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« Previous Entries Next Entries »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”
Radio show advises on Australia move
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008The Last Word programme on Today FM carried a feature today on how to emigrate to Australia. The marketing manager of a business called Migrationabroad.com painted a rosy view of moving to Australia, depicting it as a place with good weather, plentiful jobs, cheap housing and a good work-life balance.
A prospective emigrant was also interviewed, who is planning on moving to Perth with his wife and children, where they will join friends. He has been working but says “with the way the economy is going, I don’t know what the future holds”. He says that his decision to move was initially a lifestyle choice rather than an economic move; they are giving it two years and then will decide whether to move there permanently.
The Migrationabroad.com representative says that she gives clinics every month, and has found that more people are moving to Australia who have never been there before. “People are prepared to take a chance on it…The culture shock isn’t there”. She added that the schools were good, they speak English, and there is a similar system to recognise trades. She said it was the most popular destination.
After the interview, the presenter read a text that had come in. “Now we know we’re in the 1980s, promoting emigration”. The presenter said that promoting emigration had not been his intent.
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