The Irish were once drowning migrants too

IN 2015, bad travel is when a cheapskate airline charges you extra for your luggage because it weighs a few kilos too much, or when your flight has been delayed and you have to sit around an airport terminal full of ridiculously over-priced shops while eating your ridiculously over-priced sandwich, says Suzanne Harrington.

That’s as bad as it gets.

Back in the late 1840s, they had coffin ships. Desperate people crammed-on, packed-off, consumed with dysentery and typhus. One third of these desperate people died en route, with so many bodies thrown overboard that sharks followed the ships the way seagulls follow trawlers. In 1847 alone, one fifth of the 100,000 Irish people who left for Canada and North America died before they ever got there. We know all this from our history books.