They say that sporting talent is in the genes. Could it be that Harry Kane – the man who will captain England in next week’s World Cup – got his sporting ability from his great great grandfather, an agricultural labourer called Jim Flood who won an All-Ireland for Limerick in 1897 before dying of Spanish flu in 1918?

Kane’s grandmother, Theresa Fitzgerald, left rural Limerick for London in the 1950s, where she married Harry’s grandfather, Michael John Kane, who’d left Letterfrack, Co Galway, around the same time.

When he leads out the Three Lions for their first game against Croatia, Kane will be yet another member of the great Irish tribe leaving a mark on the country that took in their forefathers. If emigrant success is doing well in the new country, then Kane epitomises that dream.

In the 1950s, half a million people left this country with similar ambitions, the vast majority bound for England. Digging around in various censuses, it’s a delight to find the grandfathers and great grandfathers of today’s diaspora. For example, the census tells us that in 1926, a man called William Sweeney was living in Kilglass, Co Sligo. An agricultural labourer described as “not yet at work”, he would have been expected to work on the farm. It’s a long way to Wembley Stadium where his two great grandsons, Noel and Liam Gallagher, finished their record-breaking world tour last October.

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Looking back at the economic history of this country through the prism of the treasure trove that is the 1926 census, the main fact that emerges is the extraordinary movement of our ancestors – all those suitcases, mail boats, long goodbyes, letters home, Irish dances in Irish areas of........

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