Try travelling the entire country with special emphasis on Dublin.
Irish boys who worked in America didn’t represent anything of their country? That’s simply your opinion.
No, actually. They didn’t. Such people were most likely left-leaning and wanted to escape the then-conservative Church-influenced atmosphere, relocating to liberal and libertine enclaves such as NYC where they could exercise their proclivities without so much societal disapproval.
I spent most of my life in Ireland in Dublin, BTW. There were many trashy inner-city locations, and bad suburbs such as Ballyfermot, Ballymun, Blanchardstown, Finglas and Tallaght, but the majority of the city and county was not like that. Of course, that was four decades ago, when people even riding the bus home from work would perform the sign of the cross at every church building the bus passed.
PS. I left out Cabra and parts of Crumlin. But even those weren’t all bad back in the day.