Irish Roots: There was no mass emigration from Ireland

I don't often find myself disagreeing with John Grenham. His latest column is one such occasion.

He's certainly right, if being a bit picky over wording, when he writes "There was no such thing as mass migration, only the accumulation of tens of thousands of individual and family decisions."

Those individual decisions did not necessarily mean the migrant came because there was a family member or friend who had already migrated as his examples suggest. I can think of two cases in my own family, admittedly not from Ireland, where that was not the case. One of them is me.