He’s right, this angry old man in melting bronzer shouting in the July heat: Those of us who don’t like what’s going on in this country should get the hell out. “Go back,” as he said, to the “crime-infested places from which they came.” A fine idea.

For me, as with more than 30 million other Americans with my hyphenate, that’s tiny Ireland, the country once so infested with crime, famine, disease and assorted horrors of foreignness that its British overlords said a merciful God was doing a favour by killing off the starving masses.

So back I went to have a look. This, mind you, was just before president Donald Trump’s suggestion to his fellow citizens to get out. And also, generations after someone on my father’s side made the choice to flee for life itself, rather than fall into the cold Irish ground through the bottom of a reusable coffin.

What I found on that island where typhus once took entire families as they shivered on floors of mud, where, by one medical estimate, 50 per cent of the children in Dublin once died before their first birthday, is now a land of universal health care.

Health care for all residents: It’s still a surprise to someone from a nation where the number of uninsured Americans has gone up by 7 million under Trump. I had left a place where nearly 1 in 7 people are left to fend for themselves when sick, to a fully covered country, the norm in most of the industrialised world.

What I found in that place where barefooted, Gaelic-speaking hordes once could not read an English sign are colleges nearly free to its citizens – good colleges, at that. Imagine, a family not having to bankrupt itself to help a child off to a better life.

What I found is a republic where nearly 1 in 8 people were born abroad, nearly as high a percentage as the foreign-born population of the United States. The prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is himself a son of an Indian immigrant. His father was born in Mumbai, while his mother hails from County Waterford, the home also of my mother’s distant family.