Many imagine that all those who emigrated from Ireland were Irish-speaking tenant farmers, but of course this isn't so. Many were shopkeepers from towns, or tradespeople, or mid-sized farmers broken by the high taxes the Famine brought, or teachers or lawyers or doctors, or clergymen and -women, or theatricals, or artists, or journalists.

Plenty of the people who went to America already had class pretensions or class allegiances; research on emigration has also found that it was not the closed door that was the traditional image for years - many, many people went to Canada, the US, South America, Australia, England or Europe, did well and returned to Ireland with a bundle of relatively easily-won cash.

The "lace curtain Irish" are much more likely to have been the people of the smallish towns of Ireland, the kind of people who used to have the picture of the Sacred Heart and statues of the Virgin and the Child of Prague (or if Protestant, the statuette of King William riding his white horse, kept in the fanlight over the door).

It may be that *some* were those who were ambitious to climb the social scale by shedding their language and taking on that of the new country; but I suspect that most were those who brought their lace curtains with them, folded and lovingly scented with Sunlight Soap and special intentions.