Forgotten Irish: tell the real story

WRITING as one of Fergus Finlay’s “people without an education” who emigrated to the UK in the early ‘60s, I found his well-meaning but rather smug column on immigration (Irish Examiner, February 15) lacking in any real understanding of what life was like then, and still is, for many driven by economic circumstances to leave home to seek employment elsewhere.

He implies that not only were Irish emigrants of a certain era uneducated but somehow their currency as human beings was of less value than those “graduates” who joined the brain-drain to, for example, Silicone Valley.

And so, while it was sad to see them leave home, they were in fact no great loss to the country.