Archive for April, 2011
High unemployment suggests lower emigration, says BOI
Monday, April 11th, 2011The Bank of Ireland has revised its economic forecast to reflect a gloomier situation than it had previously predicated.
The Bank’s latest quarterly economic outlook says that the economy will grow by 0.5% in 2011, down from the 1.5% growth rate it had previously predicted.
The Irish Examiner reports this downward revision comes following the emergence of what the BOI report described as “two surprising and unwelcome” economic trends:
“The first was that the unemployment rate over the past six months has been much higher than previously published, on the basis that the labour force stopped falling in the final quarter of 2010,” commented Bank of Ireland chief economist Dan McLaughlin, author of the report.
The bank said that this implies that the scale of net emigration “is much lower than previously thought”.
The unemployment rate in 2011 is now expected to average 14.4% from 13.6% last year, although it has probably peaked in recent months, BOI said.
Notre Dame setting up Irish oral history archive
Friday, April 8th, 2011The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana is working on an online database of Irish oral history that will allow users to upload their stories themselves.
The project, headed by Deb Rotman, the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Anthropology, is aimed particularly at capturing tales from the generation of immigrants who lived through the Irish Civil War and in early twentieth-century America.
“Those generations have some really great stories that we’re trying to capture, but we can only do so much,� says Rotman in a press release from the university. The project will allow immigrants to upload their own experiences using audio, text, photos and possibly video.
The project is linked in with the university’s archaeological and anthropological exploration of Michigan’s Beaver Island, which was inhabited in the 19th century by a group of Irish people largely from the Donegal island of Ã?rainn Mhór. In Beaver Island, they created a farming lifestyle similar to the one they’d left behind – so in studying this community, students are gaining an insight into a rural immigrant experience, unlike the more frequently studied urban Irish experience in the US.
“The archaeological record and the historic documents work together telling different parts of the same story,� says Rotman, “and oral history is the third leg of that stool.�
As an alumnus of Notre Dame, I’m pleased to see such innovative Irish projects coming from there – particularly as I attended back in the dark ages, even before there was an Irish Studies option! The University now has one of the highest-profile Irish Studies programmes in the world.
Read the press release on the Notre Dame website.
Meanwhile, I’ve updated my GlobalIrish.ie list of Irish oral history projects. Am I missing any? Let me know!
“I feel like I’m the only one left”: One young writer on emigration
Thursday, April 7th, 2011There’s a good article on emigration in Blastmagazine.com, written by a young woman who is still at home, but feeling a bit forlorn as her friends emigrate.  Brenda Collins writes:
I’m not so desperate that this recession is making me lonely. But with most of my friends more likely to be making a living in Uganda than Ireland, I have to admit that it’s getting a little barren and boring for me here. I feel like I’m the only one left. I don’t laugh anymore when I see the “Will the last graduate left in Ireland please turn off the light� Facebook page pop up on my news feed. I admit, I’m not the most gregarious of individuals and this probably hasn’t helped my case. In Ireland, shyness and sobriety do not a social network make.
Nevertheless, I feel slightly robbed. We were the first generation of Irish people who grew up with the warm and unwavering promise that we would never have to leave. And so we grew up, unprepared, only to get smacked mid-degree with a hefty layer cake of governmental corruption, incompetence and economic failure. as her friends are emigrating.
(Though weren’t the 1980s generation the first generation of Irish people who grew up with the promise that they would never have to emigrate? The 1970s were a period of return migration, and seemed to hold out the promise at the time that emigration was over. How illusory.)
In any case, the writer notes, that it’s not only the absence of paid employment that’s driving her generation to go:
The choices for emerging graduates are stark. You can stay and fill out the long application forms for social welfare payments and paper the streets with your resumé in the hope that something sticks. Or you can leave. Because the biggest problem is not the lack of jobs (although it’s hardly a reason to celebrate), it’s the lack of anything. Last September, I moved to Manhattan to do a three-month unpaid internship. It was an incredible experience and I gained so much from it, both professionally and personally. But the sheer insanity of borrowing money to work for nothing epitomises the sort of outlandish rabbit-hole that the Irish people have been pushed into.
And that’s why people are emigrating. Not only is it nigh on impossible to get a salaried job, it’s also impossible to get work experience or internships. Facing a future of meagre state payments and the slow rot of their academic skills, graduates turn instead to visa applications. They uproot their whole lives just to feel what it might be like to have a career. I read New York Times articles about 28-year-old law students who are “stuck� doing yet another internship, and I envy them. There is no such innovation on this side of the pond.
It’s a bleak portrayal of what it’s like to be a young person at home in Ireland right now. Some commentators have noted that this feeling that “everyone is going” is in itself likely to be a driver of emigration. This is no doubt true. But what’s the solution?
Read the whole article: Irish emigration 3.0: A Blast writer’s thoughts on Ireland’s recession.