World a much smaller and better place for Irish ‘semigrants’ today

ON FRIDAY evenings when I arrive home, tired, often hungry and dying to see the family after a week in London, an array of my compatriots line up to greet me. Some are well known and some are not known at all.

On the walk from flight to passport control at Dublin Airport I mentally salute the photographs on the walls — Michael D, Padraig Harrington, Mary McAleese, Mickey MacConnell, the cute red-haired freckle-faced child, the wizened old man with bright eyes.

The welcome home from these images is distinctly Irish. So too is the goodbye from Dublin Airport.

I leave with exhortations ringing in my ears from Connect Ireland, a government initiative backed by the IDA to attract companies and jobs.

Video and audio messages from Saoirse Ronan, Paul O’Connell, Michael Flatley and Martin Sheen remind me that all contacts are valuable and a potential help to our economy emerging from recession.

While the talk about Ireland, at home and abroad, is so often couched in economic terms and parameters, it’s good to remember that Ireland’s people, whether we live in Kanturk or Kensington, Shannon or Sydney, Waterford or Washington, are her greatest asset.

Last year I became one of that diaspora, falling under the unusual acronym Nipple — New Irish Professional Person Living in England.

I’m also a ‘semigrant’ — a new breed identified by University College Cork (UCC) as professional Irish people who earn their living elsewhere, but travel home regularly and are in close touch with Irish life.

And there are a lot of us recent emigrants. Of the 90,000-odd people who left the country last year, about 22,000 headed to the UK and it’s fair to assume that the vast majority were London bound.

While many have left with no choice, there are others who have departed for better opportunities, greater experience, higher salaries and new adventures.

More than 20 years ago I lived both in the USA and in Australia for spells.

The recession of the 1980s drove many far and wide in search of opportunities. Back then home felt very far away.

My mother wrote regularly, often including week-old newspapers and magazines that we read from cover to cover and then passed around to friends.

In the folds of stories from home she would slip in a couple of Twinings Irish Breakfast teabags for a taste we couldn’t replicate so many miles away. Phone calls were expensive and sporadic.

My 1980s generation were among the first students in Ireland to routinely go onto third-level education and our departure as graduates in straitened times sparked many headlines and much soul searching.

While the emigration experience has been ingrained into our culture for centuries, it was now about losing educated young people and not just manual labour.

The emigration wave born of the last six years of austerity is much more nuanced. The latest Central Statistics Office numbers tell us that young people are leaving in large numbers.

A UCC report, Irish Emigration in an Age of Austerity, found that 70% of those who left between 2006 and 2012 were people in their 20s and 62% had third-level qualifications.

These are some of the faces I share early morning and late evening flights with on a regular basis. But the Nipples I mostly see are males and females in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

Our roles pay enough to warrant regular, even weekly flights home. Viber and Skype contact as well as social media mean that Nipples don’t have to miss out on family or community life.

Smart phone apps keep these ‘semigrants’ in touch with news from home. Morning Ireland can be played live each day and many television programmes are available on playback facilities.

When my grandfather left west Clare for work in England in the 1950s contact was laborious and only by letter. The journey home, by train and boat, was arduous and family life was limited to Christmas and a few weeks in the summer. When I travelled to London as a child with my mother in the 1970s I remember her hushing us in the shops of Oxford Street, lest our Irish accents led to us being mistaken for terrorists at the height of the IRA bombing campaign.

When I now meet the descendants of Irish people who emigrated to the UK decades ago, they no longer live in the shadows. They lead in commercial, political and social endeavours and are generally thrilled to explore shared connections of our past. The recent four-day state visit to the UK by President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina highlighted the deep links between our two countries and how much we have in common. Culturally living in England is a richly rewarding experience, one that is not so far removed from modern Ireland.

AND all the clichés about the Irish fitting in are true. Internationally the people I meet are not talking about the Celtic Tiger or the IMF/EU bailout anymore. The reaction to Ireland is much more likely to include references to Chris O’Dowd, Niall Horan or Una Healy than to Fianna Fáil or bankrupt property developers.

And if ever my inferiority complex surfaces in a comment about the slowness of the economic recovery, I am likely to be reminded of what a great country I belong to by the children and grandchildren of emigrants who hold a special place in their hearts for the home of their ancestors.

For those of the Irish diaspora like me, weary from a decade of constriction and repeated redundancies at home, it’s invigorating to be working in a global city like London and building for the future, rather than always trying to do more with less. Eighteen months ago I couldn’t see a life beyond the confines of the Irish media world I inhabited. When the Sunday Tribune I edited folded, and when my subsequent job became untenable, it took a significant adjustment to expand my horizons beyond Ireland.

By the time I did I was grateful for an opportunity and so excited to land my dream job that I didn’t waste time on being daunted.

The Monday-to-Friday Dublin London commute is not glamorous. It can be tiring, but it’s manageable. And compared to the career opportunity London offers in terms of global scope, digital transformation, business leadership, innovation and working with really smart people, two flights a week is a dawdle. I’m very fortunate indeed to be a Nipple.

Nóirín Hegarty is managing destination editor with Lonely Planet based in London and Nashville, Tennessee.