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Thursday, May 5th, 2011A social psychologist has said that the changing nature of emigration means that Ireland is likely to come under increasing pressure to allow its emigrants to vote.
Dr Marc Scully completed his PhD thesis, “Discourses of Authenticity and National Identity among the Irish Diaspora in England�, in the Open University’s Psychology Department last year. He spoke last week at the second annual Conference on Social Psychology in Ireland (C-SPI) in the University of Limerick.
According to a UL press release, Dr Scully is now exploring how “his findings might apply to the emerging ‘third great wave’ of post-war emigrants now leaving for England and elsewhere.�
He believes that the changing nature of emigration is enabling a shift toward bi-located lives:
“There’s every indication that recent emigrants are, at least psychologically and in some cases practically, living in two countries simultaneously and are embracing this as an increasingly normal way of living.
This will have implications for the political aspirations of the Irish abroad:
Therefore, the calls for emigrant voting rights which were so prominent before the election are unlikely to go away, as advances in communications have allowed emigrants to continue to be part of the national conversation in ways that weren’t possible with previous generations – the emphasis placed on transnational knowledge and experiences by this cohort means that they will want to continue to have a say, and this will need to be addressed as an aspect of political reform.â€?
This calls to mind a recent experience I had, in which I spoke on a radio show about issues of emigrant voting rights and emigration. Another of the show’s guests, a rep from the London Irish Centre, made the point that he was not in favour of emigrant voting rights, believing that people should vote in the location where they worked and spent their everyday realities. He went on to suggest that there were few things sadder than some of the older people he’d met who had spent decades in England but had never adjusted to the fact.
I was a bit surprised by the way he connected the voting rights issue with the plight of disadvantaged Irish people who had been unable to settle in London and didn’t quite know how to respond. I’ve thought since that that was a particularly curious argument against emigrant voting rights: obviously the situation of 1950s and1960s-era emigrants caught in that kind of limbo between two cultures wasn’t caused by anything to do with emigrants having a vote – because, of course, they didn’t have a vote in Ireland then and still don’t now.
I don’t believe that Official Ireland’s explicit rejection of its own citizens’ right to the most basic act of participation in their home country did anything to help Irish people integrate into the UK or elsewhere – and in fact, I believe that if emigrants had maintained the right to vote we wouldn’t have waited until 2002 for a Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants – which signalled a new attitude in our approach to the Irish abroad with the words: “We owe much to our emigrantsâ€?.
The most vulnerable of our emigrants, who were enormously helpful to Ireland’s economic development when we needed them, were allowed to languish with little thought from our politicians until this century. They were far away, their remittances were useful, and our leaders were under little pressure to listen to either their needs or any nascent political aspirations among the Irish abroad.
Things are different now. We need our Irish abroad as much as ever, but as countries all over the world seek to engage their expats not only economically but politically as well, we need to realise that we can’t expect the relationship to flourish if we’re not listening to them. We need to pay attention to Dr Scully’s assertion that the new kinds of transnational navigation being practiced by our young emigrants today will make them increasingly hard to ignore. We should be embracing this, and welcome this increased engagement as healthier for everyone.
Related link:
Marc Scully’s page on the Open University website.
High unemployment suggests lower emigration, says BOI
Monday, April 11th, 2011The Bank of Ireland has revised its economic forecast to reflect a gloomier situation than it had previously predicated.
The Bank’s latest quarterly economic outlook says that the economy will grow by 0.5% in 2011, down from the 1.5% growth rate it had previously predicted.
The Irish Examiner reports this downward revision comes following the emergence of what the BOI report described as “two surprising and unwelcome” economic trends:
“The first was that the unemployment rate over the past six months has been much higher than previously published, on the basis that the labour force stopped falling in the final quarter of 2010,” commented Bank of Ireland chief economist Dan McLaughlin, author of the report.
The bank said that this implies that the scale of net emigration “is much lower than previously thought”.
The unemployment rate in 2011 is now expected to average 14.4% from 13.6% last year, although it has probably peaked in recent months, BOI said.
Notre Dame setting up Irish oral history archive
Friday, April 8th, 2011The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana is working on an online database of Irish oral history that will allow users to upload their stories themselves.
The project, headed by Deb Rotman, the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Anthropology, is aimed particularly at capturing tales from the generation of immigrants who lived through the Irish Civil War and in early twentieth-century America.
“Those generations have some really great stories that we’re trying to capture, but we can only do so much,� says Rotman in a press release from the university. The project will allow immigrants to upload their own experiences using audio, text, photos and possibly video.
The project is linked in with the university’s archaeological and anthropological exploration of Michigan’s Beaver Island, which was inhabited in the 19th century by a group of Irish people largely from the Donegal island of Ã?rainn Mhór. In Beaver Island, they created a farming lifestyle similar to the one they’d left behind – so in studying this community, students are gaining an insight into a rural immigrant experience, unlike the more frequently studied urban Irish experience in the US.
“The archaeological record and the historic documents work together telling different parts of the same story,� says Rotman, “and oral history is the third leg of that stool.�
As an alumnus of Notre Dame, I’m pleased to see such innovative Irish projects coming from there – particularly as I attended back in the dark ages, even before there was an Irish Studies option! The University now has one of the highest-profile Irish Studies programmes in the world.
Read the press release on the Notre Dame website.
Meanwhile, I’ve updated my GlobalIrish.ie list of Irish oral history projects. Am I missing any? Let me know!
“I feel like I’m the only one left”: One young writer on emigration
Thursday, April 7th, 2011There’s a good article on emigration in Blastmagazine.com, written by a young woman who is still at home, but feeling a bit forlorn as her friends emigrate.  Brenda Collins writes:
I’m not so desperate that this recession is making me lonely. But with most of my friends more likely to be making a living in Uganda than Ireland, I have to admit that it’s getting a little barren and boring for me here. I feel like I’m the only one left. I don’t laugh anymore when I see the “Will the last graduate left in Ireland please turn off the light� Facebook page pop up on my news feed. I admit, I’m not the most gregarious of individuals and this probably hasn’t helped my case. In Ireland, shyness and sobriety do not a social network make.
Nevertheless, I feel slightly robbed. We were the first generation of Irish people who grew up with the warm and unwavering promise that we would never have to leave. And so we grew up, unprepared, only to get smacked mid-degree with a hefty layer cake of governmental corruption, incompetence and economic failure. as her friends are emigrating.
(Though weren’t the 1980s generation the first generation of Irish people who grew up with the promise that they would never have to emigrate? The 1970s were a period of return migration, and seemed to hold out the promise at the time that emigration was over. How illusory.)
In any case, the writer notes, that it’s not only the absence of paid employment that’s driving her generation to go:
The choices for emerging graduates are stark. You can stay and fill out the long application forms for social welfare payments and paper the streets with your resumé in the hope that something sticks. Or you can leave. Because the biggest problem is not the lack of jobs (although it’s hardly a reason to celebrate), it’s the lack of anything. Last September, I moved to Manhattan to do a three-month unpaid internship. It was an incredible experience and I gained so much from it, both professionally and personally. But the sheer insanity of borrowing money to work for nothing epitomises the sort of outlandish rabbit-hole that the Irish people have been pushed into.
And that’s why people are emigrating. Not only is it nigh on impossible to get a salaried job, it’s also impossible to get work experience or internships. Facing a future of meagre state payments and the slow rot of their academic skills, graduates turn instead to visa applications. They uproot their whole lives just to feel what it might be like to have a career. I read New York Times articles about 28-year-old law students who are “stuck� doing yet another internship, and I envy them. There is no such innovation on this side of the pond.
It’s a bleak portrayal of what it’s like to be a young person at home in Ireland right now. Some commentators have noted that this feeling that “everyone is going” is in itself likely to be a driver of emigration. This is no doubt true. But what’s the solution?
Read the whole article: Irish emigration 3.0: A Blast writer’s thoughts on Ireland’s recession.
“My heart leaped up with so much joy”: Happy St Patrick’s Day!
Thursday, March 17th, 2011Every St Patrick’s Day, I am reminded of my favourite book, The Hard Road to Klondike, and Micheál MacGowan’s poignant story of St Patrick’s Day in All Gold Creek in the Yukon. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it’s the translation from Irish of the oral memoir of Donegal native Micheál MacGowan’s adventures in Montana and the Alaskan Gold Rush. It’s wonderful.
I love the story of this impromptu St Patrick’s Day parade  (probably Alaska’s first!), not least because it’s true. MacGowan’s tale captures the camaraderie, fun and poignancy of a good St Patrick’s Day celebration far from home. The story opens early on St Patrick’s morning with our hero, high in the hills, five miles from the nearest village, gathering a can of snow to melt for water for his breakfast.
As I stood there, suddenly I thought I heard pipe-music in the distance. At first I thought it was a dream but in a short while I heard it again. I straightened up then so as to hear it better but as luck had it, didn’t the piper stop playing as soon as I was in a position to listen properly. It was some time before he started up again but when he did he seemed to be closer and the music was clearer; and wasn’t the tune he was playing ‘St. Patrick’s Day’! I’d say that by then the piper was three or four miles away up in the hills behind us; there, then, was I, three thousand miles from home but, in the time it would take you to clap your hands, I fancied I was back again among my own people in Cloghaneely. My heart leaped up with so much joy that I was sure it was going to jump out of my breast altogether.
I ran back into the cabin and told my friends what was happening. They came out and when they heard the music, they were so overjoyed that one of them rushed around with the news to all the Irishmen in the neighbouring cabins. They too got up and when they also heard the pipe-music coming towards them they nearly went out of their minds. They went roaring and shouting around the place so much that you could hear the echoes coming back out of the mountains and valleys surrounding us. Everyone waited there until we felt the piper was coming near to us and then we all went out to meet him. Nobody was fully clothed and half of us hadn’t eaten at all but our blood was hot and despite the frost none of us felt the cold a bit! When we met him, we carried him shoulder-high for a good part of the way back. He was brought into our cabin and neither food nor drink was spared on him. And it was still early in the day.
When everyone was ready, he tuned his pipes and off we went four abreast after him like soldiers in full marching order. There wasn’t an Irish tune that we had ever heard that he didn’t play on the way down the valley. Crowds of people from other countries were working away on the side of the hill and they didn’t know from Adam what on earth was up with us marching off like that behind the piper. They thought we were off our heads altogether but we made it known to them that it was our very own day—the blessed feast-day of St. Patrick. On we marched until we came to the hotels and we went into the first big one that we met. Without exaggeration, I’d say that there were up to six hundred men there before us—men from all parts of the world. We were thirsty after the march and, though we hadn’t a bit of shamrock between us, we thought it no harm to keep up the old custom and to wet it as well as we were able.
We had a couple of drinks each and, as we relaxed, I stood up and asked the piper to tune up his pipes and play us ‘St. Patrick’s Day’ from one end of the house to the other. The word was hardly out of my mouth before he was on his feet…
The men drown the shamrock exuberantly at the town’s hotels, their day only briefly disrupted by the violent dispatch of an Orangeman who didn’t appreciate the celebrations. (We’ll skip that bit.)
As night fell, we all gathered ourselves together again and set off up the hill along the way we had come until we reached our own cabins again. We were tired out and it wasn’t hard to make our beds that night. The piper spent the night with us and next morning he bade us farewell and went off to the back of the mountain where himself and two friends of his were working.
A loyal good-natured Irishman, like thousands of others of his race, he left his bones stretched under frost and snow, far from his people, out in the backwoods, where none of his own kith would ever come to say a prayer for his soul. We heard that he had been killed in one of the shafts shortly after he had come to us to keep the Feast of St. Patrick with his music in All Gold Creek.
A bit of a sad ending there, but MacGowan himself had a much happier one. He went home to Donegal in 1901, travelling first class with the fortunes he brought from the Gold Rush. “I had seen enough of modern times in America; and it was like a healing balm to find myself under the old rafters again.” He decided to stay in Donegal, fell in love, married, and raised a family – and MacGowan, one of Ireland’s greatest emigrant adventurers, declared he would rather see one of his eleven children “gathering rags” than heading for America.
Happy St Patrick’s Day – I hope you’re parading where ever you are!
- You can read a full book review I wrote several years ago over at the Emigrant.ie website.
- I also wrote the entry on Michael MacGowan in Ireland and the Americas.
- You should probably buy the book.
Are we being too optimistic?
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011A recent edition of the Economist published an interesting graphic showing inward and outward migration based on both historic data and on forecasts from the Economic and Social Research Institute.
The graph, however, shows that the ESRI is predicting a strong downturn in outward migration starting this year, and a similarly significant upsurge in immigration. This is curious – there was much media panic over the forecast that a net total of 100,000 people would leave Ireland between April 2010 and April 2012. At the time I didn’t understand the hullabaloo, as outward migration was already running at about 65,000 a year. But this graph is a pretty vivid demonstration that the ESRI’s forecasts are likely to be too optimistic, as there’s no apparent change in economic circumstances on the horizon likely to be strong enough to drive such a reversal.
Another note on that Economist article: it takes a fairly balanced view on emigration overall, with some emotive talk of how emigration is “a trauma formed by economic wounds inflicted decades ago that still runs deep in the collective memory”, while also noting the more positive aspects of emigration that have not gone unnoticed by policy-makers:
Still, many argue that a population willing to move to where the jobs are is exactly what a country in Ireland’s predicament needs. Historically, labour mobility has helped to keep a lid on unemployment. And there have been other benefits: the diaspora, particularly in the United States, has proved a useful asset for Ireland, politically as well as economically. Moreover, a move abroad today is hardly the one-way ticket it was for many in the 19th century. When Ireland started to boom in the 1990s many émigrés returned home, bringing with them much-needed skills and capital.
While any rational assessment of the impact of emigration on Irish society would have to point out the diaspora’s positive economic benefits, I believe the last two sentences of that paragraph are too optimistic. They echo many statements made by politicians and comfortable business executives in recent months, as well as the hopes in the heart of many young people who are going away. But it’s a line that is being fed to us by a political class that doesn’t want to face up the enormity of the fact that for many of this generation, emigration will be a one-way trip. We will need Celtic-Tiger-job growth to drive Celtic-Tiger-style return rates, and that doesn’t seem likely right now – if ever. (Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe anyone has crunched the numbers and actually determined how many of those who left in the 1980s and 1990s ever returned. We know it’s significant, but with 800,000 Irish-born citizens abroad, it’s safe to say many of them remain overseas.)
Plus, the last boom was both a tech boom and building boom, which offered opportunities for both those with high-tech skills and tradespeople. Another building boom in the next decade or two seems highly unlikely. And even if a new tech boom starts, today’s emigrants who might like to return will be competing for jobs with the highly skilled, multilingual workers of Europe in ways they didn’t have to in the pre-accession days of the early Celtic Tiger. It’s highly likely that any future inward migration will be comprised of a broad range of nationalities, as it was during the last years of the Celtic Tiger, and returning Irish emigrants will have no monopoly on future opportunities.
I would like to think that those individuals who are most highly motivated to return will do so, but it’s unrealistic to believe that it will be an easy task to lure this generation of emigrants back after several years of a severe economic downturn. There’s really no evidence to suggest that emigration won’t be a one-way trip for most of our young people, and we should stop pretending otherwise and start dealing with reality.
Read the article on the Economist website: Ireland’s crash: After the race
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