"This was a very small plot of land. He was a tenant farmer, so it wasn't his. He didn't have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn't working; probably not enough to eat, couldn't sustain. So, he left and went to America, and here I am a couple of generations later."
"What's amazing to me is when you have that experience and you stand there, I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country. It takes an entire lifetime to go to a country where, often, people don't speak the language. They have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation; it's a whole lifetime that you're feeding into this process."
"I think I was overcome by the fact that there's a lot of sadness in that story, and in a lot of these stories. People leave not because they think, 'Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.' They leave because..."
Conan O'Brien traveled to Ireland to visit the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, a tenant farmer near the Galbally Mountains. Though the original structure no longer exists, a genealogist located the exact spot where his ancestor lived. O'Brien filmed the visit for his HBO Max series and expected to approach it humorously, but became unexpectedly emotional. His great-grandfather left Ireland due to poverty and inability to sustain himself as a tenant farmer, immigrating to America to build a better life for future generations. This experience transformed O'Brien's perspective on immigration, fostering deep empathy for those who leave their homelands out of necessity rather than desire for adventure, dedicating their entire lives to establishing foundations for their descendants.
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