need and, in one bright spot, Massgoers have been responding very generously to fund- raising appeals. On the eve of polling day, the Irish hierar-


chy’s Council for Justice and Peace issued a document called “From Crisis to Hope: Working to Achieve the Common Good”, which dealt mainly with the economy and warned against spending cuts that would affect the poor disproportionately. It even warned of violence on the streets if the reces- sion bites yet more deeply than it has to date. Indeed, the absence of any violence to date – bar a few scuffles – has surprised many observers. Given the depth of the recession, they wonder why the Irish have not been more like the Greeks. How does one explain this? One reason is that there isn’t really a tradition of mass street protests in Ireland. A second reason is that the Irish took out their anger on Fianna Fáil. A third is that alongside the anger there is a great deal of fatalism: protests seem largely futile because the Irish believe their fate is no longer in their hands. Instead, the IMF and the EU have been calling the shots. With Ireland’s debts so vast, the country has been frozen out of the bond markets and has had to depend on the IMF and EU to lend money. But it is dawning on a growing number of people that the IMF and, more especially, the EU have not treated Ireland very fairly.


exorbitant interest rate of 5.8 per cent. But more importantly, the bail- out, Ireland’s rescue package, is aimed just as much at the banks in Germany, France, Britain and other EU countries as it is aimed at Ireland and the Irish banks, for they invested heavily in Ireland during the boom, lending Irish banks tens of billions of euros. If the Irish default, it will have a big knock- on effect in those banks, the so-called “contagion effect”. Irish taxpayers are now beginning to won- der why it is they are being asked to protect not just their own banks, but foreign banks as well, and are having to pay for the short- sightedness and greed of French, German or British bankers. Ireland and the EU generally have still not reached their economic endgame. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and maybe later Italy and Belgium, have so much debt that defaults seem almost inevitable with stark conse- quences for the euro. The Germans and the French are going to have to decide to pay for the rescue of the euro or else plunge everyone into an even deeper economic crisis. No one knows what is going to happen. In the end, the election of a new Irish


F


Government will be seen as a very minor chapter, a footnote really, in a much bigger drama that is by no means fully played out. Irish voters have many bumpy days ahead yet, even if they did have the satisfaction of punishing Fianna Fáil.


■David Quinn is a former editor of The Irish Catholicand a commentator on Irish affairs.


or a start, the EU is charging a rather


Exodus begins


There was a time when Irish emigration seemed to have ended. But a new generation is leaving home, says Rory Fitzgerald


cattle, be brought up for export.” Yet in 2011, Ireland looks set to lose another generation to emigration as economic devastation forces thousands to leave every month. During the Celtic Tiger years, Ireland’s


I


biggest migration problem was a novel one for the country: mass immigration. In 2007, 12 per cent of the Irish population were immigrants and Ireland was per capita the wealthiest nation in the European Union, bar Luxembourg. Since then it has experienced a devastating economic collapse, the worst in the developed world. With unemployment now approaching 14 per cent, Ireland is once again seeing some of the brightest and the best leave for elsewhere. A leading Irish think tank, the Economic and Social Research Institute, estimates that 100,000 people will emigrate over the next two years. That amounts to 1,000 a week, or about 2 per cent of the total population. This would be the equivalent of the United Kingdom losing 1.5 million people in a couple of years. Ireland has experienced many waves of


emigration in the past. The most devastating was that which followed the Great Famine in the 1840s when more than a million fled; but there have been many others since. In the 1950s, around 330,000 people left, and the 1980s severe recession saw an exodus of some 200,000 people. In the past, Ireland’s unskilled poor were usually the ones who left to seek work abroad. The current generation of emigrants is different. An astonishing 63 per cent of new graduates are considering emigration, according to research by Innovo Training and Development and the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin. The survey found that the most sought-after destinations are Canada (30.3 per cent), Australia (28.6 per cent) and New Zealand (13.4 per cent). However, given its proximity and close cultural ties, Britain still remains the favoured option for many considering emigration. Its NHS has become a particularly attractive option for many Irish health-care workers, especially since the implementation of a recruitment freeze across the Irish health system. Audrey (25), a midwife trained in Cork,


is typical of those leaving. She is off to Birmingham next month: “I qualified last year and, because of the recruitment ban, there’s no work here. The sickening thing is that there’s a dire shortage of midwives


n 1934, the Irish Republic’s founding father, Eamon De Valera, proclaimed: “No longer shall our children, like our


as more babies than ever are being born.” The building trades were the hardest hit


as Ireland’s property bubble burst, leaving half-finished housing estates all across the country. Michael (44), a self-employed carpenter from Waterford, says: “A couple of years ago I was turning down work. Now there’s nothing. Time was I couldn’t spend the money fast enough. Now I’m still owed money by three builders who’ve gone broke. So I’m off to London as soon as I’ve rented out the house. It’s either that or the dole. My brother’s been there since Christmas and he has work already.” Ireland’s recent economic collapse has


sometimes been described as a “middle-class recession”, due to the high numbers of architects, lawyers, accountants and engineers out of work. “James” (36) is a solicitor who has been out of work since mid-2008. As the Irish property market collapsed, so did the need for conveyancing solicitors. He and his partner, a part-time architect, have two children under four. “James” confides that their mortgage is in arrears and that they regularly have to ask relatives for money just to buy groceries. “We try to make the most of it. It’s great


to have so much time with the kids, but it’s not easy. I never imagined we would be in this situation. I’m studying for the New York bar at the moment, but we’re never going to be able to sell our house,” said “James”.


It is now increasingly common for the family breadwinner to “emigrate” from Monday to Friday. Garry (29) from Cork has been working with a civil engineering firm in Wales for almost two years, yet his young family remains in Cork. He said: “I take the ferry home to Rosslare after work every Friday night – that’s four hours – and then it’s a three-hour drive home. It’s worth it to see them. It’s a depressing situation, but what can I do? I’ve no choice. There’s no work here.” The departure of so many energetic young people has already depleted rural communities across Ireland. Monivea’s rugby club in County Galway has lost almost half its players, while Gaelic football clubs throughout the country are similarly lifeless. Meanwhile, Gaelic football clubs in Sydney, Manchester and the Bronx are thriving. It seems history is repeating itself as the


flower of Irish youth swells the great cities of the world, and their own home villages grow eerily quiet in their absence.


■Rory Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist. 12 March 2011 | THE TABLET | 13


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