“We had to leave Ireland back in the early 1980s, following an incident at the circus. My brother Stevie dared me to put on a girl’s wig, take off my trousers and run up to a hippo with a stick in my hand. I’d not done anything quite that zany before, but I thought what the hell. Before we knew it, we were all over the news, and the animal welfare people were calling for me to be put in a military school and to be made do a school project about hippos. I wouldn’t have minded that, but, my folks decided it’d be better all round if we just emigrated’. – Cheryl (27), Lucan, County Dublin, now Missouri.