Mind Moves:Now that it is winter the "wild geezers", as our new roving Irish wanderers have been termed, have returned home and a new set of backpackers is off to see the world, hitting warmer climes as we prepare for colder weather.
The ease with which young people pack up and backpack across the globe is truly wonderful. They are courageous, adventurous, audacious and adaptable. They are undaunted by distance, difference in custom, cuisine or comfort. They are the new explorers of the intellectual and geographical landscapes of our world.
No longer is "doing Europe" a privileged undergraduate summer activity or a post-graduate educative process when travelling the entire world is an easy rite of passage.
Few will remember the time when European countries were entities in an atlas, about which one might learn the capital cities, principal towns, primary industries, agricultural activities, main rivers, mountains and distinguishing features. Now they are accessible within hours.
They are home territory for many of our fortunate young Irish Europeans who flit to Florence, hop to Helsinki and celebrate birthdays with parties in Paris.
With the current currency advantage of euro over dollar, shopping sprees to New York have become commonplace. Going away is something that is done for fun. This is a far cry from what was called the "American Wake", that final farewell hooley held for those departing for America before they were accompanied, often by an entire village, to take the boat. American Wakes were about the bereavement of departure and the hope of a better life elsewhere.
It must have been difficult for those young American waked saying goodbye to their parents, their friends and their lives because there was nothing here to sustain them. Today's Irish explorers of foreign parts may be unaware of how these generations prior to them left Ireland, not for experience, entertainment or escapade, but because they were poor.
They accepted that a living could not be eked out in their own land and that they would work at menial, poorly paid tasks so that they could pay the passage for the next family member to join them. One by one, families were dismantled and reassembled in Boston, or Philadelphia, up the Yukon, in Newfoundland or Labrador. The Irish Navvy was famous, the Irish servant girl iconic, their accent, customs, industry and success part of our history and the history of those places they went to. But at home the bereavement of emigration was terrible.
That is why, just as families once waked their dead, these Irish families "waked" their emigrating sons and daughters, the finality of their journey; the death of their former lives. The neighbours gathered for singing and dancing, food and drink and a frantic keening kind of merriment that denied the pain of parting.
Perhaps the merrymaking was to imbue the hearts of those who were leaving with the voices, the sounds, smells, music and the dancing steps of their heritage, so they might carry it with them in their hearts, retain it in their behaviour, remain connected to home through its customs and keep their identity with them wherever they set up new lives.
Later, there were other emigrants who went more silently, by stealth, to England. Girls who were pregnant who had to hide their pregnancy at home. There were girls such as those writer Edna O'Brien depicted in The Country Girls Trilogy. There were young women in the 1960s who would work in the factories in England and return to Ireland at intervals dressed in garish clothes, minis and the highest of heels, to protest their success and sophistication to parishes whose lives went on without them and who could not relate to the new image of the young girl who had left. No longer part of what they left, they had little left that they were part of.
These emigrants carried a heavy emotional load. Their suitcases were heavy, functional objects, as battered as their lives when they packed them with an aching paucity of possessions and a heart-rending excess of unrealistic hope or unquenchable despair. We have retained their stories in our literature, some of them emigrants or sons of emigrants themselves, writers such as Pádraic Ó Conaire who gave us Deoraíocht (Exile) and accounts of many emigrants' lives.
There were many men who worked in England to support their wives and children back home in Ireland; men who worked until their bodies were as broken as their marriages. Many led second secret lives as so poignantly portrayed by writer Maeve Binchy's stark play Deeply Regretted By . . . , when two families face the death of the one man, the one husband, whose Irish family and English family discover each other upon his death.
Our story of emigration may be historic. It has taken different forms in different times. And lest we forget, there are modern counterparts from other countries arriving here with the same hope that we once had when we departed.
We go now for entertainment. Others arrive out of economic necessity. The cycle continues. It is just the names, the places and the dreams of streets paved with gold that shift location. And it's our turn to welcome.
Marie Murray is the director of the student counselling services at UCD