Huddled masses left it all to the petty gentry

RYLE DWYER, (Irish Examiner, Nov 22) informs us that the Irish who fled to America in wake of the Great Famine were regarded as the dregs of society — poor, dirty, disease-ridden and uneducated.

Let us not forget that those English settlers with which this country had been filled long before the Great Famine were regarded as the 'dregs of the English population.'

As an historian put it, 'going to Ireland was looked on as the miserable mark of a deplorable person.'