Away for Christmas

THE statistics tell the official story but word-of-mouth paints a starker picture of the shift back towards the age-old curse of mass emigration.

The most recent CSO figures tell us 65,300 people left Ireland in the 12-month period to April 2010, roughly half of which were Irish, almost 10,000 more than had left in the year that bookended the September ’08 collapse. Unsurprisingly, we have to go back to 1989 for the last time things were this bad.

Visit any small town or village in Ireland and you’ll get names, not just cold statistics. Walk around Woodlawn in the Bronx and the intensely Irish community that resides there will tell you about the upsurge they’ve witnessed in the last two years.