The word used today for voluntary emigration in Irish Gaelic is eisimirce, but it was not in use until the beginning of the 20th century. Up until then, and naturally during the Great Famine, the only word ever used was deoraí, meaning ‘exile’.34 Reluctant exile, or emigration, was not a new phenomenon in the 1840s, but the departure from home became the lot of thousands of poor Irish families every month, a forced path to escape misery or death, as described in Lone Shanakyle, named after the mass burial pit that served as a graveyard in Kilrush, Co. Clare

Available on DÉANTA’s album Whisper of a Secret, 1997