Emigration always a lifestyle choice

The imprecision of Dr Piaras MacEinri (Irish Examiner, Sept 27), who headed a UCC study into recent Irish emigration, is strange. He “warned against using the findings to back the idea that emigration was mainly a lifestyle choice, as Finance Minister Michael Noonan claimed”.

Emigration is a lifestyle choice. So is internal migration, from Cork, Donegal, Mayo or Tipperary, (as I did) or elsewhere to Dublin, and vice versa.

Emigrants and migrants — including those with third-level qualifications financed by taxpayers — think their lifestyles will be better than if they stayed in their places of birth. That is true of famine and political refugees.