“All it will take is a good job” – NZ journalist tells emigrant’s story
Monday, May 18th, 2009The New Zealand Herald carries an interesting article on the Irish economy that has some particularly moving words about emigration. Journalist Ruaridh Nicoll tells the story of Michael Dermody, a 25-year-old Kilkenny man bound for Perth, Australia.
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.
NY GAA not benefitting from Ireland’s downturn
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009The Irish Times takes a look at the New York GAA scene in the context of Ireland’s falling economy, as Mayo prepares to make the trip to play New York in the opening round of the Connacht championship.
The article notes:
It used to be an economic downturn in Ireland was at least good for something; the GAA in New York. When players here were laid-off or couldn’t find work they typically looked to America, and particularly New York, where the promise of employment and a vibrant GAA scene – along with several other perks – was more than enough to entice them across the Atlantic.
These days things are a little different
The article notes that stricter immigration laws have kept New York’s GAA scene from booming as it might have in tough economic times of the past. There has been talk of an increased numbers of players coming, but “it’s really only dribs and drabs”, according to NY GAA chair Larry McCarthy.
They key to the NY GAA’s future growth? The twelve underage clubs in the New York area, according to McCarthy, which bring players up from under-10s to minor grade. But McCarthy notes that that the dominance of American sport is a challenge in attracting young people, and many young people lose their connection to their GAA clubs when they go away to college.
Related web page:
Irish Times: New York build on underage structures
Recruiters warn of brain drain
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Brain drain will spread across the economy in the next few years, according to recruitment experts interviewed in the Irish Independent.
A recruiter with Merc Partners claims that caps on banker remuneration may “lead to a brain drain of bank executives. The cap also makes it very difficult to attract talent from outside Ireland.”
A recruiter with CPL notes that “highly skilled graduates . . . will not stay here if there are not good opportunities and a good quality of life”. She added that their healthcare business had seen increased inquiries into emigration to Britain and Australia.
The issue is even more pressing for those in architecture and law, according to a director with Deloitte: “Certainly in the short-term, anyone who has studied architecture and law will have no choice but to emigrate.” Adding that civil engineers and quantity surveyors will also be forced to emigrate, the recruiter said, “This will include experienced and non-experienced people as these sectors have been hit drastically.”
The evidence for such an increase is mixed, however, with many commentators noting that the global nature of the downturn is keeping many at home, despite a rise in media coverage and increased public interest in emigration. It will be difficult to get an accurate picture until the CSO releases its annual Population and Migration Estimates later this year.
Related web pages:
Irish Independent: Ireland faces massive bank brain drain as wages fall
Colm Toibin focuses on reluctant exile in “Brooklyn”
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Colm Toibin’s new novel, “Brooklyn”, garnered substantial press over the weekend. The author’s sixth novel is about a reluctant emigrant from Enniscorthy who moves to the New York borough knowing “the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar”. The book reflects on the pangs of homesickness and depicts the struggles of the main character, Eilis as she adapts to a new land fraught with its own struggles and eventually falls in love. Just as she begins to settle in, Eilis is called home by a family tragedy and must return to Enniscorthy.
The book is receiving widespread critical acclailm.
Related web pages:
- New York Times Magazine: His Irish Diaspora
- New York Times Book Review: ‘Brooklyn,’ by Colm Toibin: The Reluctant Emigrant
- Irish Independent: No place like Colm
- Irish Independent: Delicate portrait of a soul triumphs in Toibin’s tale
Ringsend native publishes memoir on American life
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Angeline Kearns Blain, a woman raised in 1950s Ringsend who today is an adjunct professor of sociology at Boise State University in Idaho, has published a memoir. “I used to be Irish” is being lauded by critics for its insight into a story too little told: the experience of Irish women emigrants.
Angeline Kearns Blain left Ireland at the age of 18 in 1957 to become the wife of an American soldier she had met at a Dublin bus-stop. The streetwise young woman had been consciously focusing on Americans as romantic targets in order to escape her working-class life as a cinema ice-cream seller. After settling in New England with her conservative, Protestant husband, she eventually settles in Idaho Falls where her husband gets a job at a government nuclear research facility. She would suffer a nervous breakdown and a marital breakup before turning to education and a career in academia.
The Irish Independent says “Her memoir is extraordinary, told with blunt honesty and scathing with. It’s a long way from the flats in Ringsend to being a professor at an American university”.
The Irish Times review notes the subversive nature of Kearns Blain’s story:
I Used To Be Irish exposes both the gender and class fault-lines not traditionally attended to in accounts of emigration: Kearns Blain’s overtures to a fellow Dublin woman emigrant marooned alongside her in a backwater town are spurned when the Loreto College graduate in question discovers that Angeline left school at 14 to scavenge dumps. The memoir upends the popular image of the Irish emigrant, that of the raw country boy pining for rural simplicity in a debauched foreign land: Kearns Blain is a streetwise Dubliner who knows enough about American popular culture to initially act the pure Irish colleen to beguile her GI, a teetotaller Puritan who later winces each time Angeline lets slip some obscene Dublin colloquialism or orders a shot of whiskey.
Angeline Kearns Blain has also written a memoir of her Dublin childhood, called “Stealing Sunlight”.
See related web pages:
- Irish Independent: “A very different American dream”
- Irish Times: “Streetwise Dublin breathes new life into the emigrant’s well-worn tale”
ESRI predicts 17% unemployment next year
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009The Economic and Social Reseaerch Institute is predicting unemployment reaching 15% by the end of this year before peaking at 17% next year. The organisation is estimating emigration figures will be 60,000 over the next two years. The Irish Independent notes that the organisations cautions, “It would be wrong to call that a forecast. It is more of an assumption, because migration is so hard to predict”.
The ESRI also predicts that the economy will contract by 14% in the three years from 2008 to 2010, noting, “By historic and international standards, this is a truly dramatic development. Prior to this the largest decline for an idustrialised country since the 1930s had been in Finland, where real GDP declined between 1990 and 1993″.
The CSO announced today that the unemployment rate now stands at 11.4%, with 388,600 people on the Live Register. This is more than double the rate of a year ago.
Related web pages:
- Irish Independent: We’ve never had it so bad
- ESRI press release: Quarterly Economic Commentary, Spring 2009
- CSO: Live Register April 2009