MONDAY was a night of gale Force winds and driving rain in London. I was walking from the South Bank towards Waterloo underground station, cursing the weather and the absence of taxis, when the melody faltered across the pavement, Carrickfergus played on a tin whistle.
The young musician was squatting in the doorway of a shop. Behind him, stretched full length and wrapped in blankets, a friend was already settled for the night.
He had been in London for two years, he told me. Things hadn't worked out so well. Perhaps if he got it together by Christmas, he'd think of going home . . . Perhaps.
Emigration has almost disappeared as a political issue. It has been replaced by the Irish diaspora, a much more fashionable concept rich with tales of triumph and survival against great odds.
It is as though we no longer want to recognise that emigration is still often involuntary and accompanied by a wrenching sense of loss for those who leave and those left behind.
Our economy, the strongest in Europe as our politicians keep telling us, has (surely?) put a stop to that particular national disgrace.
The latest figures from the Central Statistics Office, reported in this paper last week, show "there has been a net increase of some six thousand people in the State over the past year. How then can emigration still be a problem? If anything one detects a rather tetchy note in some of the editorial comment, that the unemployment figures are still stubbornly and disgracefully high precisely because emigrants are coming home and taking so many of the new jobs.
But tens of thousands still leave, the majority of them between the ages of 16 and 24, and very often the experience of emigration is not a happy one. Of course, things are better. Many of the young people who go, but by no means all, are better qualified. They are able to get decent jobs. Working in another country brings them new experience, adds to their skills.
They can come home more often, visit family and friends at Christmas, talk about returning for good if the right opportunity arises.
It's a rosy picture and it has enabled us, understandably perhaps, to embrace the comfortable myth that emigration is now just another career choice. Our young people, fluent in languages and technology, are out there doing the business" and good luck to them. This, in turn, has affected the national debate.
There is a real impatience now when anyone, the churches, charitable organisations working with the homeless in big cities in Britain, individuals who have done research on the subject, point out that the picture is not as uniformly glowing as we want to believe, that far too many of our young people still leave Ireland for the same dreary old reasons as they have in the past, lack of jobs or the hope of making a future in their own country.
At a summer school devoted to the Irish diaspora this year one speaker, an academic living and working in Britain, argued that for many younger emigrants conditions are now harsher, economically and socially, than in the past.
It was not a popular point of view. He was told that this was an example of the victim culture" which has been a part of our history and the national psyche for far too long.
Cherishing the diaspora was the theme of a speech which the President, Mary Robinson, made to both houses of the Oireachtas. Its purpose was to reclaim the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who left this country in conditions of almost unimaginable hardship, and to honour the contribution which they and their descendants have made to a broader sense of what it means to be Irish.
It would be a terrible irony if this celebration of their survival and achievements were to have the effect of making us ignore the needs of our emigrant communities now. The harsh reality is that, by virtually any social and economic criteria, theme communities still fare badly.
Recent research shows that in Britain the Irish form a larger proportion of the homeless population than any other ethnic group, have a higher rate of admissions to mental, hospitals and account for a disproportionately large number of suicides.
These issues do not figure on the agenda for concerned debate.
Nor are they likely to do so for as long as emigrants lack a political voice. Earlier this month the Government announced that it wash shelving plans for a referendum on granting voting rights to emigrants, abandoning the pledge contained in the Coalition's programme for government.
It is true that the proposal, for three seats in the Seanad, had been vigorously opposed by politicians who saw it as the thin end of a wedge that might lead on to emigrants having full voting rights, just as they do in every other European country. Groups campaigning on the issue on behalf of emigrants were also unenthusiastic, for the opposite reason that they saw the plan as much too restricted.
This is not, at least not primarily, a column about votes for emigrants. I've written on the issue before and think the case for full rights to vote in all elections is overwhelming. But what is particularly depressing about the Government's decision to shelve the referendum, and the lack of almost any public reaction to the announcement, is that it shows just how little serious attention we now pay to the whole issue of emigration. Far from cherishing the diaspora we seem determined to ignore it.