Emigration isn’t their first goal

In reply to a question in the Dáil last week about JobBridge internships being used to supplement teachers, Minister Ruari Quinn declared: “an awful lot of young people are going into teaching so that they can emigrate”.

This is an incredibly ill-founded claim to make, and there is no doubt that if the minister were to ask Final Year students in the Teacher Training Colleges or the Higher Diploma in Education students at university their reason for choosing a career in teaching, that their desire to emigrate would be a complete non-starter as an answer.

Is the minister seriously suggesting that students, when filling out their CAO forms, will put down teaching as their preferred choice of career, so that when they qualify in three or four years’ time they will want to be able to say: ‘Hooray! Now we can emigrate’.