Saturday, April 17, 2010
WATCHING Vincent Browne’s news programme on Wednesday night I found myself thinking that young people should seriously consider emigrating because the prospects here seem so bleak. This is the third major recession I can remember and there are reasons for suspecting it could be the worst, notwithstanding the ERSI’s recent prediction that things will pick up in 2011.
It suggested that unemployment will drop from 13.5% to 13%, but that is largely because 60,000 Irish people have already emigrated and a further 40,000 are expected to go this year. These are the people who would normally be paying taxes that would fund the medical cards, free travel, and pensions of the retired generation. An exodus has already started for Australia.
Eleven young people left Gneeveguilla in Co Kerry for Australia in just one week recently. From 1996 to 2002 the population of the village actually went up from 230 to 239, but the gains of all those years were wiped out in a week. Upwards of 40 young people have left the Rathmore area for Australia this year.
The exodus in the 1950s was preceded by massive emigration in the 1930s and 1940s, while the emigration of the 1980s actually began in the 1970s. But the current economic crisis has been a crash in which we have gone from boom to bust.
Irish people have instinctively turned to emigration in times of economic hardship ever since the Great Famine. We conveniently blamed that on the British.
Only the potato crop failed in 1845, but it was not until after it failed again the following year that the true horror began to strike home.
The British government, which was wedded to laissez-faire economics, initially felt powerless to intervene. It did nothing to stop the export of other foodstuffs. Only those who were totally dependent on the potato starved. Most of the people exporting the food were Irish, but it was the British government that allowed it. If there had been an independent Irish government, things might not have been done any differently, but we would only have had ourselves to blame in that event.
Individual landlords exploited the crisis to shift people from their land by assisting them to emigrate to the US. In ethnic Irish circles the famine was depicted as genocide, as if London had deliberately created the blight to starve the Irish in order to force them to emigrate.
George Bancroft, the US ambassador to Britain, reported on March 3, 1847 that British spending on Irish relief that year equalled "the entire expense of the whole administration of the federal government of the United States for two years".
That was an independent assessment by an anti-British observer. By then the British had initiated relief projects that were roads to nowhere or bridges over nothing. The government in London wished to allow the people to earn money, but if they employed them on productive jobs the authorities believed it would undermine the economy.
At the time the Americans still looked on Britain as their greatest enemy. Bancroft gloated that the British were bankrupting themselves because they were doing so much to help the starving Irish. The 1840s were marred by a selfish, irresponsible capitalism, but the British were really no worse than others. They, at least, had already outlawed slavery, which continued in the United States until the 1860s.
In historical terms the Great Famine was not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through the famine, but she said they never talked about it. She therefore concluded there was so much fish available that the famine probably never affected the Dingle peninsula.
In fact, however, the peninsula was one of the worst affected places in the country. It was like west Cork. Contemporary newspapers carried horror stories of what was happening.
The price of meat remained static throughout the famine, which indicates there was no shortage of it. The starving were dependent on the potato. They died even though there was plenty of other food.
Eventually all classes were hit by the consequences of the famine because the greatest killer was not actual starvation — it was disease. More people died of diseases like typhoid and cholera than of hunger. Ironically, many of the wealthier people, such as those who had been exporting food, were even more susceptible to the typhoid and cholera epidemics because they would have developed little natural resistance to such diseases.
What was subsequently called the Great Silence was probably a consequence of people feeling guilty because they could have done more to help the starving and thus helped to avoid the ensuing epidemics that killed so many. To err is human, and to blame it on someone else is politics. So we blamed the whole thing on the British.
We can still learn from the mistakes of those days. As a result of the Irish Examiner’s recent exposé on the ghost estates around the country, the Government has been talking about bringing in bulldozers to demolish unfinished buildings. This is like a flashback to famine times — a 21st century equivalent of 19th century laissez-faire arguments.
The Government is talking about tearing down unfinished buildings and there have even been suggestions of demolishing hotels because there are now too many beds in the country. Such destruction would become the latter-day equivalent of the roads built to nowhere during the famine.
Commonsense dictates that these projects should be finished. If those responsible are not going to finish the work, the state should take it over and put unemployed construction workers back to work on completing the houses and then sell them off.
OF COURSE, that would mean these houses would be competing with other property on the open market. It would undoubtedly have some impact on the demand for houses, and prices would come down. Who would be hurt by all of this — the speculators who helped to get us into the mess?
For many years our bigger hotels concentrated on international tours to fill up the bulk of their rooms and then charged premium rates for the other rooms. This meant the American and European tour companies were only being charged about one-third of what anybody coming in from the street had to pay.
Few Irish people wished to go on a bus tour of their own country, so before long most of them could not afford to bring their families on holidays to Irish hotels. It was cheaper to fly to Turkey for two or three weeks and avail of the tourist accommodation there than to spend a week in a hotel at home.
In addressing the problems of the last recession in the late 1980s, Charlie Haughey noted that Irish people going abroad as tourists spent more than the country earned from incoming tourists. In recent years the imbalance has undoubtedly grown worse.
For years the tourism industry complained there were not enough bedrooms in the country. Now we have too many. This is because we have priced ourselves out of the market. It’s time we got our priorities right for a change.
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