World View: Eamon de Valera told Michael McInerney once: "There is no doubt, Peadar O'Donnell has earned his place in Irish history". As McInerney (political correspondent of this paper in the 1960s) recounted in his biography of the Donegal-born radical and writer, de Valera protested when O'Donnell said he was not a republican.
Even if O'Donnell had been taoiseach, there would still have been emigration.
"Yes," came the reply, "but the same people would not have emigrated."
His remark came to mind as coverage of the elderly Irish in Britain, who left here in the 1950s, highlighted their loneliness and isolation from contemporary Ireland - and the renewed efforts to reach out to them by voluntary groups and state-funded agencies before it is too late, whether by visiting, bringing them here on holidays or resettling some people in retirement homes. Plans to subsidise their travel or provide access to Irish broadcasting are also being actively pursued, but have hit bureaucratic and funding obstacles from the Government.
One told Róisín Ingle last Saturday: "I don't think they know Irish people like me even exist. But here I am." Another woman said: "When I go back, I don't feel good enough. When it comes to money and the clothes I wear, I feel different. The last time I went I got the feeling they didn't want me, and I don't think I will be back there again."
A 54-year-old man who left Meath when he was 16 said going home for Christmas would be a waste of time. "If you are struggling, they prefer you to go away, so they don't have to look at you. I am proud of being Irish, but if you are not self-sufficient there, you had better expect to be punished."
These days we are more concerned with immigration than emigration - a revolutionary change reflecting the transformation of Ireland's economy and society over the last 15 years, which has created a sustained period of virtually full employment.
The changes have reconfigured attitudes towards
emigration. The discourse linking it to post-colonial underdevelopment, exile and dispossession was gradually displaced by one about the Irish diaspora, celebrating its diversity, the achievements of the Irish abroad and their role in providing international links for what has become one of the most globalised economies in the world.
Those who resent that displacement say it obscures or erases the dynamics of class and power which underlay the successive waves of emigration in which an estimated seven million people left Ireland from the 18th century onwards. Those who left were usually the weakest members of Irish society and the victims of its deep inequalities.
Their descendants in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia (the main centres of the Irish abroad) come to some 70 million people now - a very loosely identifying group, based on census figures especially in the US.
In Britain, there are some 900,000 Irish-born people and 1.7 million people with one or two Irish-born parents. But the 2001 census and a separate General Household Survey, whose results were published last year, found the number of people identifying their cultural background as Irish, at 2 per cent, was less than the Irish-born population.
This finding contradicted assumptions by many Irish activists in Britain that there is a clearcut relationship between ethnic origin and national identification.
It seems to confirm that the Irish have assimilated relatively rapidly in British society. While the census questions are still disputed for over-simplification, the argument that the Irish are by far the largest non-British ethnic group there, albeit less visible than others, is now less credible.
They are now more differentiated, with some surveys showing they are better qualified, more ambitious and higher up the corporate scales than their British counterparts, while there is plenty of impressionistic evidence that the Irish are no longer stereotyped as stupid or subversive, but have become trendy.
This picture is contradicted by evidence that most Irish-born men work in skilled manual or non-skilled jobs (especially in construction), most women in public administration and the health services, and that Irish people suffer disproportionate rates of mental and physical illness.
Emigration was regarded as a safety valve against radicalism for an increasingly conservative social order after independence, ridding itself of the most dissatisfied men and women of each generation.
Indeed, O'Donnell told McInerney in the 1960s that one of the great mistakes made by the "social republicans" in the 1926-32 period was not to have become involved with Fianna Fáil.
"In those days, the alternative to Fianna Fáil was Fianna Fáil, for it was the only party with enough Fenianism to stand up to the church.
And we of the left and radical could have provided that alternative and acted as a platform - and the alternative - against the right-wing policies of Fianna Fáil."
O'Donnell had a right to speak on behalf of emigrants because of his prolonged work with the "tatiehokers", migrant agricultural labourers from the west of Ireland who went to Scotland and England each year. They were as invisible and despised then as these are now. His demands for state-funded farms and new communities in the western counties to provide employment came to nothing as church and state converged in a conservative bloc that facilitated continuing emigration of the same people through the war years and through the 1950s to a Britain that badly needed such workers - and yet shut those who left out of the national political imagery.
The remarks by these people in London eloquently capture these ambiguous attitudes of a different Ireland, echoing the long-established ones which regarded emigration with guilt and shame but saw it as necessary for social order and stability.
Those who left were expected to stay gone, remittances aside - and they amounted to a subsidy as large in its time as the later EU structural funding.
Although millions of them retain Irish citizenship, there has been a completely begrudging official attitude to their voting in Irish elections, or to setting up representative institutions through which they could plug into Irish public life, as many other European states have done.
This is despite the commitment in Article 2 of the Constitution, arising from the Belfast Agreement, that "the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage".
In the longer term, the failure to create such institutions is likely to affect the ability to harness diasporic identification constructively.
Ireland's political, cultural and economic adaptation to a much more interdependent world is mediated in good part through our relations with them.