During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday ahead of his gig hosting the Academy Awards, Conan O’Brien shared how a recent trip to Ireland and the story of his great-grandfather gave him a new perspective on immigration.
“I went back to Ireland and I [saw] a great genealogist who said, ‘I found where your great-grandfather’s home was,’ O’Brien recalled. “The home is gone, but he found the little spot where he lived, near the Galbally Mountains. He said, ‘I’ll go there and show it to you,’ and I said, ‘We’ll do it on camera.’
O’Brien film the visit as part of his HBO Max travel series Conan O’Brien Must Go. “I was expecting to have these jokes loaded up; we had props and funny things we were going to do,” he explained. “But I got there, and I did not expect this because I’m not someone who wears my emotions on my sleeve, but I got emotional. It was very powerful.
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“This was a very small plot of land,” O’Brien continued. “He was a tenant farmer, so it wasn’t his. He didn’t have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn’t working; probably not enough to eat, couldn’t sustain. So, he left and went to America, and here I am a couple of generations later.”
Reflecting on the trip, O’Brien remarked: “What’s amazing to me is when you have that experience and you stand there, I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country. It takes an entire lifetime to go to a country where, often, people don’t speak the language. They have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation; it’s a whole lifetime that you’re feeding into this process.”
“I was just thinking about this guy, whom I’ll never meet, who had to do that,” he added. “I think I was overcome by the fact that there’s a lot of sadness in that story, and in a lot of these stories. People leave not because they think, ‘Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.’ They leave because they have to.”