When Mary Coughlan, the tánaiste, was asked back in February 2010 about rising emigration and its effect on Ireland, she said she thought that a lot of the young people leaving were doing so to "enjoy themselves" and that their departure was "not a bad thing".
She had, you see, seen callow youths laughing at airports, a tell-tale sign that they were merely going on a series of jolly working holidays rather than being part of a more worrying trend.
When my girlfriend and I moved to London about nine months later, we were greeted by a dozen or so friends who’d already made the trip. We also had three of my siblings, their young families, and that typically Irish network of 80 or so people whom we kind of, sort of knew, in a nebulous, parish-newsletter fashion.
Despite this abundance my abiding memory from the time is just how steadily, month on month, that circle grew.
Between 2008 and 2015 nearly 600,000 people emigrated from Ireland
As it happened I had a handy metric by which I could track this tide. Each time someone moved over from Ireland I’d refer them to the recruiting firm through which I’d found work. To my surprise it kept a note of each referral and began giving me M&S vouchers for each person who was made permanent.
At the end of that year I received a Christmas card in which their cheerful if somewhat culturally insensitive staff referred to me as the Irish Embassy. Eventually they were just calling me about any new role that had just come up, in the hope that I knew somebody fresh off the boat with office experience. Invariably, I did.
This regular uptick of arrivals in our first few years made it seem as if Ireland were in the midst of an orderly, and cheerful, evacuation. Between 2008 and 2015 nearly 600,000 people emigrated from Ireland (net emigration was estimated to be 138,400), a disproportionate number of them young, educated and ready to work.
There was a sense among us in London that at home our loss was considered a fair trade for lower unemployment figures, as if it was better to catapult us over the sea than to develop us for employment at home.
It’s easy to dismiss Coughlan’s comments out of hand – and, personally, that’s what I’d recommend. As young people, many of us were moving to another country for the first time, so, yes, there was a sense of adventure.
It’s adorable to think how romantic we found using the wifi in McDonald’s to search for somewhere to live. How exciting it was to view flats with all the home comforts of an ongoing siege, available for prices that suggested they’d just been vacated by the duchess of York.
But we grew to thrive within an environment eager and able to employ our talents, having come from a place that didn’t seem to care about them one way or the other.
The torrent of educated young Irish people did eventually slow. Perhaps this was because conditions were improving back home, or perhaps because I no longer knew the people who were moving over.
Most who moved over when I did are still in London, settled and happy, with jobs and social ties and avocado recipes we know by heart – some of us now accumulating pets and spouses and babies, and still more avocado recipes.
We do talk about returning, often fondly, but wonder what precisely this would mean and to what we would return.
Would it be an Ireland that continues to regard each generation of young people as surplus to requirements? An Ireland with an inbuilt mechanism for ridding the electorate of tens of thousands of liberal-thinking twentysomethings, just as they become more likely to vote, or invest themselves in society? A country that, for all its outward gestures, remains more socially conservative than anyone I know from that country, and one that sometimes seems as if it’s ruled by and for people who’ve made their money and just want to pull the ladder up behind them?
And what’s the point of moving home and starting a family in Ireland just so that, two decades later, my own kids will reach the age at which they too must leave? Then I’ll be the anxious parent sending them teabags and phoning them to let them know when distant relatives die.
More broadly, of course, the huge wave of post-Tiger emigration we’ve just witnessed doesn’t stop with the individual experiences of the emigrants themselves – however special, riveting and brave my own story clearly is.
It’s too early to know what effect this emigration will have on an Ireland that might not yet feel the depth of that loss, or how we recalibrate the value a country puts on its young people, their labour and their contribution to society.
Until then, if our young people do still leave Ireland with smiles on their faces, perhaps we ought to ask ourselves why.
