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Wall Street Journal examines rising emigration
By Noreen Bowden | August 27, 2009
Wall Street Journal reporter Joellen Perry examines Ireland’s upsurge in emigration in today’s edition; she takes a look at its impact on the Mayo community of Ballycroy, which has lost its Gaelic football team after four of its players left the country.
A key gauge of Ireland’s economic health isn’t found in the island nation’s business districts or trading floors, but on the football fields of the rural west, where rosters of amateur clubs are getting so thin that villages are struggling to find talented players to field 15-person teams.
Sean McManamon left Ballycroy — a picturesque village sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Nephin Beg mountain range — for a job in London in February after his small construction firm folded. Mr. McManamon, a midfielder who was a stalwart of the Ballycroy team’s defense, emigrated around the same time as three other players, leaving the village without an adult team for the first time in more than 50 years.
It is the 35-year-old father of four’s second stint as an emigrant. He hopes it is his last. Emigrating again, after being in London for eight years and returning in 1999 to capitalize on Ireland’s real-estate boom “was easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” says Mr. McManamon, who left his family, a 100-acre farm and a nearly finished seven-bedroom home behind. “I never thought I’d leave Ireland again.”
Perry notes a number of other indicators: immigration centres in destination countries are reporting more arrivals, the US embassy is reporting a rise in the number of those applying for short-term working visas, and a director at Deloitte says that “10% of the 2,000 Irish executives who are potential job candidates for his corporate clients are now working overseas, up from ‘pretty much zero’ last year.”
The anecdotal evidence of increasing emigration continues to build – we’re still waiting for the official migration figures from the CSO for the year to April 2009, which presumably will confirm what these numerous reports are suggesting.
Related web page:
WSJ.com: Economic crisis strikes at Ireland’s heartland
Topics: Latest News | 1 Comment »
September 8th, 2009 at 8:41 am
HI NOREEN Saw your article on IRISH emigration , this will be an interesting scenario over the coming year at least ; PRESENTLY there are 450,000 PERSONS unemployed as of
August 2009 and although official statistics say UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is 12.5% , I believe that to be 22.5% of the workforce taking that to be 2,000,000 (2006 irish independent newspaper article ) BUT modified since by immigrants from POLAND .LITHUANIA, LATVIA , UKRAINE ,ROMANIA WHO HAVE returned to their homelands plus whatever IRISH have emigrated ALL worth looking into , Brendan