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« Previous Entries Next Entries »More families emigrating, say Australian visa companies
Monday, September 8th, 2008Young families are emigrating at an increasing rate, claims an article in the Irish Independent. While it cites no official statistics to back up this claim, companies specialising in immigration assistance say they are seeing more families making the move.
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.”
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”
Nursing rep raises spectre of emigration
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008Hundreds of newly trained nurses will be emigrating due to a lack of jobs in Ireland, warned the Irish Nurses Organisation this week. INO general secretary Liam Doran says that only about 25-30% of newly trained nurses are being offered jobs, after being trained in four-year training programmes funded by the taxpayer. Doran told the Herald newspaper,
“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“.
Irish interest in Australian visas rising
Thursday, August 28th, 2008Australia’s Department of Immigration has reported a continuing increase in the number of young Irish people obtaining Working Holiday Visa. The visas, which are available to those between 18 and 30, have been growing in popularity every year for the last five years. Between July 2007 and March 2008, there were 12,700 visas issued, according to a report in Australia’s Irish Echo; 13,500 had been issued for the entire previous year.
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.
Emigrant writer inhabits “Ireland of the mind”, says poet
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008Irish-born, British-based poet David Wheatley has been featured in The Age, an Australian publication, speaking about his poetic life. The occasion was his winning of The Vincent Buckley Prize, which commemorates the late professor of English at the University of Melbourne; the prize allows alternate Irish and Australian winners to spend time in the other country.
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.
Emigration increasing, says CSO
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Emigration increased slightly in the year ending April 2008, with 45,300 people leaving Ireland.
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.
Benefits to New Zealand highlighted by company
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008The Sunday Tribune is carrying an article on the benefits of migration to New Zealand. Much of the recent media coverage of migration to Australia and New Zealand seems to be the result of a media campaign by MigrationAbroad.com, a for-profit organisation that handles visa applications to Australia and New Zealand. They are actively promoting such visas through monthly clinics.
The company is promoting New Zealand’s cheaper property, falling unemployment and cultural similarities with Ireland as reasons for a move.
Read the article: “A different opportunity down under”
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