Accents from the south-east of Ireland can still be heard in Newfoundland, Canada, more than 250 years after the Irish community first put down roots there.
The story of how those links were forged and the hard times which have recently befallen the descendants of that community will be told in a documentary to be screened on TG4 on New Year's Day at 10.05 p.m.
Filmed by a Waterford-based RTE cameraman, Mr Donal Wylde, An Boithrin Glas relates how, for 100 years before the Famine, people from the south-east worked their six-week passage to Newfoundland to get seasonal work on the richest cod-fishing grounds in the world.
After a time they began to put down roots in Newfoundland; women followed the men from Ireland, and by 1780 two-thirds of the population of St John, the capital of Newfoundland, was Irish-speaking.
Mr Wylde, whose fascination with the subject began when he visited Newfoundland in 1980 to work on a three-part Radharc series for RTE, returned recently to film the disappearing traces of the Irish community from the small fishing ports of the Canadian island province.
"Because of the remoteness of the fishing centres in what is essentially a wilderness country, the music, song, dance and folklore, as well as the accents if not the Irish language, survived in these cut-off areas," he said.
"Most of the ancestors of the Irish community in Newfoundland were drawn from a radius of about 40 miles from Waterford, stretching as far as New Ross, into south Kilkenny and south Tipperary and to the borders with east Cork."
However, a government-imposed ban on fishing in the almost fished-out grounds off the province, which came into effect in 1992, had a devastating impact with the loss of 30,000 fishing jobs. This caused large-scale migration to the Canadian mainland.
Part of the knock-on effect has been the erosion of the communities from where the culture of south-east Ireland has survived, said Mr Wylde.
Even though the Irish tradition is being chipped away, interest in Irish roots continues in Newfoundland. The 35-minute documentary relates that the Memorial University in St John has just started a course in Irish-language studies, for which 50 students have signed up.
The programme draws its title from the birthplace near Knocklofty of the one-time superior general of the Franciscans in Ireland, Father Louis O'Donel, who was guardian at Clonmel friary in 1784 when he was appointed first bishop of St John. "One of the chief reasons he was appointed was that he spoke Irish," said Mr Wylde.