Spectre of emigration returns to haunt the country once again

Last week, the latest "good news" statistics to emerge from Brussels revealed that the number of people leaving Ireland in search of "a better life" has increased at a rate which outstrips all other countries in the European Union. An incredible 40,000 people left these shores last year, and as we assess the impact on everything from dinner tables to hurling teamsheets, it's clear that Westmeath has taken a huge bite of that number. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has predicted that at this rate, at least 200,000 people may leave the country by 2015, if job opportunities do not improve. These are alarming numbers, and bring us back to the misery of the post-Famine era, or the doldrums of the 1930, '50s and '80s. Even more alarming is the fact that the government, and those tasked with advising government, have only begun to notice the pattern of people leaving the country for warmer, more positive climes; when in truth, emigration has been a reality for the past four or five years. Our rate of emigration, the EU's statistics office Eurostat tells us, is twice that of Lithuania's - a country which has been gutted of its brightest and best since the Nice Treaty was signed in 2004. Many of them, joined by Poles, Latvians and Estonians, went to Ireland from that year onwards. The arrivals numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and six years later, we have reached the extraordinary situation where not only were we the largest net recipient of immigrants, but now we are also the largest exporter of our own. Indeed, some of those who have left Ireland since 2008 are immigrants who are now returning to mainland Europe due to the lack of jobs. But nobody doubts that the vast majority of those fleeing are young Irish men and women, many of them university graduates. During the "Celtic Tiger" era, they did what society and their parents told them to do: they went to school, studied hard, and went through varying levels of expense and frugality to get through college - only to be told that there at the end of it all, there is nothing here for them. Undoubtedly many of them studied Arts in university, and English students will undoubtedly have come across the words of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man': "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow". It was unfair of Joyce to pin such an unfortunate description on the country itself, but it does ring true in some respects. At regular intervals since the Famine, Ireland's youngest and brightest have been forced away from these shores by the incompetence and self-preservation of a ruling class. In the 1840s, it was starvation. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, it was stifling protectionism. In the 1980s, it was the bungled economic policies of successive governments during the 1970s. Today it's bankers and developers, and as was the case before, we have placed our faith in another generation of politician who lacks the moral fortitude to stop this vicious circle; instead, we tolerate their spinning of the same old excuses and home truths, with the same ends. So while banks are bailed out to the tune of tens of billions, we struggle to find that extra million for a hospital; that extra ten grand to fix a footpath, and that little bit more needed to keep the guardians of our future here and ready to work. Mass starvation is about the only difference between the injustices of the Famine and those being dealt out today. In the Famine, many turned West and never looked back; let's hope that sooner rather than later, we can offer the emigrants of today an excuse to come home.