Jap and Git are two of the characters from the new movie Kings, based on Jimmy Murphy's play, Kings Of The Kilburn High Road.

They and four of their mates left Connemara in 1977 and took the boat to north London. Thirty years later, the first of them dies after falling under a train in the Underground. Everybody gathers to see the body of Jackie Flaherty off home, to Ireland, a place he couldn't return to when he was alive.

Jap and Git can't go back either. Ireland is no longer home. London never was and still isn't. As Git says at one stage, they are now of a different tribe, not Irish nor English, but Paddies.

Kings is one of the few works to deal with the generation of emigrants who left Ireland in the 1970s, bound for Britain's building sites.

Peter Woods' novel Hard Shoulder is another in which you can smell the concrete and the currents of stale beer from lives gone sour.

In many ways, the 1970s emigrants were the last generation with little going for them. By the time the great exodus of the 1980s came round, a large slice of those leaving were armed with an education. They were the Ryanair generation, the first to routinely fly back and forth, maintaining links with home.

The 1980s emigrants were also young enough to return here when the economy took off. Britain served as a port of call, a temporary refuge, until the pull of home beckoned.

Many who left in the decade before them were gone too long by the time the economy turned here. Jap Kavanagh and Git Miller are representative of the large swathes of displaced Gaels who sought refuge from loneliness in drink and would end up down a dead-end alley.

Kings is a reminder of how much better life is in this country today. We can put up with the bling, the coarseness, the vulgarity, but at least we're no longer sending young men of 20 off like cattle. The recent debate over Aer Lingus pulling out of Shannon highlighted the shift. The priority now is to continue bringing investment inwards, rather than exporting human resources.

The global wheel turns.

Paddy no longer has to be torn from his roots, and the Poles are the new Paddies.

They come here in their thousands, chasing the kind of decent life unattainable at home. And no more than the Irish immigrant of old, the Pole carries plenty of baggage and a taste for the sauce. Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway are their London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow . . . foreign cities offering work by day, and, not infrequently, oblivion by night.

Casualties from that tribe are already showing on the streets of our cities. Alice Leahy of the homeless agency Trust has spoken about the increasing number of eastern Europeans now lowered into the ranks of the homeless. It is deja vu all over again, lonely emigrants unequipped for the new life which was supposed to harbour their dreams.

Cheap travel and education indicate that the Poles won't suffer the same displacement the Irish did.

There are, however, other barriers. Language is one, but an even greater one is the propensity of many Poles to drink at home. At least Paddy could lose himself in the illusion of a nation on tour when he entered the watering holes of north London. The Pole in Ireland tends to take his bottle home, and exacerbate the disconnection from the society in which he works.

In years to come, when Poland reaches better times, they will look back on the casualties, who left in search of a better life in Ireland and, failing to find it, couldn't go home because of the shame.

Different nationality, different cities, nothing but the same old story.