In one of the most widely acclaimed Irish plays of recent years, Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, the heroine is a west of Ireland woman who spent the best years of her life nursing in England.
She has had, ostensibly, a brilliant career: State Registered Nurse at 21, sister at 24, assistant matron at 30. But she has given it all up to come back to a lonely existence in the west.
The audience never learns in any detail what happened to her or why she abandoned what would seem to have been a good life abroad. But it does not need to. Anyone watching the play in the Ireland of the 1980s or early 1990s would have had an instinctive understanding of her struggle.
On the one hand, there would have been good money, pride in her own skills, a career. On the other, the sense of dislocation, the pining for home, the sacrifice of family life to the rigours of an institutional existence.
The playwright did not need to spell these things out because, for well over a century, Irish nurses had staffed the health systems of Britain and the US. Their struggles and sacrifices, their compassion and ability, had worked their way into the collective memory.
Such a history, surely, would leave an indelible mark on the Irish psyche. Here, more than anywhere else, there would have been an understanding that host countries should be immensely grateful for the work of immigrant nurses and anxious to ease in any way possible their yearning for home.
Home, for 27 Philippine nurses in Dublin until last Tuesday was a B & B in Gardiner Street with two gas rings for 30 people, six people in a two-person bedroom, six people having to sleep in three beds between them, dirty bed linen, grotty decor, poor hygiene and a view from the window of a back yard that looked like a dump. So much for gratitude. So much for the sympathy that ought to come from collective memories.
This time last year the arrival of the first groups of nurses from the Philippines a few months previously was being hailed as the salvation of the Irish health system. A nursing-home manager described the nurses as "a saving grace for our business". Beaumont Hospital declared its delight at the nurses' "expertise in patient care" and reported that "consultants working closely with them in theatre are very happy with their skills".
Sheer self-interest ought to ensure that these highly-skilled, hard-working, good-natured professionals would be treated with the utmost respect. The shortage of nurses is one of the primary reasons for the appallingly long waiting lists in Irish hospitals.
Expensively built and equipped operating theatres and wards have been left idle because there are too few nurses. This alone should be a powerful motive for making these nurses feel welcome, cherished and at home.
In this case, though, self-interest of another kind ought to be at work. The reversal of fortunes dramatised by the altered course of the flow of migrant workers gives us an opportunity to make good on all the demands we made of other countries for decades.
We expected the British or the Americans to appreciate the great gift our nurses were bringing them and were outraged by any ill-treatment they received. Now, we should expect no less of ourselves.
Instead, this group seems to have been treated like battery hens, mere economic units to be stored in the cheapest, most cramped conditions while they are not working. The message is that they have been brought here solely as workers.
Their lives beyond the job seem not to have been deemed worthy of serious consideration. So little thought was given to their needs as human beings that even after their living conditions were exposed by the Irish Nurses' Organisation, no one could decide which of the three eastern region health boards was responsible for housing them.
The event is not entirely bleak. An Irish nurse, Madeleine Speirs, cared enough about her fellow workers to investigate their conditions on her own initiative. The INO weighed in quickly and forcefully.
The Minister for Health, Micheal Martin, immediately expressed his disquiet and promised to remind health employers of their responsibilities. The health boards in question apologised. There was in general a sense of shock and shame. That the new Ireland is not entirely shameless in its exploitation of skilled labour from developing countries is some comfort.
Even if the nurses are decently housed and even if the health employers get their act together, however, a bigger question remains. If this is how we treat migrant workers whom everybody is very glad to see here, how do we treat those who are in a weaker position?
These nurses, after all, are close to the top of the heap among immigrant workers. They speak excellent English. They are highly skilled. Many of them already have experience of working abroad for significant periods.
They work in a profession that is highly unionised, with standardised rates of pay and conditions. Their contribution to Irish society is extremely visible and immediately obvious, even to the most pig-headed xenophobe. They solve an acute political and social problem.
Many of the migrant workers now being brought into Ireland, especially from eastern Europe, don't have these relative advantages. They may not speak much English. Although many of them may be highly skilled professionals in their own countries (teachers, public servants, academics), they are brought here to work in basic manual jobs.
Often physically and socially isolated, they are wide open to exploitation. Although their work benefits the Irish economy greatly, those benefits are not immediately visible to most Irish people.
If migrants at the top of the heap can be treated with the kind of offhand indifference evident in the housing of the nurses from the Philippines, what is happening to those at the bottom? Or do we only really care about such things when we need the people involved much more than they need us?