COLIN: Ireland.

A small island on the edge of Europe, between the Old World and the New.

As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.

The sea has allowed us to leave and it also has allowed us to come back.

COLIN: The history of the Irish has long been a global one.

Ireland was as much of a classic colony, right from the beginning, as much as was India.

KENNY: Part of what it means to be Irish in that second half of the 19th century is emigration.

The Irish became kinds of Irish gauchos here in the Pampas.

RAY: Most of the immigrants that came here were working class men and women.

These are the people that made America.

HALL: First generation, they got by.

It's the second and third generation who start to climb up the social hierarchy.

COLIN: Today, over 80 million people worldwide say that they are Irish.

It's possible to joke about shamrockery and about, you know, turning rivers green.

But no other country in the world, I think, is able to achieve this.

I think people want that affiliation, because it's not a tainted one.

It's one of great storytelling, great literature, you know, what's not to love?

COLIN: From That Small Island: The Story Of The Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people who have truly left their mark on the world.

COLIN: The aftermath of the Great Famine.

One million people dead of hunger and disease.

One part of the suffering endured.

Up to double that number would leave this island, never to return.

In a population of 8.5 million approximately, over 1.1 million died.

Just over two million people left the country.

That's a reduction in the population by one third in ten years.

That's an event without parallel in contemporary European history.

CONNICK: The Dunbrody is a replica of an actual famine ship, and it was operated and owned by the Graves family from New Ross.

They operated a fleet of ships from New Ross and also from Liverpool.

Between 1848 and 1858, over 20,000 people travelled on the Graves family ships from the quayside here in New Ross.

There would have been upwards of 300 people on some of those vessels that would have travelled on a six to seven week journey across the Atlantic.

COLIN: Many of those who fled Ireland during these famine years made their way first to Liverpool.

In 1850 alone, over a quarter of a million arrived in the city.

MORRIS: We're here in the Albert Dock.

In front of us is the River Mersey, uh, which is where all of the Irish uh, would have arrived.

GALLAGHER: A lot of them ended up concentrated around the Docklands area.

And you can imagine a lot of very malnourished people, um, in very close proximity and close quarters to each other, enabled all sorts of diseases to thrive.

Typhoid and cholera were rife.

There are huge paupers graves with thousands of the Irish dead in Liverpool from that period.

People may have ended up on fever vessels, they may have ended up in the workhouse, or gone on to America or Australia.

But certainly, nobody was ever going home again.

FEMALE SINGER: ♪ A stór mo chroí, ♪ ♪ when you're far away, ♪ from the home you'll soon be leaving; ♪ ♪ For it's many's the time by night and by day, ♪ ♪ that your heart will be sorely grieving.

♪ KINEALY: The ones who got to North America felt they were lucky, but again, we have to temper that with the fact that we know maybe 10% of them died on-board ships.

We don't know precisely.

Uh, emigration was largely unregulated.

And then, as we know from the records in Grosse Île and Montreal, people died on arrival.

And people's lifespan, because of what they'd been through, was shortened.

So even though people fled from famine, they didn't totally escape from its consequences.

MCGAURAN: "They are dying on the rocks and on the beach where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals.

We buried 28 yesterday.

28 today.

Now, two hours past midnight, there are 30 dead we will bury tomorrow."

KINEALY: One of the myths of the Famine, which has been really tough to dispel, is the idea that the Famine was confined to the west of Ireland and it was only Catholics who died.

Absolute myth.

MCGOWAN: In Canada, a large number, maybe 20% of the 38,000 migrants who landed in Toronto in 1847 were Protestant.

Typhus knew no religion.

There were Protestants on those ships who died here as well as Catholics did.

COLIN: The United States would remain the preferred destination for the majority.

CASEY: Behind me is the waterfront that bordered the second and fourth wards of New York.

During the famine years, hundreds of thousands of Irish would have set their first foot in America here, on these East River docks.

KENNY: In the 1840s, the Irish accounted for 45% of all immigrants to the United States.

That means the Irish were very, very visible.

COLIN: Many Irish made their homes in lower Manhattan, an area then known as Five Points, today's Chinatown.

This is one of the more affordable neighbourhoods in the 19th century.

Outsiders saw it as noxious, dangerous, known for drinking, prostitution, gambling.

The people who lived here, to them, it was home.

They had a social life, they had a religious life, they had community.

It was an African-American district as well as an Irish district.

So you would have what they used to call amalgamation, mixing of races.

The neighbourhood where you get the most intermarriage is a little bit north of here, it's called Little Africa.

It was known as Laurens Street at the time.

And there you get a lot of Irish women marrying African-American men.

Why?

Because the African-American men were employed in the hotels and the big houses as waiters, up in a, in a gentrified section, and so, you know, they were reliable providers.

And you get, and you get children of those marriages raising families.

BROWNLEE: Irish and African-Americans lived together harmoniously in a number of communities.

And there was a lot of cultural interconnection.

In fact, in Five Points, they would hold, uh, these dance competitions between Irish step dancers and African Juba dancers.

The dancers would borrow techniques and routines from one another.

And these competitive competitions led to the creation of American tap dancing.

COLIN: These were also the days of... "No Irish need apply."

Native-born Americans, uh, saw the Irish wherever they looked, and they didn't... often like what they saw.

They objected to how they dressed, how they spoke, how they looked.

They were portrayed as having kind of simian characteristics, the way that African-Americans were portrayed.

Over time, as a result of competition for jobs and housing, uh, the relationship became more competitive.

And unfortunately, uh, that's the part of the history that has become the popular narrative.

CASEY: This is the major Catholic cemetery for the Archdiocese of New York in the second half of the 19th century.

It is arguably the largest Irish graveyard on the entire planet.

COLIN: The famine migrants who arrived in New York in these years were not coming into a vacuum.

Many Irish had arrived earlier in the century.

Many of them made good.

When thousands of their impoverished fellow Irish arrived, they did not turn their backs.

We have this image of the starving, poverty-stricken Irish, but that's only part of the story.

You also had wealthy, middle class, and upper class Catholics who were ready and able to help.

MALE SINGER: ♪ Well meself and a hundred more, ♪ ♪ to America sailed o'er... COLIN: The Irish arrived to a country that would soon be torn apart by political differences.

In 1861, the American Civil War broke out.

Irish-led regiments drawn from the East Coast cities where the majority of the Irish had settled were prominent on the side of the Union.

MALE SINGER: ♪ Says Paddy, ♪ you must go and fight for Lincoln.

♪ KENNY: The Irish, uh, fought on both sides.

Uh, those who were in the South, uh, fought with their, their state, as was the pattern throughout the Civil War.

COLIN: Gradually, in all the major urban areas where the Irish settled in numbers, the next generation began increasingly to move up in society.

Their political acumen was obvious from the beginning.

QUINLIN: The real way that that power change came about was through sheer numbers and organisation.

And in places like Boston and New York and Chicago, it was actually numbers of Irish immigrants who then registered to vote that really made the change.

The first Irish-born mayor of Boston was 1884, and after that, it was sort of no looking back.

COLIN: As well as crossing the Atlantic, some Irish set their sights on an even more distant location... Australia.

The first Irish to arrive had been sent as convicts.

In the decades following the famine, the Irish and others were now coming to Australia as free settlers.

HALL: It was a very male society.

They needed women.

So they came up with an idea that okay, we've got a whole lot of overcrowded workhouses in Ireland.

Let's get some of these surplus, uh, women in particular, to come to Australia.

So they went around deliberately selecting girls from the ages of 14 to 18, and they were to be servants and wives.

Because they were Irish, terrible things were said about them.

These were the lowest of the low, that they wouldn't know how to behave, and that they were going to contaminate the breeding stock.

COLIN: By 1900, the Irish made up almost a quarter of the white population of Australia.

They were a significant minority, but they remained under suspicion.

HALL: They came from a majority Catholic country to a vastly majority Protestant country.

So you have this sort of in-built situation where the English don't trust these Catholics, and they very much see them as lower than themselves on a racial hierarchy.

At the peak of the racial hierarchy are English Protestant men essentially.

The lowest of the low is certainly the Indigenous people, and then probably the Chinese, and next definitely the Irish and Irish Catholics.

The relationship between the Irish and the Indigenous people is complex.

Some small numbers were sympathetic and tried to make it better for Indigenous people.

And then there were many who were quite active in the dispossession as police, for removing children, or as part of the push to take land off the Indigenous people.

COLIN: Some of the Irish who had previously emigrated to various destinations, such as the West coast of America, or Australia, eventually travelled onto New Zealand.

These were people who had means and were able to establish themselves as business people and shopkeepers.

Others arrived by a different route.

SONJA: From 1845, we see a lot of British troops arriving in Auckland.

Now, we know that two-thirds of the rank-and-file British soldiers were Irish men.

So when the troops left in 1870, a large number of the Irish remained.

Not only did they remain, a lot of them actually married Maori women who they had initially been fighting against their tribes.

We now have large number of Maori people with, you know, Irish surnames.

COLIN: As well as their presence in the English-speaking world, the Irish were also found in almost every country in Latin America.

Many had risen to prominence, including Mayo-born William Brown, founder of the Argentinian Navy.

COLIN: Argentina would see a large and more systematic migration.

While some Irish stayed in the city of Buenos Aires, many moved to the grasslands known as the Pampas.

This is the land of the gauchos.

The Irish, they were very successful because they brought all their knowledge from home, how to work in the land, how to breed sheep, graze cattle, and also they were excellent horsemen.

So they became kinds of Irish-Argentines or Irish-Gauchos here in the Pampas.

Part of what it means to be Irish in that second half of the 19th century is emigration.

The floodgates that are opened by the Famine remain open throughout that period, and indeed they remain open throughout the 20th century.

COLIN: By the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was the largest in the world.

It was the empire on which the sun never set.

JACKSON: I think Ireland's relationship with Empire is fascinatingly ambiguous.

On the one hand, Ireland has direct experience of colonialism.

At the same time, Ireland contributes to Empire.

COLIN: The Irish were particularly visible in one of Britain's largest colonies... India.

Britain's presence in the subcontinent had begun in the days of the East India Company.

OHLMEYER: We're standing in Mumbai.

The amazing financial capital of India, but in the early modern period, it was called Bombay.

It was built by an Irishman called Gerald Aungier.

He was born in Ireland in the 1630s, and he became one of the most important early governors of Bombay.

His grandparents were very active colonists, planting Ireland, and it's that mindset that Aungier brought here.

The money that Gerald Aungier made here, he remitted a lot of that back to Dublin, to his brother, who was a property developer, and he developed the first suburb in Dublin, which, of course, is Aungier Street.

COLIN: As Britain tightens its grip on its largest colony, one area where the Irish had a noticeable presence was in the military, the hard and cruel fist of Empire.

OHLMEYER: The army was composed of a white officer class, including many members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, especially Ulstermen.

And then the rank-and-file were composed largely of Irish Catholics and Indian sepoys, who were basically native troops.

The Irish Catholics were never allowed to become officers.

They were treated as if they were indigenous.

COLIN: Irish people also served in the administration of the British Empire.

OHLMEYER: Increasingly, Irish middle-class Catholics joined the upper echelons of the Indian civil service.

We find that they are much more sympathetic.

They draw these parallels between what had happened in Ireland during the Great Famine and what was going on in India.

The kind of policies which destroyed the local economies, devastated the peoples of India and Ireland... famines were an expression of that.

Uh, there is a tendency to see Irish colonialists, particularly those who were policemen or viceroys of India, but were Irish in origin, as being complicit in Empire.

I think that doesn't really capture the reality, because these were merely individuals.

Ireland was as much of a classic colony, right from the beginning, as much as was India.

COLIN: Among those who followed in the wake of Empire were members of Irish religious orders.

MARY: We had priests and nuns in their hundreds and thousands who arrived along with imperial troops regrettably.

But not necessarily to do the work of Empire.

Loreto in India has been here since December 1841.

When we first began, we catered to the children of the soldiers, but we also had a free school, an orphanage, till a time came when we amalgamated schools, and we had the poor and the rich students with us.

But nobody knew who's poor, who's rich.

This has been Loreto tradition right from generations.

COLIN: Others of Irish origin would live their lives and give their lives as servants of Empire.

Dublin-born Brigadier-General John Nicholson was one of the most famous, or infamous.

BARTLETT: He's celebrated as a great Victorian hero.

But Nicholson can also be seen as a psychopathic killer.

And there's no two ways about it.

Psychopathic killers are not unknown in the British Empire.

Nicholson literally put the bodies of insurgents into the cannon and blasted their body parts out over the insurgents who had rebelled.

It's very hard to find words to describe just how utterly savage he was.

MARY: Empires are about greed, they're about power.

They are miserable phenomena.

And so, something about that also attracts that kind of person, methinks.

That person who is capable of being the bringer of misery to others, the lack of conscience.

Yet they are of us.

They are of us, but they're of us as empire.

COLIN: In Ireland in some quarters, there is a sense of growing hostility to the British Empire.

It is also even more apparent among the diaspora, the children and grandchildren of the Famine generation.

FERRITER: There are opportunities abroad for Irish people who emigrate and who are forced to emigrate, but there's also dislocation.

There's resentment.

There's festering sores about being displaced.

GEOGHEGAN: Many went to the United States with nothing but bitter memories of British rule in Ireland.

It was a disaster for Britain because what you were doing was creating a disaffected group of people who passed on that message of anger and resentment and bitterness down through the generations.

From the middle of the 19th century on, there was no Irish nationalist movement of any kind, moderate nationalist, militant nationalist, cultural nationalist, which didn't seek support from among the Irish of the diaspora, and which didn't get support.

COLIN: The support of the diaspora was crucial to one of the most critical events in modern Irish history, the Easter Rising of 1916.

[gunshot] FERRITER: There are those abroad who want to be a part of the Irish revolution.

They feel it very deeply.

Some of them travel back to Ireland.

COLIN: The Irish-Argentinian community would have one of their own present in the GPO in that fateful week.

His name was Eamon Bulfin.

COLIN: Following the execution of the leaders of 1916, nationalist opinion in Ireland and throughout the world turned in favour of the Irish rebels.

An election victory was followed by the outbreak of a guerrilla war where the Irish Republican Army, as they were now known, took on the might of the British Empire.

FERRITER: Even when Sinn Fein is conducting its political War of Independence from 1919, it prioritizes the idea of having Sinn Fein representatives abroad.

Eamon de Valera, for example, during the War of Independence, spends a year and a half in the United States.

COLIN: The War of Independence lasted from 1919 to 1921 and ended with the signing of a treaty with the British.

It would cause bitter division and lead to a civil war with some men and women who had fought side by side, now bitter foes.

It also confirmed the partition of the island.

26 counties became independent, while the remaining six counties remained part of the United Kingdom and would be known as Northern Ireland.

And a very substantial one-third nationalist and Catholic minority in Northern Ireland feel abandoned.

They feel that they're on the wrong side of the border.

There are also in the region of 70,000 Protestants who feel they're on the wrong side of the border because they're in Southern Ireland.

COLIN: The new independent Irish state was socially conservative.

It was also anxious to make its mark.

CRONIN: This new country has to announce itself somehow, not just as a new independent state, but also as a modern state and get it away from what they see as that kind of old rural isolation of how Ireland existed under British rule.

The Free State had arrived, it has its own flag, its own coins, its own banknotes, it has embassies opening up around the world.

It's there, it's a real thing.

COLIN: In 1939, the Second World War broke out.

Ireland would remain officially neutral.

However, many Irish participated in the Allied war effort.

A number of Irish volunteer for the war effort, be it in civilian jobs in the UK or by joining, uh, the British armed forces.

REDMOND: Irish women were particularly sought for because they were single for the most part, and could be redeployed from a munitions factory to a munitions factory as needs must.

Also, women's fingers being small, they were often desired to make munitions.

They were handy for that.

Hugh O'Flaherty is one of my great heroes.

Here's a man very much in the O'Connell tradition.

He's a Kerry man, like O'Connell.

MARY: Every time he helped, you know, a British soldier to escape, or helped a Jewish person to escape the clutches of evil Nazism in Rome, he put his life in danger.

His own life didn't matter to him as much as doing the right thing for others.

COLIN: After the end of the war, Ireland continued to look outward on the world stage.

Increasingly, it saw itself as an honest broker, on the side of the world's ex-colonies.

Ireland champions decolonization at the United Nations, being very, very blunt about the evils of the colonial masters and what they did to formerly subject peoples.

COLIN: Ireland would also appear on the world stage as UN peacekeepers in the Congo, a role that continues to this day in trouble spots worldwide.

From time immemorial, the sea had been the main highway, the only route out of Ireland.

But now, a means of transportation revolutionized travel into and out of the island.

KENNEDY: Aviation is an emerging technology.

It makes the divide between the Old World and the New so much smaller.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Once quiet fields in County Clare have become a world centre of air transport.

KENNEDY: A transatlantic air service is vital for post-war development of Ireland.

COLIN: Transatlantic flights by American airlines such as Pan Am had been leaving Shannon since 1945.

In 1958, the first Irish transatlantic flights took place, followed by the establishment of a national airline, Aer Lingus.

It was a long way from the famine ships that had carried previous generations to a new life in the United States.

KENNEDY: Ireland uses aviation as a way to project its image internationally.

It shows the diaspora in the United States that Ireland has modernized.

MALE ANNOUNCER: A new era is opening for the people of Connemara.

MALE ANNOUNCER 2: Quiet in studio now, please?

MALE ANNOUNCER 4: Cue camera one.

EAMON DE VALERA: I am privileged in being the first to address you on our new service, Teilifís Éireann.

COLIN: In countries that had seen large numbers of Irish emigrants, the next generation were increasingly making their way in society.

First generation were frequently not as successful.

They got by, but they put a lot of energy into their children.

And it's the second and third generation who start to climb up the social hierarchy.

And certainly by the beginning of the 20th century, you've got a quite a substantial Irish-Australian professional class.

There's doctors, there's lawyers, there's, they certainly did well.

Some historians talk about the Irish in Britain as operating in a kind of an in-between space.

COLIN: The Irish were now Britain's largest ethnic minority.

REDMOND: Many did choose to live together in certain areas, and visit dance halls that were known to be Irish.

MAN: The aim of the Irish club is simply to be a place where the Irish people can meet, for conversation, eating, drinking, lectures, debates.

This was just a very handy way to get jobs, find out about accommodation, maybe meet your marriage partner.

BOYLE: So many of the Irish who were coming to the United States were obviously from rural areas and agricultural backgrounds like my own family.

And then they settled primarily in big cities.

New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or St.

Louis.

FLYNN: Most of the immigrants that came here were working class men and women.

You know, my father was a dock worker, my wife's father was a dock worker, my mother would clean office buildings.

These are the people that made America and produced the children that became the citizens that led us to new heights.

BOYLE: Those Irish in succeeding generations came here and served in such big numbers in police force and firefighters and politics or other realms of public service.

I think that strengthens the attachment and why so many Irish Americans are patriotic about the United States.

COLIN: One of the most significant events for Irish America, and still hugely significant today, was the election of John F. Kennedy as the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.

PERRY: For Irish Americans, the election of JFK as president was a real conclusion point to being an immigrant community.

Getting an Irish Catholic, an Irish man into the Oval Office was a sign that you weren't knocking at the door as the underdog.

You know, those signs, "no Irish need apply," suddenly there was an Irish man, and not just an Irish man, a Catholic Irish man in the Oval Office.

COLIN: In June 1963, John F. Kennedy paid a triumphant visit to Ireland, returning to the town his great-grandparents had left during the Famine.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things, a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty.

COLIN: Five months after returning from his visit to Ireland, President John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas.

COLIN: The end of the turbulent decade of the 1960s had seen a world in turmoil, with widespread unrest from civil rights marchers and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the US, to student uprisings on the streets of Paris.

Ireland was not immune.

Young Catholic marchers took to the streets of the North to demand fair treatment and civil rights.

...question of nonviolence.

COLIN: They were met with batons... ...and later with bullets.

The resurgent IRA now faced the British Army on the streets of Northern Ireland.

Loyalist paramilitaries also targeted those they saw as enemies of Ulster.

This was the beginning of the Troubles.

JACKSON: The impact of the Troubles is of course absolutely huge and bloody.

And I think they have left still painful legacies in terms of human cost.

COLIN: The conflict would see horrific atrocities in Northern Ireland.

Some also occurred south of the border.

The Troubles would also cross the Irish Sea, and continued to haunt Britain and Ireland until the peace process and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

MALE REPORTER: After two years of talks, a truly momentous agreement.

Even with all its faults, the most successful peace process anywhere in the world of the last half century is the Northern Ireland peace process.

I want to honour those whose courage and vision have brought us to this point.

It would not have happened though without the American dimension.

COLIN: Ireland's relationship to the world has seen many changes, but is one that still draws on our history.

These changes can be seen clearly as Irish people's historic role as missionaries has been transformed.

MARY: We're drawing on an ethic that we have developed out of our history and out of our past.

KEVIN O SULLIVAN: I think the, the memory of the Famine has always been used to articulate Ireland's relationship with, with Africa, and actually with the Global South more broadly.

I mean, if we go back to the foundation of Gorta, that word is deliberately chosen because it, it says famine and it creates that Irish connection.

AULD: I would say what draws young Irish people to work in the development space it would be Ireland's reputation.

Irish are known I suppose for all the missionary work we would have done over the years.

Ireland sent me here through the Irish UNV volunteer programme.

I've tried to put female entrepreneurs here in touch with Irish businesses in the same sector so they can learn from each other.

I think the concept is because we come from a small island, Ireland is trying to see how we can best support other islands around the world.

POWER: If you look at Ireland's population size, the assistance that it is offering proportionally, it just goes way beyond, you know, most developed countries.

I would love it if there could be this pride in the extent to which Ireland is punching so far above its weight in making a difference internationally.

COLIN: Increasingly, the face of our diaspora is changing, as more diverse groups discover their Irish connections.

GREY: I've interviewed a lot of Irish Americans, and some of them are 100% Irish or they, you know, four grandparents from Ireland, et cetera, et cetera.

But most Irish Americans are a bit German or a bit Italian, or they could be Jewish, or they're part African-American.

We're more and more diversifying our opinions of what it means to be Irish and American.

BROWNLEE: Almost 40% of African-Americans have some Irish ancestry.

So the mission of the African-American Irish Diaspora Network is to forge relationships between African-Americans and Ireland based on shared heritage and culture, so that we can work together to overcome the polarization that we see occurring in so much of our society today.

COLIN: The attachment between the Irish at home and the Irish of the diaspora can be seen at its clearest in a place that acts as the unique spiritual and emotional home of Irish sport, Croke Park on an All-Ireland final day.

For those people who are our diaspora, who left this country because of war and famine and where your ancestors had to leave it.

We are thinking of you today as you watch us.

You are in Croke Park today, if not in body, but in spirit, and we thank the countries who took you in and gave you jobs and allowed you to make a new name for yourselves with our native games.

[crowd cheering] COLIN: The Irish diaspora today is far-flung, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and all points between.

Some of these diasporas continue to be replenished.

Others are historic, established over 100 years ago, but they still retain a pride in their Irish heritage.

COLIN: The Irish also left a legacy in the Caribbean.

FARMER: You've just got to open a phone book, look at the names, and there they are.

But beyond that, you've just got to listen to some of us speak.

In Barbados, depending on where you are on island, the lilt of how we speak does sound Irish, whether it's from County Cork or somewhere closer to the coastline.

So that's the legacy.

But beyond that, our love of poetry, the rather wry way in which we see the world, and the resilience.

And that comes from both sides, whether Africa or Europe, or in some cases directly Ireland.

MALE SINGER: ♪ How sweet is to roam.

♪ ♪ By the sunny Suir stream.

COLIN: Further north, on the coast of Newfoundland, the speech patterns of the Irish can still be heard today.

♪ With you, lovely Molly, The rose of Mooncoin.

♪ There's so much Irish up here that they call, they changed the name of the road to the Irish Loop.

We've been told that the bulk of the Irish Newfoundlanders that came here all came from 30 miles of Waterford city.

Our people came over here from New Ross, County Wexford in 1827.

We go to Ireland on trips.

People say, where you from?

And I, we'd say we're from Canada.

"Come on b'y, you're not from Canada, for the love of Moses.

Swear you're from out the road," that's what they say to us.

I said, no, swear to God, we're from Canada.

[crowd cheering] COLIN: The Irish and their descendants are still present in many places in the world.

But the Famine Irish in particular retain a haunting presence on the streets of New York.

It was conceived as a small patch of Ireland created for the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine.

COLIN: Ireland's footprint on the world stage is evident.

But above all, Ireland's soft power is most often seen on St.

Patrick's Day.

On the 17th of March, a large portion of the world turns green.

Happy St.

Patrick's Day.

[crowd cheering] It's possible to joke about shamrockery and about, you know, turning rivers green.

But no other country in the world, I think, is able to achieve this.

ANNOUNCER: Tokyo's most chic and busiest shopping thoroughfare closes to traffic just one day of the year.

MARY: I remember standing in Omotesando Street in the company of a number of ambassadors.

And one of them said to me, we went to ask, could we have the street closed down for our national day?

And we were told no.

She said, how come?

And she said the answer from a very puzzled Japanese official was, yeah, that's, that's for, that's for the Irish.

All of this, from Capitol Hill down to the White House, is taken over by a nationality for a day, and that's what happens, uh, around Saint Patrick's Day.

That's an incredible level of influence for one small country to have.

POWER: I think part of the connection is just never losing the nostalgia, you know, the music, the, the longing.

I mean, that's part of the identity is the longing.

SINGER: (SINGING IN GAELIC) COLIN: Since joining the EU in 1973, the Irish have also rekindled their long-rooted connection with mainland Europe.

KENNEDY: Being an island off the coast of Europe is not a barrier to Europe.

The Irish have always been a people who broaden out, who travel, who trade.

That is part of us.

COLIN: Today, roughly half a million people of Irish birth live on the continent of Europe.

The Irish continue to be a global people.

Australia and Southeast Asia offer young Irish business people and professionals new opportunities.

WALSH: There's a lot of work being done with Irish businesses, both here in Australia and over in New Zealand too, and links to, to Asia and Southeast Asia through Singapore.

MCGLYNN: 12 years ago, I moved to Singapore.

I got the job as a project manager to build the national stadium for Singapore.

It's a 55,000-seater stadium.

It looks after, hosts the Singapore national team.

And it was my first introduction to Singapore.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Rasheedat Adeleke has taken Ireland up to first.

It is Ireland for gold.

What an upset, what a surprise.

COLIN: Today, the Irish enjoy global success.

FEMALE: It's great to see that from a small island like Ireland, you can come from there and go to the Olympics.

COLIN: Displaying the flexibility and the determination that are part of the Irish story since the very beginning.

[crowd cheering] TUATHAIGH: The opening decades of the 21st century have seen quite extraordinary and accelerating changes take place in Irish society.

But it's not just the growth in the population, but its increasing diversity.

I'm going to cry.

It's feeling that I cannot explain.

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.

I feel at home here.

I worked here, schooled here and it's a country I want to be part of.

Culturally, such a small country has given so much to the world.

ANNOUNCER: 20,000 people have come here tonight to see U2.

Would you welcome Sinéad O'Connor.

Thin Lizzy, ladies and gentlemen.

The Cranberries.

POWER: I think people want that affiliation, um, because it's not a tainted one.

It's one of great storytelling, great literature, you know, what's not to love?

TUATHAIGH: I would hope that Irish society in 20 years' time will continue to be in a creative debate.

What Irish means will not have a single answer.

What is important is that it continues to be an abiding question.

COLIN: The story of the Irish has its highs and lows.

It is the story of a people rooted in Ireland, but at home in the world.

A story that can and should give us hope in a world of fear and uncertainty.

Ultimately, it is a story of the triumph of the human spirit.

[closing music] [closing music continues]