It is time to defeat this enemy - The drain of emigration

YESTERDAY we celebrated our national day with a great, uplifting sense of fun and a determined, unrelenting pride.

A well-tested sense of defiance, our well-honed a-plague-on-all-their-houses resolve played a part too. All around the world the 40m plus diaspora, whether new emigrants or children of long-settled parents, raised a glass, metaphorically at least, and hurrahed whatever they imagined being Irish is today or what it might have been once upon a time in the sepia long ago.

Government minsters scattered around the globe pressed the flesh and smiled at babies in far-flung Irish centres. The toddlers Irish citizens, some yet to meet their grandparents. The minsters swung hurleys in sun-baked countries where an ash tree never grew. They did all they might to create a positive impression of this small, relatively remote island to try to attract investment and jobs or even holidaying visitors.

This annual exodus is an increasingly important part of our interaction with the wider world. It is tragically typical of our self-deprecating short sightedness that these valuable missions are demeaned as jollies by those amongst us who seem to begrudge everything.

Amid the flag waving and cheers there was an absence, a silence in our towns and cities though. The near 250,000 healthy citizens who left this country, albeit in different economic circumstances, since 2008 have left a void that cannot be easily filled. That we seem to regard an exodus on this immense scale as natural and tolerable says a lot about how we have become inured to the deprivations forced on us by the lack of opportunity and economic collapse.

Water charges brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets but emigration, a far, far greater drain on our national well being did little more than provoke a few tear-stained letters to national papers. That we have so completely accepted that forced emigration as inevitable may be our greatest capitulation in a litany of abject deference stretching across too many centuries.

Even today other European countries as badly affected by recession as Ireland — Greece, Spain and Portugal — have tiny rates of emigration compared to ours. That we can’t even give a plausible explanation for that difference, that terrible waste, says a lot about us. That we are so very cavalier about recognising the emotional consequences of emigration on emigrants and those left behind — especially mothers, and even more so mothers in rural isolation — suggests a coldness very much at variance with our self image.

Emigration is first an economic issue and then an emotional one. Then it becomes a social and political one. It is hard not ot think that some of those well educated and vibrant Irish people building lives for themselves and their young families far, far away are the very people we need to confront the age old cultural and administrative malaises that still have such a negative impact. It of course suits the status quo that they leave but we can no longer afford such a regular emptying if we are to realise our potential. We should more clearly recognise emigration for the enemy it is.