Looking for a Start in the Smoke

There's a marvellous article in this morning's Washington Post about the huge population of people that's moving from Eastern Europe to Ireland to find work. The writer, Kevin Sullivan, follows a guy called Janis Neulans on his way from Riga to Lucan, and extrapolates then from Neulans' micro-case to the macro-case of how Europe is changing. The parallels with Neulans' journey and experiences here are so close to our own emigrant stories as to be frightening (Kilkelly, Ireland, eighteen and sixty, my dear and loving son John. Dear God).

Fascinating, informative, well-written, insightful, thoughtful, all in just twenty-five hundred words. Makes you wonder why we never read this sort of stuff in our own media, as we ourselves are surely the ones most affected by these demographic changes. Funny that.