Long Island

Come on man, visit your Long Island Historical Society. During the 1950s, Suffolk County was mostly farmland.

The movie makes it seem as if only the women left Ireland, but that was definitely not the case. This is basically the express version of the larger story, without reviewing hundreds of years of Irish history:

Post war Ireland in the late '40's was still an an agrarian economy that was looking at the need to re-absorb as many as a quarter of a million citizens who had been either members of the British armed forces or war workers during hostilities. Ireland had never been industrialized during its days as part of the UK (the last stage of the split had happened in 1937), had been officially neutral during the war; its economy was in no condition to accept back as much as 8% of its 3 million pre-war population.

As a result, many Irish men stayed in England, and some who had stayed at home during the war migrated to the UK after the war to work in reconstruction efforts. My uncle, one of my mother's brothers, spent several years in London after the war when he was in his early twenties. He did so even though as the oldest male child, he was to inherit the family farm, because the money was good and my grandfather could still manage affairs back home. A number of Irish men also migrated to the US after the war, when movement became freer in general, and the American economy was booming.

In addition to these conditions, remember that it was still the late '40's and early '50's, when women were expected to marry. But there were few available men for Irish women to marry, and no jobs to be had. My mother was one of ten siblings who survived to adulthood (another brother died at age ten). My mom and her four sisters all emigrated to the US, with her oldest sister coming here in 1947 at age 23, my mother arriving here in 1950 with her next older sister (my mother turned 18 on the ship on the way over here - her sister was 19). My mother's next younger sister arrived in 1951, also turning 18 on the ship on the way, and her youngest sister migrated in 1960 - this time by plane - shortly after she turned 18. Three of the sisters married Irish-American men (my father included in that group), and two married Irish immigrants.

Of my mother's five brothers, the oldest inherited the farm (and still runs it to this day, at age 90), the next oldest spent 30 years in the Irish Army, another contracted polio in his teens and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The other two brothers emigrated to the US also. I remember one of my uncles saying "We all loved Ireland, and it was home to us, but there were no jobs..." As the saying went back when I was a kid in the early '60's, the second largest Irish city population after Dublin was New York. Some people said it WAS New York, and Dublin was second - that's how many Irish were here.

The "Celtic Tiger" Irish economy that you read about is something that has evolved more recently, with Ireland's full membership in the EU. For many years before that, the Irish economy was fairly tepid, even at its best.

P.S. - To underscore what Ireland was back in the late '40's/early '50's:
My mother brought my younger brother and and me to Ireland in 1958 when we were small kids to meet and spend time with the family she'd left behind. My grandparents were living on the small farm in the west of Ireland where my mother and her siblings grew up. They lived in a cottage with a thatched roof, no central heat, and no indoor plumbing. They had recently gotten electricity, which allowed them to light a few light bulbs and listen to the radio (there was only one radio station). There was no refrigerator - milk was whole milk, fresh as could be - straight from the cow a few minutes earlier. Warm...cow body temperature, or maybe a little cooler...ugggh. No car, either - my grandfather had a horse.

That thatched cottage housed my grandparents, my grandmother's never-married brother, my mother's brother who was to inherit the farm, his wife, his wife's mother, my mother's brother with polio and my mother's youngest sister, who was only 16 at the time, in 1958. A lot of people in a small space. And none of all of this was unusual in the area my mother was from - most everyone lived that way.