Official Ireland has had a mean and ambivalent attitude towards the social and physical welfare of the Irish abroad. Greater prosperity in the 1990s led to a change of attitude towards them - more of a celebration of their achievements and diversity.
This culminated in a new constitutional commitment arising from the Belfast Agreement to recognise the Irish abroad as part of the Irish nation. But the State has been extraordinarily slow to accept any concrete welfare commitment.
RTÉ's Prime Time documentary, "Ireland's Forgotten Generation", which described the plight of elderly Irish people in England, admirably highlighted these attitudes.
They still reflect traditional attitudes to emigration. It was regarded as a necessary social evil by many of those who remained in Ireland, given the lack of employment opportunity here. But there remained a feeling of superiority towards those who left - despite the fact that the £3.5 billion remittances sent back were the equivalent in the 1950s and 1960s of the structural and cohesion funds from Europe which sustained communities and social development in the next generation.
In the revaluation of migration that came with greater prosperity there was a tendency to celebrate the success stories, notably in the United States but also in Britain, and to overlook the continuing hardship and exploitation suffered by less fortunate emigrants. Of the estimated three million Irish citizens abroad, some 1.2 million were born here, about 30 per cent of the present population.
Many of them have settled happily in England and fill out the huge human flow between these two islands every year. But a substantial minority was left stranded in sub-contracting jobs, living singly in bed-sitters and as they get older much less able to cope. Their distinctive cultural and social needs are relatively invisible in an increasingly multicultural society and require sensitive and targeted care.
This television programme focused on the Government's failure to respond adequately to the proposals made by the expert task force on policy towards such people last year.
While more funding has been given to the Dion committee in Britain for its work with them, it falls far short of the €18 million annual sum the task force recommended for outreach workers. Public pressure can help narrow that gap. It should come in support of a wider commitment to set up an Agency for the Irish Abroad - sited, as Mr Eoin Ryan TD has argued imaginatively - along with a dedicated museum on the subject in the Custom House in Dublin.