First may I wish you a warm welcome to our country? There are many here who wish you well, and I am certainly one of those. Emigration is something that the Irish race knows only too well.

Prior to the great famine in 1847, there were in excess of 8.2 million people crammed into our small island. Many of these lived in abject poverty. Many people believe that it was the famine that drove people out of the country, while this was indeed a factor, well over a million had left before the famine hit.

While the famine, claimed in excess of a million lives, the drop in our population to less than 4 million, is solely attributed to massive emigration. Many of you may know our history of subjugation, primarily at the hands of the English for 800 years, but we were indeed invaded by the Vikings and Normans as well.

Emigration has been a feature of Irish history more than almost any other country in the world. This is shown by the fact that, apart from the 5 million people in Ireland , there are an estimated 55 million people worldwide who can trace their ancestry back to Ireland.

It is for this reason, that we of all races should freely accept that emigrants to our shores, as others did to us in the past. We have been blessed with a strong economy, due to the Celtic Tiger, fuelled by low taxes and a young educated population.

It is said that the Irish helped to build the railroads of America . This was because primarily the Irish who left Ireland , fled for reasons of poverty, and possessed nothing more than determination, and a very strong fellowship network abroad. However what we are seeing in Ireland today, with you our readers, is an influx of highly skilled people from around the world.

Our ancestry aside, unfortunately it is a fact of life that many Irish people are prejudiced against you. We want our cake, and we want to eat it. We have tasted wealth, and we want to keep it, enjoy it, and we don't want to share it. What is even worse is that, many people feel that high pay is their right, and that they do not have to work for it.

In reality, good employers are screaming out for people who have skills and training, who will do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.

There is one thing that you must do – you must be completely fluent in English. This means that you must speak English and only English when you come here. You must not speak in your native tongue to your friends, because, if you are to break down our inherent, if unfair, prejudices, then you must be able to argue eloquently with us.

Get to know us, if you want to live and work with us, and then you can start to get paid, what you deserve, in jobs you should be doing. You owe that to yourselves, your families and those of us, who need you to succeed, to wake us indigenous Irish, out of our complacency. 

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