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“That’s what young people are entitled to do”: Tanaiste on emigration
By Noreen Bowden | February 16, 2010
Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Coughlan was questioned about emigration in a wide-ranging interview aired last night by BBC’s Hardtalk programme. Here is what she had to say:
Questioner: For the first time in 15 or more years, there is net emigration in Ireland. Once again we see Irish people leaving this country leaving this country looking for work. How long? How long is that going to last?
You have two things happening. We have had over – in the80s we had about a million people working. Two years ago, two and a half years ago, over 2.1 million people working. We have 1.8 million still working in this country.
We did have a lot of people who came from the new member states to come here. Many of them have returned home because the employment opportunities have not been afforded to them.
Equally we have a lot of people – young people- who have decided they will go to other parts of the world to gain experience and I think the type of emigration that we have –
Questioner: But your government was supposed to have ended that, the whole cycle of Irish having to leave Ireland.
It’s the type of people that have left have gone on the basis that – some of them, fine, they want to enjoy themselves. That’s what young people are entitled to do.
But moreover, they are coming with a different talent. They are coming with degrees, PhDs. They are people who have a greater acumen academically and they have found work in other parts of the world.
And that’s not a bad thing. Because equally we still continue to have very many people who are working here from other member states, the EU and Northern Ireland.
Related web pages:
- See the full interview on thestory.ie (Emigration comments begin in the sixth minute of part 3)
- Hardtalk website
- Mary Coughlan’s website
Topics: Latest News | 2 Comments »
February 17th, 2010 at 2:07 am
As a direct result of her incompetence many Ryan Air flights will be full and they will be one way tickets and this is what Cowen and Coughlan and FF/Greens want. Soon the financial world will see that they have been fooled up to their eyeballs concerning the “austerity” measures that Lenihan has brought in.
They wanted to believe that Ireland was doing something, we are we are borrowing 20 more billion this year alone and putting another 54bn into NAMA an SPV to keep it off our balance sheet. Today the greeks were being crucified about their SPV loans that they took out with the full knowledge of the ECB and Eurostat who are pretending they knew nothing about them. They told Ireland to create an SPV just a couple of months ago. No wonder the Euro is under massive speculative attack.
September 30th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
[…] it’s an involuntary departure. Tanaiste Mary Coughlan declaring young Irish people were entitled to emigrate to enjoy themselves, Avoca executive and Your Country Your Call judge Amanda Pratt on PrimeTime to blithely tell young […]