Back in the early 2000s, I joined the staff of the Cricklewood Homeless Concern in an overnight sleepout. The CHC, as it was then known, was a charity that had dedicated itself since 1983 to looking after, mostly, elderly and homeless Irish men.
These men had arrived in London, decades earlier, lured by the promise of work in postwar reconstruction. In their later life, many had fallen through the social and economic cracks after years of unofficial employment ‘on the lump’ – the system that paid construction workers in cash, ‘off the books’, and as a result, no pension provision or social welfare payments were ever made on their behalf.
Our sleepout was to protest against the Catholic Church’s plans to close the CHC hostel and use the church-owned site for more profitable purposes. We positioned ourselves, along with our cardboard ‘mattresses’ and our sleeping bags, on a street close to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s residence, for maximum effect. There is a happy ending to that story: the many and varied protests and objections to the sale of the site were successful and a brand-new hostel was built, opening in 2004, which now operates under the name of Ashford Place.
Run by specialist staff as well as volunteers, the hostel offers not just housing support to those clients who need it, but also keeps a focus on social inclusion, health, well-being and community action. Ashford Place is still thriving today.
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In 2008, some five years after the first edition of An Unconsidered People was published, I made a return visit to Kilburn and Cricklewood, to Ashford Place and to the Crown on Cricklewood Broadway.
The pub – namechecked by the Dubliners in the song McAlpine’s Fusiliers – had played a significant role in the hiring of Irish day-labourers throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It closed in 2000 and reopened in 2003 as a luxury hotel.
Once the place where Irish sub-contractors had gathered in their vans to select whatever number of construction workers they needed for that day, the Crown had now been transformed into a 145-room Moran Hotel, complete with upmarket bar and dining facilities.
Even in 2008, it was clear that the demographic of the entire area was changing radically. The previously Irish shop fronts and cafes now had names from Romania, Poland, Afghanistan and the Philippines. Halal meat was on offer; the fruit and vegetables in slanting displays along the pavements were considerably more exotic than carrots and turnips. The Irish had moved on: the next immigrant families had moved in, in search of better lives, just as those before them had done. For a time, the Crown had continued to be the collection point for casual labourers, carrying on the long-established Irish tradition. But this time, it was construction workers from Eastern Europe who endured, on a daily basis, the desperation and ritual humiliation of random selection by their subbies.
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When I conducted the dozens of face-to-face interviews that formed the basis of An Unconsidered People, I did so because I wanted to capture the personal stories of as many people as possible, before the texture of their emigrant and immigrant lives in the 1950s was lost to us for good. I recorded their voices and listened to them over and over again: often finding as much insight in their hesitancies and their ellipses as I did in the words themselves. Roslyn Oades remarks that ‘the quality of an individual voice [is] as unique as an individual’s fingerprint.’
The areas of Kilburn and Cricklewood where I based my research were known as ‘another Irish county’, such were the numbers of Irish who settled there in the fifties. There is a well-known mantra, quoted by almost everyone I met: from Euston Station to Kilburn is as far as you can walk while carrying a suitcase.
The Commission on Emigration observed that leaving Ireland during the 1950s became ‘a part of the generally accepted pattern of life’. Estimates differ, but between 400,000 and 500,000 people are known to have left this country during those 10 years, in search of a better, or even a different, kind of life. Ireland was the only country in Europe, apart from East Germany, whose population declined in the 1950s.
The people I interviewed about their experiences of that decade were all generous with their time. We met at the end of the 1990s and our meetings continued into the early years of the new century. We would meet in their homes, or in neutral venues, or in Irish clubs. I drank a lot of tea. I said little and listened a lot. I was conscious that I was asking people, who were very often elderly, to recall events and feelings of some 40 or 50 years earlier. I became acutely aware of the power of reminiscence, of what Sarah O’Brien calls ‘memories in flight’: that moment when relating past experiences for the benefit of an attentive listener becomes highly charged. The narrator is not just remembering events, or narrating them in chronological order – rather, s/he comes close to experiencing them all over again.
Individuals’ memories differ, of course, and so do the meanings they attach to them. The moment of departure from the homeplace for one unwilling emigrant is very different from the departure of another who is bent on seeking adventure, or escaping the poverty of 1950s rural Ireland, or breaking free of the rigid economic, social and sexual norms and expectations of a deprived and conservative community.
While delving into statistics and economics can give us a clear picture of the push and pull factors of emigration, of the numbers of people leaving and of their destinations and their reasons for going, those disciplines cannot touch, in the ways that oral history can, the emotional and psychological impact of high levels of emigration on the family, on the community, as well as on the individual emigrants themselves.
I have no reason to believe that the many and varied personal challenges of emigration for those who left Ireland in the subsequent decades – and for those who remained behind – were any less painful, particularly for the individuals who emigrated due to economic or other difficulties.
One thing that was different, though, was the level of education attained by those who left in more recent decades. In the 1950s, those who went to the large urban centres in Britain were predominantly from rural Ireland, and were mostly unskilled, often with formal education ending once primary school was completed. This was to change radically with the waves of emigration that took place during the 1980s and the mid-2000s.
In the following pages, I offer a brief overview of the economic conditions in Irish society that led to these more recent waves of emigration – first in the 1980s, when some 200,000 people left this country, followed by the next wave in the mid-2000s. The exodus that came about as a result of the economic crash of 2008 saw some 213,000 people leave Ireland to look for opportunities abroad. The global crash, along with the collapse of our entire banking system, had a huge impact on this society. Its reverberations are still felt today.
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Due to increasing levels of economic activity in the 1960s, that decade did not see mass emigration on the scale of that of the dismal fifties. However, throughout the following decade, 1970s Ireland presided over huge levels of state borrowing. The enormity of this debt, coupled with the added catastrophe of a second oil crisis, laid the seedbed for the severe economic downturn of the 1980s.
In excess of 200,000 (net) people left Ireland during that decade of recession. Research shows that ‘the 1980s labour market in Ireland was one of the worst performing in Europe’. The unemployment rate rose from 7 per cent in 1979 to 17 per cent in 1986, ‘when two-thirds of the unemployed had been out of work for six months or more, almost half for over a year’.
Along with the high levels of unemployment, mortgage rates became crippling during that 10-year period. Central Bank figures record that an interest rate of 16.25 per cent was charged on borrowings in 1981 and 1982. Rates stayed high throughout the decade, ending at 11.4 per cent in 1989. Ireland had become a very expensive place to live. Housing, food, childcare, healthcare: the cost of everything was increasing, shifting out of reach for so many with young families.
Each week, as I remember, there was yet another American wake for one friend or another. The term that had originated in the 1800s felt appropriate all over again as we watched the ever-increasing numbers of people leaving the country: a mass exodus of the predominantly young from villages and towns all over Ireland.
Britain still remained the destination of choice – if we can call it ‘choice’ – along with Canada and the United States. Many of that generation of emigrants became ‘undocumented’ workers in the US – entering as tourists and staying long beyond their permitted visas. The Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) estimated that in the early 1980s, no fewer than 135,000 ‘New Irish’ were working illegally in Boston, New York and Chicago.
Other sources quote even greater numbers of undocumented workers. In a Dáil debate in 1987, the Fine Gael TD Jimmy Deenihan noted: ‘At this time it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 out-of-status Irish emigrants are in the US. They are also categorised under the terms of illegal, unauthorised or undocumented aliens.’
In 1989, at the height of the exodus, 70,000 people left this country, giving rise to a popular bumper sticker of the time: ‘Last one to leave Ireland, please switch off the lights’.
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I still remember a 1980 address to the nation by the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, who warned us, even at the start of that most difficult decade, that we were ‘living away (sic) beyond our means’.
Watching that televised speech again today, the ironies just keep multiplying. Although we didn’t realise it, not yet, this was the decade of Charvet shirts and the economic ‘black hole’. The Moriarty Tribunal, established 17 years later, in 1997, to inquire into payments to politicians and other related matters, revealed that while Taoiseach, Charles Haughey spent approximately £16,000 of taxpayers’ money on bespoke shirts from the French company Charvet. The shirts arrived in diplomatic bags. The Charvet website of the day claimed their shirts to be ‘Of almost unbelievable elegance to the most demanding clientele in the world’.
Charvet for some, hairshirts for others.
Not all of us were, in Charles Haughey’s words, ‘living away beyond our means’. The vast majority of the population did not need to be told to ‘tighten our belts’. The 1980s saw the collapse of the construction industry; the downturn in manufacturing; little or no recruitment to the civil service. I was teaching in a disadvantaged area during those years and I remember the way my colleagues and I shared the reluctant view that we were educating our students only to swell the dole queues. The divisions caused by intergenerational unemployment and social exclusion became ever more visible throughout that turbulent decade.
The economic black hole that emerged in the country’s finances during the 1980s was caused in part by the scale of tax evasion in the Irish business community. An article from The Irish Times in May 2001 notes that 20 years earlier ‘the remoteness of the Cayman Islands and its no questions asked policy towards would-be depositors made it an attractive location for Irish businessmen hiding hot money from the Revenue’.
Against this grim background of economic recession, the Troubles in the North of Ireland were raging. This, too, was the decade of the hunger strikes; of Reaganomics and Thatcher; of the dark cloud of political unrest. No wonder people voted with their feet and left in their thousands.
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Typically, emigrants of the 1980s were more highly educated, often graduates, or highly skilled. I remember the public awareness of what was perceived as a ‘brain drain’ from Ireland during those years. ‘The very high rates of emigration occurring among many of the professional and technical graduates is one of the most worrying aspects of the present situation’.
However, the picture wasn’t that simple. ‘It would be a mistake to see Irish emigrants in the 1980s as consisting solely of high-skills graduates ... there were still a considerable number of “old wave” emigrants whose profile would not have differed greatly from that of earlier generations’. And that profile was, as we have seen earlier, predominantly male, rural, and either semi-skilled or unskilled on departure.
The emigrants of the 1980s were also, for the most part, young. Figures for 1981-86 showed that 68 per cent of all emigrants were in the 15-34 bracket. They also left from all parts of the country, not just rural Ireland: ‘the propensity to emigrate is now much more equal in the eastern and western, and the urban and rural counties, than was previously the case’. And on this occasion, ‘more males than females moved abroad ... because of the construction down- turn and the increasing integration of women into the Irish labour force’.
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In the absence of any face-to-face interviews of my own with those who emigrated in the 1980s, or with those of the post- crash ‘generation emigration’, I am deeply indebted to the Emigre study. This study, authored by Irial Glynn, Tomás Kelly and Piaras MacEinrí of UCC, includes many observations about emigration in the 1980s, but its main focus is the experience of those who left Ireland in the wake of the catastrophic economic crash of 2008.
In examining this ‘new wave’, the study’s authors devised a complex and sophisticated methodology. In addition to compiling the responses from representative household surveys, the Emigre team divided the Republic of Ireland into six ‘clusters’, ranging from sparsely populated rural areas to densely populated urban areas, and everything in between. Affluent areas, areas of high unemployment, areas with a predominance of young parents – representative samples from all these clusters were surveyed and interpreted.
Researchers also attended Working Abroad Expos in March 2013, documenting levels of education of respondents, their socio-economic profile, and whether they had children. They also asked people why they wanted to move abroad, adding several valuable layers of detail to the final report.
The Emigre report also has a welcome emphasis on the personal: those in the household survey were asked for their own thoughts on emigration; whether they knew anybody who had left the country in recent years; whether emigration had affected their own community; and whether they had had any experience of emigration themselves.
I found it particularly interesting that ‘very few responses’ to the surveys were received online. Just under half came via post. Instead, the authors observe: ‘Most of our responses derived from face-to-face interactions on the doorsteps of households.’
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Ireland has a long tradition of exporting its people. There were the 200,000 Ulster Presbyterians who made their way to America in 1718 in order to escape poverty, discrimination and rapidly rising rents. They had originally migrated from Scotland to the North of Ireland in search of a better life.
There was the mass emigration of the post-Famine years, when – as Dr Catherine Shannon has noted – ‘at least 1.5 million emigrants left Ireland between 1846 and 1855, with the majority travelling to America’. Then in the 20th century, we had the waves of emigration of the 1930s, 1950s and the 1980s. And now, in recent years, the economic crash has seen people leave these shores in large numbers once more. And while economic pressures have always had a significant role to play in the phenomenon that is Irish emigration, many also decided to escape their lives in Ireland in search of adventure in other countries.
Women, in particular, were often not solely economic migrants. Their pattern of emigration from Ireland diverged from that of most other European countries in the 1950s, for example – they often emigrated alone, rather than with husbands or families. In the decade from 1926 to 1936, significantly more women than men, emigrated to Britain. During that decade, it was estimated that almost 46,000 Irish women, as compared with 30,000 men crossed the Irish Sea. ‘Ireland is somewhat unusual internationally in that female emigration has always been a strong component of the overall numbers and has, at times, actually exceeded male emigration’.
If we focus on female emigration to Britain, a longing for change was frequently the cause. I remember the many women who spoke to me during our interviews for An Unconsidered People about that need to escape, to be free, to have opportunities that would never be theirs at home, and to avoid the destiny of their mothers and grandmothers, trapped in the grinding poverty of rural Ireland. Many young women chose to train in the UK as nurses or primary school teachers, as it was easier to secure places there than in Ireland. And while job and career opportunities were one part of the equation, the casting off of suffocating social and religious expectations was most definitely another. Reproductive choice; sexual freedom; the ability to leave a bad marriage without com- munity recrimination: these, too, were extremely important aspects of women’s new lives away from home.
All of those who left, men and women alike, have contributed to the worldwide Irish diaspora which is currently estimated to be about 70 million people. This number includes those who claim even distant Irish ancestry. According to a study carried out by the Department of Foreign Affairs in 2017: ‘The vast majority of this 70 million figure are descendants of Irish emigrants, often through several generations starting with those who left Ireland around the time of the Famine’.
The largest group in this figure is the 36 million people in America who ‘self-identified as “Irish-American” or “Scots-Irish”. The balance of the 70 million figure would be made up of large Irish ancestry populations in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand’.
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The era of the Celtic Tiger, however, seemed set to reverse that trend of large-scale emigration. During that economically heady 10-year period from 1997 to 2007, a transformation in the make-up of our own population was taking place. Membership of the EU meant that there was a significant increase in immigration into Ireland in that same decade.
Our Central Statistics Office tells me, for example, that ‘there was a total of 420,000 non-Irish nationals living in Ireland in April 2006, representing 188 different countries. While the vast majority of these people were from a very small number of countries – 82 per cent from just 10 countries – there was also a remarkable diversity in the range of countries represented’.
In 1998, the figure for non-Irish nationals living in Ireland was lower than 50,000. Eight years later, it was more than eight times that number. The numbers vary from study to study, but according to official government documents, there was an ‘average non-Irish population of 14.9 per cent for all Irish towns over 1,500 inhabitants in 2016’.
That was the average: there were, of course, several very surprised villages in rural Ireland that suddenly saw their population increase radically, and there were also towns that remained relatively untouched. Immigrants, as always, will follow the work. And their arrival brought several unexpected benefits: small rural schools on the verge of closure saw their pupil numbers increase and succeeded in staying open and thriving. Motorway construction benefited due to the influx of immigrant workers, just as it had in the UK some 50 years earlier with ‘the [Irish]men who built Britain’. And several towns and villages in Ireland saw their local GAA teams energised by the participation of new players from as far afield as Syria and Pakistan.
At the beginning of the 1990s, work was plentiful. Former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, himself an economist, outlined in July 2007 the four reasons he believed were responsible for the extraordinary economic growth and development of this country in those years.
‘In Ireland between 1993 and 2001, output per worker improved by almost one-half, growing by over 5 per cent a year. Elsewhere in Europe, it increased at only one-third of that rate.’ Second, ‘a major factor ... was the arrival in Ireland during that eight-year period of almost 300 new mainly high-tech industrial projects. These increased almost fivefold the value of our manufacturing output, trebled the volume of exports, and, most important of all, virtually quadrupled the reported money value of the average industrial worker’s output’.
Third, ‘[growth] came from an unprecedented increase of almost one-half in our workforce, a process that involved bringing into paid employment very many people who had previously been outside the labour force, viz. unemployed people, students or women who had been working in the home. All these had until then been dependants, either supported by bread-winning parents or spouses, or, in the case of the unemployed, by the State through social payments.’
Finally, ‘a significant proportion of those who had emigrated during the financial crisis of the 1980s returned during this period to join the Irish workforce’.
All of these processes together, FitzGerald wrote, meant that ‘by 2001 the average worker was both producing 46 per cent more output – and needed to share this increased output amongst 28 per cent fewer people’.
Like everybody else living in Ireland at the time, I saw the changes that were taking place during those years. I watched in astonishment as the 1980s receded like some kind of bad dream. When abroad, I was asked constantly about the Irish ‘economic miracle’. Everybody in this country who wanted to, or could, was working. There was a collective obsession with property prices: whether the property was at home or in Alicante, in Bucharest or Budapest, in Katowice or Dubai. In a strange reversal of our history, ‘ordinary’ Irish people were in the buy-to-let market: becoming landlords themselves – a status hitherto reserved for the rich.
And then.
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Early in 2008, no ordinary Irish citizen could have foreseen the extent of the economic crash that was about to happen. Just a couple of years earlier, in 2006,taoiseach Bertie Ahern had mused that ‘the boom is getting boomier’. House prices were spiralling, the Celtic Tiger was still walking the land – at least in theory – and unemployment stood at the all- time low of 4.3 per cent, the third lowest unemployment rate in the EU. Politicians were congratulating themselves that things had never been better; and Irish developers were buying huge tracts of land in Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, as well as transforming urban spaces at home.
During the affluent years – although they weren’t so for everybody – the profiles of the most prominent property developers seemed to be everywhere as they morphed into the latest celebrities. There was a public appetite to read about their extravagant lifestyles, to have some sort of vicarious experience of the lives of those men and women who were moving in ‘high society’ circles in the UK and elsewhere.
‘Media profiling of the riches and influence to be amassed through property dealings arguably fuelled the wider wave of speculative development that seized the national economy, housing sector and, indeed, the national psyche through the 2000s.’
Congratulatory articles about our rich and suddenly powerful speculators appeared frequently in the media. A report from November 2007 observed: ‘Romania is all set for a property boom, Irish style. Last week a clutch of Irish developers were in Bucharest to tell Romanian politicians, developers and financiers about Ireland’s experience.’
An Irish consortium, headed by former Revenue inspector Derek Quinlan, bought the Savoy Hotel Group in London for €1.1 billion in 2004. Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett bought the Battersea Power Station for €400 mil- lion in 2006. Irish property magnates had now carved out a space at the centre of the London property market and were becoming international movers and shakers, for the first time ever. They were placed right at ‘the heart of the old colonial foe, [something that] marked a significant economic and symbolic moment in the growth of the Celtic economy and a resonant moment in the progressive transformation in the international perception of Ireland and the Irish’.
A couple of years earlier, in 2005, an article in The Economist had declared: ‘[The developers] were influential in shifting both internal and external understandings of Ireland, from an image as EU’s welfare-dependent poor cousin to an image as an entrepreneurial global success story, ripe with business and investment acumen.’
The Department of Finance seems not to have recognised the dangers to the Irish economy posed by lack of fiscal regulation and the growth of the housing bubble in the early 2000s. However, there were others in Ireland who tried to sound a warning note about what lay ahead.
The ESRI, for one. ‘Over the last twenty years each of the ESRI’s Medium-Term Reviews has considered the medium-term outlook for the economy and the appropriate stance of fiscal policy. The introduction to each Review has referred to some relevant story from classical Greek mythology. The 2003 Review began with the story of Icarus! That publication identified the unduly expansionary fiscal policy, and the failure to control the housing market as a serious concern. The warnings became increasingly emphatic in 2005 and 2006 and this advice was picked up and widely reported in the Irish media ... After a decade of generally high growth and low unemployment there was a growing feeling among households and companies that the Irish economy was invincible – many people did not want to hear the message and consider the possible remedies.’
But the message from the government of the day was that any dire warnings about a crash were vastly overblown. The term ‘soft landing’ gained widespread currency at that time, referring to the gradual levelling out in house prices over the coming years that was envisaged by many – including the Department of Finance.
The economist David McWilliams was another to shout ‘Stop!’. He warned over and over from the early 2000s, writing hundreds of thousands of words in newspaper columns about the impending crash; he made documentaries about the subject; he wrote books on the topic.
Appearing before the Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis in February 2015, McWilliams stated: ‘The panic of September 2008 did not have to happen. It was not anything that was pre-ordained. It could have been fixed very early. The problem is if there is no housing boom there will be no banking boom. If there is no banking boom there will be no banking crisis. If there is no banking crisis there will be no interventions, such as the [bank] guarantee, and there will be no bailout. All of these things are the consequence of bad economic policy, not the cause.’
Back in the early years of the 21st century, those who presided over the Celtic Tiger did not want to listen. In 2007, addressing the Irish Congress of Trades Unions conference, Bertie Ahern observed he didn’t ‘know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide’. He was referring to those who ‘talked down the economy’. At that point, the bank guarantee scheme to underwrite €400 billion of bank debt, and the subsequent IMF €64 billion bailout were both still some 18 months into the future.
When the crash came, it was devastating – and the worst hit countries in Europe were the ‘PIIGS’: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, where unregulated loans to acquire property had been fuelling the ever-expanding bubble in each of those countries.
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And when the crash did come, emigration came along with it. While some studies emphasise the fact that the ‘correlation between economic downturn and emigration is unsurprisingly strong ... with 50,000 [emigrating] in 2008’ and remaining in the ‘80,000 range since 2011, with a record high of 89,000 in 2013’, there are many other factors that feed into the process of emigration: factors that the Emigre study highlights.
In that study’s fourth chapter, Departure, the authors observe: ‘The overall picture which emerges is a complex one. As befits a society which is now largely urban, the traditional cliche of the emigrant as rural is no longer true in terms of absolute numbers, [but] the emigration from rural Ireland is still disproportionately higher than the norm.’
In terms of education, following the trend of approximately a quarter of a century earlier: ‘the general improvement in educational standards in Ireland in recent decades is reflected in the educational attainments of today’s emigrants. In fact, today’s emigrants are much more likely to have a high standard of education than the population in general and arguments referencing a “brain drain” are not misplaced.’
And consider the proportion of emigrants with a third-level qualification leaving Ireland post-crash: 62 per cent of them, while the figure for the general population was considerably lower: ‘47 per cent of Irish people aged between 25-34 hold a tertiary qualification of three years or more, suggesting that university graduates are represented amongst those leaving’.
The authors go on to observe that 'between 2006 and 2013 gross emigration of Irish people was in the order of 213,000 persons in total, rising from just over 13,000 in 2005 to almost 51,000 in the year ending March 2013, an increase of nearly 400 per cent in the seven years from the pre-crisis period in the Irish economy to the present. In itself, this gives the lie to the notion that emigration is purely a matter of "lifestyle choice"(Italics mine).
As I’ve already noted, there are many and varied reasons for emigration: economic pressure, study, advancement in careers not available at home, a longing for change and adventure. Of those who emigrated post-crash, ‘47.1 per cent had been in full-time employment before their departure’. Their reasons for leaving included having skills that were in demand else- where, in areas such as IT or health. Some felt that they were ‘underemployed’; they were often working in jobs below the level of their skills. They saw their opportunities for advancement at home as being limited; they were attracted by the higher salaries and better working conditions elsewhere.
The economic crash caused a huge upheaval in Irish society. Donal Donovan and Antoine Murphy, quoted in the Emigre study, have argued: ‘The scale of the economic and financial catastrophe that befell Ireland was virtually unprecedented in post-war industrial country history ... In April 2013, the IMF calculated that over 23 per cent of the Irish labour force was either unemployed or under- employed’. The construction industry suffered one of the most dramatic impacts of those years: from a peak of 380,000 employed in 2006, numbers fell to approximately 150,000: from an ‘unsustainable 25 per cent of Irish GNP’ to 6 per cent in 2012’.
In the 1950s, four out of every five people who emigrated from Ireland went to the United Kingdom. Emigrants after the economic crash followed a similar path, the majority leaving for Britain, with Australia, the US, Spain and Germany also featuring prominently.
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The impact of emigration on a community is profound. Parents and siblings get left behind. Friends get left behind. Decades later, sitting in rooms all over Kilburn and Cricklewood, those who left Ireland in the 1950s spoke with palpable grief about their leave-takings. They spoke of how the brothers and sisters left behind in the homeplace often resented the responsibility of caring for ageing parents - a responsibility that they felt rested unfairly with them, given the departure of one or more of their siblings. They spoke of the bitterness of both sides feeling that they had got a raw deal – those who had to leave, and those who needed to stay.
A national conversation developed on the airwaves during and after the departure of all those tens of thousands after the crash of 2008. Parents spoke openly of their grief at the perceived loss of their adult children. They reminded us of how previous generations of parents, friends and sib- lings must have also grieved those who left the country in the earlier waves of emigration. They reminded us of the pain of not seeing children and grandchildren with any kind of frequency, particularly when destinations such as Australia and New Zealand came into the mix. Skype and email, WhatsApp and FaceTime might have made those separations a little more bearable – but they did not make them easy.
There is always a complex web of emotions to be navigated for parents: not wishing to stand in the way of the adult child’s advancement or economic security, yet suffering the wrench of watching their children move far away from home, perhaps for good.
In the 1980s and mid-2000s, whole villages were unable to put a GAA team together, such was the exodus of young people from rural Irish communities. COVID-19 made that loss and those distances even more painful, the loneliness more acute. Families are fractured, wondering if they will ever see each other in person again.
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In the wider community, after the crash of 2008, years of austerity followed. Spending on public services was vastly reduced. As a result, child poverty increased, health services diminished, spending on health and education was drastically cut.
After some initial ‘green shoots’ reached towards the light of recovery in 2013 and 2014,the economy began to improve, slowly. The most up-to-date prediction is that ‘The Irish economy is forecast to grow 7.2 per cent this year and by a further 5.1 per cent in 2022, according to a new European Commission report.’ Are these predictions overly optimistic? Have we had similar assurances before? The debt from March 2020 to mid-2021, a year and a half of COVID-19, is massive, with its final tally still uncertain.
In July 2021, Ursula von der Leyen announced a package of €990 million in EU grants to Ireland. She said it is part of the largest recovery package that Europe has seen since the Marshall Plan in the aftermath of the second World War and ‘it is necessary because we want to spur the recovery for Europe, and indeed Ireland, for now and for the future’.
‘We want to be stronger coming out of this pandemic than we went into it and we want to emphasise and invest in our common objectives,’ she said.
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The possibility of improving economic prospects may entice some of the Irish living abroad to return to live here – particularly those raising children. The separations and losses of COVID-19 may be a factor in making that return feel more urgent. Perhaps the single biggest obstacle returning emigrants would have to face is the short supply of houses and the rapidly increasing prices of those houses once they do come on the market.
Anecdotal evidence regarding the housing market in Dublin, for example, shows that many houses are selling at significantly higher prices than the officially listed asking price. Advertising a house for sale at a lower figure is to ‘lure the punters in’, as one estate agent put it to me recently. After that, the sky’s the limit.
But housing is not the only obstacle the returning emigrant is likely to face: there is also the cost of childcare in this country – estimated recently by a Unicef report to be among the most expensive in the world. Access to education and healthcare can still be problematic. Many schools in urban areas have long waiting lists; our health service has been placed under unbearable strain since March 2020 – and it was already straining at the seams before that, as the numbers of patients on trolleys in all our public hospitals every winter will testify.
The pandemic is in the process of changing the face of this country, and perhaps all countries, for generations to come. It will take a decade or more before we can assess the nature and the full extent of, for example, changes in work practices; changes of individual and community perspectives on life in the wake of the pandemic; changes in migration patterns from the cities to a more affordable way of life in small rural towns and villages. This last has already given rise to some uncomfortable questions.
More affordable for whom? If city dwellers opt for a hybrid of working from home and the occasional day at the office, allowing them to live further away from the location of their jobs, what impact will this have on their destination communities? There is already evidence that the newcomers are in a position to out-bid the current residents of those communities because of their higher earning power and greater disposable income as they move from cities to towns. It is one more potentially divisive outcome of the catastrophe that descended on the world in early 2020.
And on a global level, where do people now go in search of a more economically stable way of life? To what countries would they turn in search of adventure, or to escape conditions at home? Or to fulfil a ‘lifestyle choice’?
And what about the immigrant who is now part of the Irish population in the same way that the Irish emigrant became part of her/his new community abroad? All those thousands of people who left this country in the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s and 2000s: all of them seeking to put down roots else- where, to find somewhere new to belong. Many of them became the targets of anti-Irish feeling, or discrimination, or poverty as they sought to establish new lives elsewhere.
A recent OECD report highlights some of the challenges that lie ahead for Ireland, as elsewhere: ‘Due to a range of vulnerabilities such as higher incidence of poverty, overcrowded housing conditions, and high concentration in jobs where physical distancing is difficult, immigrants are at a much higher risk of COVID-19 infection than the native-born. Studies in a number of OECD countries found an infection risk that is at least twice as high as that of the native-born.’
Our population is now more diverse than it has ever been. Emigration is part of our DNA. For one small island to be represented by seventy million people around the globe who like to claim at least an emotional connection to Irishness, however tenuous, emigration is a unique part of who we are. Arguably, it means we have an even greater responsibility to welcome, to support and to nurture these new generations of citizens who have chosen to make Ireland their home, coming here in search of a better or a different kind of life, just as hundreds of thousands of Irish have done, down through the centuries. Their presence enriches our music, our literature, our sports and our culture and they are now, to borrow an earlier term from the United States, our 'New Irish'. This Ireland, this newly changed Ireland needs to become some- where that we can all belong together.
This new chapter is taken form the revised edition of An Unconsidered People by Catherine Dunne, published by New Island
