Dun Laoghaire Harbour. The boulevard of broken dreams. A lonely Tayto packet whistles across the rain-spattered jetty, near where the group of Irish mammies are huddled in the cold, waving goodbye to their sons. One of them crushes a fag butt beneath her sodden Louboutins and turns away. She can’t look any more. On the gangplank, one of the boys turns with tears in his eyes and waves back. He’s only a boy, just turned 32, with nothing in his pocket but an old Blackberry and a law degree from UCC. Not worth the paper it’s printed on. Forced across the water to hated Blighty like millions of Irishmen before them, the lads trump onwards to an uncertain future.

Life is tough for those forced to leave the Emerald Isle

At Collinstown Airport, a similar tale tugs on the heartstrings. Jack Kennedy-Cruikshank is slumped in the Departure Lounge, waiting for the next flight to Heathrow. He’s been in construction all his working life – six months as an architect’s assistant with Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy and Kennedy-Cruikshank, followed by almost a year as chief architect on the Dunnes Stores anchor store at the new CityWest Retail Park – yet now he must turn to the building sites of London, like billions of lonely Paddies in centuries gone by.

“There’s just no work in Ireland, like,” he says. “People are saying it’s like the coffin ships all over again and to honest I don’t think there’s too much difference between then and now. It’s whole communities broken up. Sure I can see young Aubrey Johnson over there in O’Neills Sandwiches, he was in Clongowes with me. I’d go over to him only I nobbed his bird after the Leaving and we haven’t really got on since. And my best mate, Ryan, he’d be here too, both of us together on the emigration road. He’s in New York though, his old man’s the ambassador to Singapore so it was no bother getting the visa, d’ya know what I’m saying? I know a guy who was in St Mark’s the same time as me and he got his MBA two years ago – he’s only had six weeks work since then. He was going round the pubs in South William Street giving out shots of Aftershock. Sure it’s a job, but it’s not a life.”

We leave this shattered city, with the bedraggled Celtic Tiger cowering behind the furniture, to Swinging London. In Waxy O’Connors in Soho, a couple of young Micks off the boats stare into their Carling shandies. Too embarrassed to ask for a pint of the black stuff, too ashamed to call themselves Young Irishmen. One of these sad creatures reflects on the hard times ahead.

“I literally have come over here with six grand in me pocket. And that’s it. That’s all I have in the world. I was out in Krystle before I left and I lost me banklink card, so the old man had to give to me in cash,” says Shaun Kilduff, another of Ireland’s spurned generation. “Me? I have a trade, I have two pairs of hands, I’m here to do an honest day’s work. If you’re a corporate accountant in Dublin these days, you haven’t got a pot to piss in. It’s just like the Famine all over again.”

They head off to try their luck with a couple of Essex bints in the corner, leaving the Irish Sentinel to ruminate on these desperate times. Oh, Charles Stewart Parnell, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Hans Christian Andersen … if you could see these young men now, forced from the crossroads and byroads of County Wicklow, of Old Foxrock, of Blackrock College and the UCD bar.

The Wild Geese have flown, and a nation weeps to see them go.