Breandán Mac Suibhne is a historian of modern Ireland at the University of Galway. His publications include The End of Outrage (Oxford, 2017), which was Irish Times Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year.  Mac Suibhne is one of the directors of Imirce, a project that makes thousands of Irish emigrant letters available through an online database. He is currently completing a book on the actual people on whom characters in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) are, more or less, based, and he is a member of an international team that has edited and annotated the correspondence (1798–1846) of the Moore family of Derry and Baltimore, Maryland, for publication by the Irish Manuscript Commission.

The great leave-takings from Ireland for North America constitute one of the largest movements of population in the modern era. In 1845–55 alone, some 2 million Irish people crossed the Atlantic, that is, almost a quarter of Ireland's 1845 population of 8.5 million. And another 4 million left for America by 1929. There were more Irish-born people living in New York in 1890 than in Dublin. In an illustrated talk, University of Galway historian Breandán Mac Suibhne gives an overview of changing patterns of emigration from Ireland, from the 1600s through the  late 1900s, and provides an update on the Imirce project that is making thousands of Irish emigrant letters publicly available through an online database.

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