The Romanians Jesus they’re getting all the houses says Joe Ryan the taxi

“The Romanians, Jesus, they’re getting all the houses,” says Joe Ryan, the taxi driver who takes me to Athenry from Galway airport, where I spot an eccentric notice issuing a stark warning about the Colorado beetle. “It may look like a ladybird in striped pyjamas, but it’s capable of destroying Irish potato crops and doing untold damage to the economy.”The wave of immigration, especially from Eastern Europe and the Third World, seems to be provoking the same alarm. “It’s easy to come over here and not have to work,” says Cormac Flannery, a punter in Brian Fahy’s bookmaker’s shop. “They get set up in the best of houses, and get washing-machines and everything The Russians, they’re getting plentiful And the blacks. Where are they from, now? Tell me some places from over there.”Nigeria? “That’s it Nigeria There’s a joke here about the black baby boxes When we were children the schools had black baby boxes… you know, you’d put a penny into it for the black babies and it would nod its head.

The joke now is that we didn’t expect so many black babies to come back and say thank you.” Flannery gives a huge chuckle: he doesn’t seem to notice that I don’t.According to Michael Melia, the Irish are overeducated, so the manual labouring jobs the Irish themselves did, most notably in the United States from the 1880s to the 1950s, are now being taken up, in Ireland, by immigrants. I am told about an abattoir in Gort that is staffed mainly by Brazilians. And about the racing trainer Tommy Stack, who has Russians working at his stables in Cashel, County Tipperary They are known as the Cashel Cossacks. “Sure, I met a Polish or Hungarian fella who could sing ‘The Fields of Athenry’ word perfect,” Cormac Flannery tells me, with another chuckle.”The Fields of Athenry”, incidentally, is about the Irish potato famine and oppression by the English. It is quite proper that such horrors should be recorded in song, although I am bound to confess that I find this one unappealingly maudlin. I have an Irish friend who sings when he is in his cups late at night, and whereas I make Danny Boy welcome, and am with him all the way when he first sets eyes on sweet Molly Malone, I use his visit to the low-lying fields of Athenry as my cue to go to bed.But increasingly it is a hard song to avoid. Where other lyrics about the old country once dominated every expatriate songfest, “The Fields of Athenry” – a version of which, by Tony McCoy and 10 other top jockeys, sold in its thousands at the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival last week, in aid of the Injured Jockeys Fund – seems to be bursting through on the rails.It also boomed out of Glasgow pubs last night as supporters of Celtic Football Club, who have adopted it as their anthem, converged for the Uefa Cup tie with Liverpool.

“I wish,” says Madelyn Brody, wistfully, “that everyone who sings the song could each give just one euro towards the preservation of the actual fields of Athenry.”For, did the barroom sentimentalists but know it, the lush fields that lead them to song (and me to bed) are, one by one, being concreted over. New houses keep springing up outside the marvellous medieval wall – 80 per cent of which still surrounds the bustling town – and Brody, the best-known and most indefatigable champion of Athenry’s 800-year-old heritage, is powerless to thwart what she calls the “cute hoors” – the duckers and divers whose mission is evidently to build without the slightest sensitivity towards the environment.”This is a unique town,” she says, “and anywhere else it would be cherished. But ghastly grain silos and pylons have been put up against the town wall, and executive homes right behind the 13th-century castle. I’m tearing my hair out.”The irony of what she says – that an object of Irish sentiment the world over is, back in Ireland, gradually being destroyed – is compounded by the irony of who she is. Madelyn Brody, married to Athenry’s veterinary surgeon Frank Brody, is another English immigrant; she grew up far from the green fields of County Galway, near not-so-green Clapham Junction.I meet her in the bar of the New Park Hotel. She has kindly assembled a group of Brits, all of whom came to Athenry (coincidentally the only town outside Dublin to rise against the British in 1916) in search of a better life. To a greater or lesser extent they all found it, although in some cases the enchantment seems to be wearing off.”I wouldn’t move here now,” says Richard Jakeman, a farmer from Suffolk who moved to Athenry eight years ago “It’s getting more like England every day.