Leaving Behind Neidín

Another post I left in the new politics blog, Tea and Toast.


Amidst all the doom and gloom of the past year, with Ireland needing help from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, an economy which continues to stay in the doldrums, and another tough budget with the spectre of at least another three to come, one traditional Irish way of life has silently returned: emigration.


From May 2008 to April 2009, a Central Statistics Office report found that 65,000 people emigrated from Ireland, a forty per cent increase from the previous year. With 57,300 immigrating into Ireland, this represented the first net emigration seen here since 1995. Over half the people who emigrated were citizens of Eastern European states who had arrived here less than a decade ago, but Irish nationals accounted for the next largest group, some 18,100 leaving their home state to find a better life elsewhere.


The numbers leaving this country are hidden somewhat by the large natural growth in population enjoyed by Ireland. The highest number of births seen since 1896 contributed to a natural growth of over 45,000 in 2008-09, meaning Ireland’s population is still growing. This fact merely masks that while the number of people aged 65 or older has increased to record levels, and more children are born to adequately compensate for deaths, thousands of our citizens have been forced to leave their homeland to secure a future for themselves.


This sad reality is not a one-year blip. In 2010, despite a similar natural increase of population, another 65,000 people left, with Irish nationals accounting for the largest share of this group, 27,700. With a net emigration figure of over 34,000, Ireland is seeing emigration levels of a scale unseen since the 1980s. Next year, the Economic and Social Research Institute predicts another 120,000 will leave for foreign shores.


It wasn’t supposed to be like this. On the day I started university, in September 2004, my class was told how fortunate we were to live in a proud, modern nation with a booming economy that was the envy of the world. The enforced emigration which had plagued this land for four centuries, right up to the days of our own infancy, was a fading memory.


Our generation, we were promised, would be the first that would emigrate only by choice, free from being forced to suffer the pain of leaving family and friends to eke out a living elsewhere, with the real possibility of never being able to return. Thanks to the economic policies of our political and economic establishment, our generation were promised the lives that no-one could have dared to imagine we would have when we were born, with free education if we wanted it, and a huge range of jobs to choose from. Our parents would not have to bear the pain of seeing their children leave home for good, and we could become masters of our own destinies without climbing aboard a plane or ferry.


Yet less than a decade later, those promises ring hollow, and the economy which was once the envy of the world hasbecome the laughing stock, as the Celtic Tiger has turned into the Celtic Kitten, devoid of claws and with a whimper instead of a roar. Our parents worry that they may soon be bringing us to the departure gates, fearing we will only return for short holidays. Dozens of my friends have already left, in search of employment they cannot get here. They form part of the 1,000 people who move to Great Britain every month and the more than 7,000 who received residency rights in Canada, Australia and the US last year, as well as the22,000 who have obtained a one-year working visa in Australia. It is sad to see them go, and the sadness will continue as more friends leave in the coming years. I might even have to leave myself, a prospect I would never have contemplated five years ago.


The title of this piece refers to a Jimmy McCarthy song, performed by Mary Black, “As I Leave Behind Neidín”, used as a soundtrack to a piece on emigration shown on the 1986 episode of RTÉ’s “Reeling in the Years”. In that year, the year I was born, 30,000 people emigrated from Ireland as crippling unemployment and no economic recovery in sight forced tens of thousands of young Irish people to leave their homelands.


A tear comes to my eye every time I see that episode, but the reason it comes to my eye now is slightly different to why it came when I first saw that episode. Once, I wondered about the people forced to leave Ireland in that year, especially the people featured on the programme. What happened to them? Did they ever get the opportunity to return to the land they clearly didn’t want to leave? Were they even still alive, or did they die in a foreign land, far from the lives and people they loved and missed? The sadness flooded through me as Mary Black sang “won’t you remember me?”


I saw the episode again recently, and while those questions about the preceding generation remained, and the familiar sorrow repeated itself as the strains of that ballad played in the background, I found myself asking the same questions, but about my own generation. What will happen to us? If we have to leave this country, will we get the opportunity to return? Will we die in a foreign land we’ll never call home? Will we be remembered?


Of course, the world is a much smaller place today, and leaving one’s country doesn’t mean that you can’t return. But it does get harder once you lay down roots in your new country, and it becomes harder to uproot, especially after forging a career and begin a family. And although it has never been easier to return, that great fear which had plagued our ancestors, the one great illness which our generation had been assured was gone forever, has returned. We were promised that the saddest part of our history was behind us, but the spectre of emigration, and the resulting loss of our nation’s children, has struck again. Emigration helps ease unemployment and eases the burden on our economy, since the majority of emigrants are of working age. But what benefit does this easing have when, once again, our children, like our cattle, are being raised for export?