Skip to main content

Irish Emigration Exaggerated?

Expert says Irish emigration wildly exaggerated...

IRELAND IS in the grip of a “media, moral and public panic” about emigration that is not justified by the number of Irish people leaving the country, a migration expert has said.

Prof James Wickham, director of the Employment Research Centre at Trinity College, told a conference yesterday that during the general election campaign politicians and the media wildly exaggerated emigration rates.

“During the election we were told every day how 1,000 Irish people were leaving the country every week. The only problem with that is that a substantial number of them are returning immigrants,” said Prof Wickham.

The most recent estimates published by the Central Statistics Office indicated 27,700 of 65,300 emigrants recorded in the year to the end of April 2010 were Irish.

Prof Wickham said there is a very real danger that the “media, moral and public panic” surrounding emigration could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“The rhetoric that is being used in the current discussion of this in the media is that of the emigrant wake like the 1950s.The emigration we are experiencing is much more like the emigration of the 1980s rather than the 1950s. The 1980s represented a turning point for Ireland, and many of these educated people returned in the 1990s bringing new skills and money,” he said.

He said Irish emigration was not yet at the mass emigration levels seen recently among young people in Poland and Spain.

The test of whether Irish migration would become mass emigration would occur this summer, when a new generation of students will leave university, he said.

“We should learn lessons from the recent mass emigration from Poland, when people were treated as traitors for leaving. This created dissatisfaction. But I’ve seen no sign of that in Ireland, which has a good record of welcoming back emigrants,” he said.

Prof Wickham said the concept of a “brain drain” caused by emigration is giving way to a more modern concept called “brain circulation”, whereby people tend to move countries more often before returning to their home state.

He said migration is now a fact of life for different generations, including retirees living in the south of Spain and young people who form relationships with people from different countries.

“There has been a huge growth in so-called love miles, people following their girlfriend or boyfriend and living in their country,” he said.

He said emigration should not be treated as an “unmitigated disaster” but effort should be put in to encouraging educated people to return with skills later.

Prof Wickham was speaking at a research symposium at Trinity College, “Employment and the Crisis: Work, Migration, Unemployment”.


Report by JAMIE SMYTH - Irish Times

Popular posts from this blog

The State is about to create another housing bubble...

The Irish economy is set to repeat its old mistake of excess mortgage-lending... The run-up to Christmas is always a good time for burying bad news and this year was no different. On the Friday before Christmas, Bank of Ireland announced it was going to have to put more money aside to absorb possible losses on Irish residential mortgages. Just how much more money was not very clear but it would appear to run into several hundred million euro. The statement was extremely technical and did not actually talk about losses or defaults. But the point is clear. The bank had already put aside some money to absorb losses that might occur as a result of people not being able to pay their mortgages. It now seems that more people than expected are going to default and the bank has had to put some extra money aside. It is as timely a reminder as you could hope for that the Irish banks are still broken and still fighting their way through a mountain of problem mortgages as a result of their rec

Ireland's Celtic Tiger Excesses...

'Bang twins' may never get to run a business again... POST-boom Ireland is awash with cautionary tales of Celtic Tiger excesses, as a rattle around the carcasses of fallen property developers and entrepreneurs will show. Few can compete with the so-called Bang twins for youth, glamour and tasteful extravagance. Simon and Christian Stokes, the 35-year-old identical twins behind Bang Cafe and exclusive private members club, Residence, saw their entire business go bust with debts of €9m, €3m of which is owed to the tax man. The debt may be in the ha'penny place compared with the eye-watering billions owed by some of their former customers. But their fall has been arguably steeper and more damning than some of the country's richest tycoons. Last week, further humiliation was heaped on them with revelations that even as their businesses were going under, the twins spent €146,000 of company money in 18 months on designer shopping sprees, five star holidays and sumptu

Top property sales 2016 – who bought and sold...

The year saw a shift from D4 to D6 while the country market slowed on the previous year... DUBLIN... Dublin 6 dominated top-end sales this year and, in particular, Dartry. Whereas in other years coastal south Co Dublin and Shrewsbury and Ailesbury Roads have dominated, Dublin 6 and the area around Temple Road have become hot property. Top of the list was the purchase in May of Alston at 19 Temple Road for a whopping €10.225 million when former Paddy Power boss Patrick Kennedy traded up from his home on nearby Palmerston Road. In a quiet off-market deal, the Victorian property, on one acre, was sold by barrister Vincent Foley and his wife, Helen, who have lived there since the late 1980s. Around the corner at 5 Temple Gardens, €6.5 million exchanged hands when the detached redbrick house on a third of an acre owned by the late barrister and former attorney general, Rory Brady, sold in another off-market deal. Not long after Subiaco at 1 Temple Gardens sold for €5.85 million shortly a