The Irish Studies Associaton of Australian and New Zealand will host its conference from the 9th to 12th of July at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

Organisers say:

Australia and New Zealand were essentially secondary destinations for the post-1800 waves of Irish leaving to make new lives overseas, accounting for no more than 10 per cent in most decades. Yet the two countries have regularly been identified by scholars as appropriate ‘laboratories’ for studying the nature and impacts of Irish migration over time. This conference seeks to review research undertaken both at the points of origin and destination and to pose new questions. Were the Irish communities that took root in the Antipodes essentially transplanted fragments of the homeland? How did they evolve, and to what extent was their evolution influenced by developments at home? Were there noticeable differences between the Australian and New Zealand Irish experiences, and if so how may these best be explained? What is the relationship today between Ireland and its most far-flung diasporic communities?

With seven keynote speakers providing contextual signposts, the topics to be addressed over three days will be diverse. Historical themes range from aspects of early convict transportation to Australia, through Irish-Maori relations in New Zealand, to late twentieth century economic interactions. Cultural life will also be a focus, Irish literature, theatre and music – both traditional and contemporary – being scheduled for discussion. A particular consideration will be how the Antipodean Irish are being depicted in historical reconstructions and displays. Necessarily, many of the contributions will reflect collective experiences, but provision has also been made for papers on those of individuals and families. The utility of oral history for recording the experiences of more recent arrivals will also be assessed.

See the conference website.

Dermody tells the journalist, “A couple of years ago, I might have known two people in the whole of Australia. Now I know 30. I have about five or six friends in Perth alone, all within 15 km of my house.”

Nicoll notes,

As I travel round Ireland, I will be told that the boom has changed the country forever and, what with modern air travel, the exodus this time will be temporary. Yet technology, in the form of Facebook and Skype, is a powerful new agent in the emptying of villages. “Those who go are in contact with the lads back home,” Michael says. “They are telling us what a good time they are having, asking, ‘What’s keeping you?’.” The network that has always been so important in Ireland – ties of kinship and geography – now sucks the young away.

Nicoll tells of Dermody’s departure:

A little while before, Michael stood up from the farmhouse table, picked up a small rucksack and his hurling sticks, and said he’d best be going.

His mother sat straight-backed, the pain hard in her eyes, her jaw set, as her son had a last gulp of tea. He tells me later that his parents “hadn’t really spoken” about his departure, “but my mother is unhappy”. This renewed emigration, after 15 years of migrants returning, horrifies the older generations. They know all it will take is a good job, a mortgage or a marriage to keep Michael abroad. “They want to know when I’ll be back, but I don’t know,” he says, as we head outside. “If it doesn’t work out in Perth, I wouldn’t be averse to New Zealand.”

Read the whole article on the New Zealand Herald website: Wounded Tiger

For information on moving to Australia, visit the Crosscare Migrant Project website.

The government is removing bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and electricians from the critical shortage list. Hairdressers and cooks had already been removed.  Health occupations, engineering and information technology remain on the list.

The visa cuts will affect would-be Irish emigrants. Media reports in recent weeks have detailed problems affective Irish job-seekers in Australia.

Australia’s unemployment rate is currently 5.2%, up from 4.8% last month.

Related websites:

• Oz cuts work permits amid recession fears
• Crosscare Migrant Project’s emigration information page

There were 7,332 working holiday visas issued between July 1 and October 31 this year, up 33% from the same period last year, when there were 5,535 issued. In the same period in 2006, there were 4,733 issued.

More Irish are choosing to stay in Australia at the end of their one-year working holiday: between July and October, 1,239 applied for an extension, a quadrupling from the 371 who applied last year. Over 10% of those on working holiday visas are now applying for a second year.  Last year, there was a record total of 15,625 working holiday visas, and this number will increase for 2008/2009.

The number of 457 visas, which are employer-sponsored and valid for up to four years has nearly doublied in two years.  For July to October, there were 1,220 visas, up from 670 in 2006. More people are immigating with partners and dependents: 900 of the 467 visas were to primary applications and 320 are secondary, up from 600 and 160 respectively last year.

The number of Irish people offered resident visas from July through October this year has jumped 60%, from 391 in 2007 to 633 in 2008.

Irish visitor numbers, however, are decreasing; the 16,730 who came to Australia on holiday visas between July and October represented a decline of 8%.

See the article on the Irish Echo website.

The event is a commercial one, and is being run by the SGMC Group, an exhibition promoter.

Exhibitors include recruitment companies, relocation specialists, several Australian government bodies, visa agencies. The recruitment companies are heavily focused on construction and healthcare, but also feature banking and finance, engineering, mechanics, trades, hospitality and mining.

The list of companies is remarkable: there are a large number of commercial companies, based in Ireland and in destination countries, that are involved in recruitment and relocation.

The weekend also features a number of seminars focusing on Australia and New Zealand, covering topics such as visas and trades recognition.

The exhibition costs 10 euro for admission.

Visit the website.

Immigration consultant Nathan Brennan says most of his clients are in their 30s and have families:

“There has been a tendency for the Irish to travel for a year or two to places such as Australia and New Zealand, and of course there is a big history of the Irish settling permanently in America. But the vast majority of people we see – over 80pc – are people aged 30 to 40 with a family. They are looking for a complete change of life and career.â€?

Liz O’Hagan, similarly, says that people are moving with children:

“People are telling us that they have lost their jobs here, are going to be made redundant and have been given two months’ notice or that their partner has lost their job. People are also worried about their children’s future. These are real families looking to move because of the economic environment in Ireland.

“People who contacted us in 2003 or 2004 with the idea of moving to Australia are coming back to us saying they now want to go ahead”.

There is no way to judge whether those who visit such immigration consultants, who charge for their services, are representative of those interested in migrating to Australia. It is probably safe to assume that those contracting immigration consultants would be among the more financially well-off. The report notes expanding opportunities for tradespeople and professionals in Australia. In an accompanying article, the newspaper profiles a family who has left Dublin for Brisbane, Australia to raise their young family. Read the articles on the Irish Independent website:

• Young families emigrate as brain drain grips economy
• “We love being outdoors and feel it’s a better life”

“It’s probably the worst scene that has existed for the last decade in the health service. Hundreds will be emigrating”.

He noted in the last 13 months the number of nurses employed in the health service has declined from 39,000 to 37,700.

Meanwhile, Doran said, other countries are working to hire more nurses. “America has said that they’ll employ 600,000 more nurses in the next six years. You could be working in the morning in America.”

The INO is trying to increase the number of posts for nurses employed by the HSE; the HSE had a hiring freeze, which was lifted in January.

The Herald also asserts that “Irish medical doctors are being lured to Australia by more flexible rosters and less onerous hours by recruitment agencies”, but offers no figures.

Read the report on the Herald.ie website: “No jobs in Ireland for our new nurses“.

The newspaper also revealed that dozens of Irish nationals are being detained annually by immigration officials. In the 2006/2007 financial year, 26 Irish people were detained, while in the 2007/2008 financial year, 24 were detained. Those detained were working without visas, or had expired visas. The Department of Immigration said they were either deported or detained, according to their situation.

Visit the Irish Echo website.

David Wheatley, who currently lives and teaches in Hull, says that he has recently in his poetry been drawn to themes of movement and migration.

“Irish poetry may seem a lot more globalised today than in the 1970s, but emigration and diaspora have always been at the centre of Irish identity anyway. Vincent Buckley is a good example. To someone of my generation, his book Memory Ireland is, at first glance, a strange and even shocking kind of document.

He visits Ireland during the IRA hunger strikes of the 1980s, and can’t understand why Irish poets aren’t writing poems in praise of the hunger strikers. I remember this striking me as incredibly out of touch with political reality.”

But having lived out of Ireland myself for almost a decade I can now appreciate better how the emigrant writer inhabits an Ireland of the mind, for better or worse, and it can be too easy and smug not to take that into account.”

But although the emigrant writer inhabits an Ireland of the mind, he refuses to be limited in his consideration of the world around him:

A lot of Irish writers, particularly the ones who live in the US, leave home only to have a kind of born-again discovery of their Irishness,” he says. “I’d like to think I’m more interested in discovering the places I go to in their own right, and hereby authorise anyone in Australia who finds me in a state of born-again Irishness to put me on the first banana boat home.”

Read the entire article on The Age website.

Read more about the Vincent Buckley Prize.

The figure is the highest since 1990, when 56,300 people left the country, but there are a couple of factors making a difference between then and now.

First, it is likely that there are number of immigrants who had been temporarily in the country who are now returning home or moving on to a third country. The CSO statistics do not reveal nationality of those leaving, but 9,000 are moving on to the accession countries of the EU, while 7,400 are moving on to other parts of continental Europe.

Second, immigration continues to outpace emigration, as it has been doing consistently since 1996. There were 83,300 people who came into Ireland last year; while this is a four-year low and a fairly dramatic decrease from the 109,500 who came in the year ending April 2007, net migration is still significantly inward.

The figure for net migration now stands at 38.5 – although this is nearly half its peak of 71,800 in 2006, it’s still a far cry from the situation twenty years ago. 1988 was one of the peak years for emigration – at that time, net migration stood at -41.9.

The trends, however, are toward increasing emigration and decreasing immigration. The figures also date to April, and as such wouldn’t show any acceleration in emigration that may or may not have occurred this summer.

Where are the outward migrants going?

• 7,000 went to the UK, down from 10,100 in the year ending 2007.
• 7,400 went to the pre-accession countries of continental Europe, up from 3,200 the year before.
• 9,000 went to the 12 countries of the EU accession states, up from 7,000 last year.
• 2,200 are reported to have gone to the US, down from 2,900.
• 19,800 went to the “Rest of the World”, with 11,300 of those going to Australia and Oceania.

The CSO also released statistics today showing that the unemployment rate has risen to 5.1%. There are now 115,000 people unemployed.