From behind the counter of the shop she runs just off Gort's main square, Mary Callanan has watched the town's transformation being played out through the private dramas of hundreds of Brazilian newcomers.
Every evening, they come here after work to use the payphones set specially at a certain rate for calls to Brazil. Callanan stocks Brazilian foods, keeps a Portuguese dictionary under the counter and has started taking language lessons at the local school.
Often she can tell if someone is a recent arrival by the length of the phone call, she says. "Usually it's dreadful really, because they're so upset. They would be openly crying there. They'd be on the phone, blowing kisses across the phone to the family and all this kind of thing.
"We're so close to them here - we're only standing a few feet away, so I've often cried myself looking at them."
Callanan reckons that Brazilians account for 75 per cent of her business: only for them the shop would be long gone. But her role is more than that of small-town shopkeeper.
Her shop, Early till Late, has become a social hub for the Brazilians, and Callanan herself has been known to double as an employment agent: if a builder is looking for a tiler at short notice, this is where he calls.
"I'd say 'just give me a minute and I'll tell you', and I'd ring a Brazilian lad I know who does tiling. Plastering, block-laying, building stone walls - all the same thing. It happens all the time. Sometimes you could get jobs for five or six people in one day."
The Brazilian community has done for Gort what it has done for Mary Callanan. In the early 1990s, the south Galway market town was sparsely populated and some of the shops on Georges Street were shutting their doors, not to reopen. Today it is one of the fastest growing towns in the west, with new housing estates rising at pace on its boundaries and a square filled with cafes, restaurants, beauty salons and estate agents.
Last year's census, details of which were published last month, put the number of Brazilians in Ireland at 4,720. The true figure could be more than four times higher.
Some 40 per cent of the houses in Gort are privately rented, mostly by Brazilians.
Every morning, several hundred Brazilians with packed lunches set off for the surrounding towns and villages, where they work mainly as builders, farm-hands and domestic workers. Though fewer than before, there is usually a group of men standing on the main square each day waiting for jobs from passing drivers.
There is almost universal agreement on the rejuvenating effect the Brazilians have had on the town, and most marvel at how easily the new arrivals have been incorporated into the community.
But there is concern about exploitation. One support worker estimates that only 10 per cent of Gort's Brazilians are comfortable in English, making it easier for unscrupulous employers to take advantage.
Stories abound of undocumented Brazilians being paid €40 a day for work they are reluctant to turn down.
"Exploitation is around language," says Frank Murray, a Portuguese-speaking Scot working in Gort for a community project run by NUI Galway. "If people speak the language well enough, they can make a deal with their employer, they can understand exactly what's going on, they can change employer if they want to, but if they don't have the language then they're scared to move and they put up with an awful lot."
Many of the Brazilians' problems bring to mind those of Irish emigrants in the United States. When Gardenia Cristina Gimenez's father died last year, for instance, she couldn't return to Brazil for his funeral because she didn't have a valid work permit.
"It's very hard when you have lost someone. I couldn't go home, because I had no money and if I went to Brazil at the time I couldn't come back to Ireland because I had no work permit," she says. When her mother came to visit her shortly afterwards, she was turned back by immigration officials at Dublin airport without an explanation.
Gort's low-skilled jobs market is saturated, and it is increasingly common for new arrivals, having taken out huge loans for a one-way plane ticket only to arrive with no English, no work permit and little local knowledge, to be forced into a swift return home. Gort's Brazilian Association is currently trying to raise funds to cover the cost of return flights for four such men.
A cafe owner tells of the middle-aged Brazilian man he saw sobbing on the square one morning last winter. He took the man inside and tried to make out his story.
The Brazilian was a skilled draughtsman in his early 60s, and though he managed to find a few days' work at €50 a day, the farmers would usually take on the younger men before him, he said. He was crying out of humiliation at the thought of his wife and family at home in Brazil, depending on him.
The cafeowner wished him well, but he hasn't seen him since.