Aglona, the village the Latvians loved and left

Deserted villages with nobody left but the aged and the very young. It is the classic image of countries swept clear by emigration.

But it is not an image from the nineteenth century, after everyone fled for the New World across the Atlantic: it is the reality right now, in many of the new member states.

Even though the borders are being kept firmly sealed in most of the EU, the numbers moving from Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to the near West - of Ireland and Britain - have been huge.

The latest figures for Ireland show that one in ten of the workforce is now an immigrant - an ironic statistic for a country which until ten years ago was notorious for its own emigration rate. Officially, at least 30,000 of these come from Latvia and many more come from Poland and Lithuania.

Unofficially, there are estimates that from Latvia alone, the true figure could be as high as 100,000.

Travelling to one village in Latvia evoked strong folk memories, with painful tales of separated families in every home.

Aglona lies about 250km south of the capital Riga. Once famous in Latvia for its basilica, where Pope John Paul II came to celebrate mass in 1993, the village now stands as a symbol for the huge wave of emigration that is tearing families apart. Nowadays, only the old people and the small children are left behind.

Aglona belongs to the poorest region in the Baltic country, finally reborn after 50 years of Soviet oppression and now finding its feet inside the EU.

Once home to more than 2,700 people, there are now around 1,500 left, with almost no one, apart from teachers, still in paid employment. For many of the rest, incomes can be pitifully low, with almost no social welfare system - nothing but dismal pensions and jobs paying a pittance.

There was no choice when the alternative was Irish and British pay rates. Even their minimum wages bring in more than ten times what can be earned locally. While the migration debate grows in Ireland, it was impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about the country in Aglona.

So many people, young and old, had been to Ireland on holiday that they talked about it with the kind of familiarity many Irish people often use when mentioning places like Boston or New York. There was also the open pain of families living apart.

Among many local families, there was a common theme from Ireland�s own social history - the almost total reliance on the remittances coming home. A large proportion of the EUR 600 million earned in Ireland, with something similar from the UK, is now being sent home to villages such as Aglona.

In one household, I met two young girls, aged 14 and 8, who are being reared by their aunt and her husband. The family already has two children and a blind grandfather to mind too.

"My parents went because they didn�t have a choice, they had no money, no job, so they had to go," said Kristine Pitkevica.

When her young sister, Sindija, is asked if she misses her parents, she says nothing, but simply clutches her sister and hides her head.

They have twice been to Mullingar, in the middle of Ireland, where their father drives a lorry and their mother works with a firm assembling window blinds.

After spending three months there for two summers in a row, the two girls can understand some English, but have no interest in following their parents westwards.

"I want to finish school here, because education standards are better than in Ireland," says Kristine, who talks with her mother on the phone every day.

Others were just back from Ireland this week. Oligs Tibkovy, 24, returned for a holiday from Lusk, a town very near to Dublin.

He has lived just outside the city for two years and has just been reunited a few days earlier with his mother, Henriete, who he has not seen in two years.

She works in a market garden centre in the Jersey Islands.

When we arrive, there is tea, coffee and a big cake awaiting us - the kind of welcome that, in a more hospitable age, strangers once received in homes across Western Europe.

Oligs�s Dublin accent comes through very clearly, as he explains how he is happy working abroad, where he nets EUR 9 per hour on a potato farm. He shares a large house with other immigrants from Latvia and Poland and will be going back with Aer Lingus in a week - with no intention of returning home permanently anytime soon.

Nearby, in a multi-storey block more appropriate to a run-down urban area than a country village, lives Lidija.

Her son Vlad and his wife have been in Ireland for four and a half years, leaving her to take care of their young daughter, Evija, now 13.

Ansverina misses her son but simply feels there�s not much choice for them, except to work abroad.

Coming in from school, her granddaughter admits she misses her parents, but prefers to stay, rather than move to the middle of Ireland. The living room looks like a typical home anywhere, with a large TV and a Playstation, along with a shelf of video games.

When she grows up she wants to be a pediatrician, says Evija, because hospitals are struggling to keep qualified doctors. While most of the countries in �fortress Europe� stays closed to the majority of workers, these �older� member states are happy to fill specialised skills gaps, without a thought for the repercussions elsewhere.

Her grandmother is fighting back the tears as she talks of her family�s enforced divisions. "In every second family, there are one or two people in Ireland or England," she says.

Leaving the village, our vehicle is overtaken by a car with a Dublin registration plate, something that you almost never see in continental Europe.

• Conor Sweeney is the European editor of the Irish Independent for which he has been writing on migration issues.

Feature on labour migration of Latvian workers to Ireland since the accession of their country to the European Union in May 2004.