (Arkansas), one of the bill’s creators, said that the current immigration system doesn’t attract “the very best talent” and gets mostly low or unskilled workers.

To repudiate that insult to my Waterford ancestors, I would like to tell the story of my first American relatives, whose experience resonates with that promised to immigrants “yearning to breathe free”. In a pest house in New York City, my great-grandparents, Jeremiah and Ellen Lyons, had their first glimpse of their new home, America. Forced to flee famine and oppression, they left Dungarvan in 1845.