CURRENT LEVELS of emigration are not comparable to the 1980s, either in scale or in terms of the type of people leaving Ireland, a symposium on contemporary Irish and European migration trends at University College Cork was told yesterday.
Piaras Mac Éinrí of the department of geography and the Institute for Social Sciences for the 21st Century at UCC said much coverage and discussion of emigration from Ireland tended to see it as a repeat of the 1980s, but the picture was more complex.
Much of the discussion about a report from the Economic and Social Research Institute last January, which predicted that 60,000 would leave Ireland between April 2010 and April 2011, failed to recognise that more than half of those leaving were non-Irish.
“I don’t believe that the figures put out by the ESRI that 1,000 people a week are leaving are correct. I don’t see a shred of evidence to support that. The most we had [leaving] last year was 63,000, but a minority of those, 27,700, were Irish.
“The rest of those who left were migrants from other countries so you are comparing 27,700 with, at its height in 1988-89, 70,000, so it ain’t the same. I’m not saying emigration isn’t a problem, but we need a more nuanced and considered discourse.”
The other notable difference between now and the 1980s was that far greater numbers leaving now were highly skilled professionals for whom movement was part of the profession, and many of them would return to Ireland.
“Of the people who left in the 1980s, half of them came back,” Mr Mac Éinrí added. “The problem is that there are still people leaving in disadvantaged circumstances who don’t have the qualifications to do well elsewhere and they resemble the traditional type of emigration we’ve always had.”
Mr Mac Éinrí said this category included construction workers which, in 2005, accounted for 26 per cent of all men in the Irish labour force. Many of them did not have the skills to obtain sustainable employment abroad.
There was an urgent need for the Government to provide funding for retraining so that such workers, if forced to emigrate, would be better equipped to find gainful employment abroad.
Dr Mary Gilmartin of the department of geography at NUI Maynooth said she had studied GAA transfer records for the past seven years and suggested that the movement of players between clubs inside and outside Ireland could provide insights into emigration.
She believed the emigration crisis within the GAA was overstated in that there were more transfers of players in 2004 – at 1,800 – than in 2010, when some 1,600 transfers were approved.
Most transfers were within Ireland, from rural to urban areas, particularly to clubs in Dublin, Dr Gilmartin added. While there were transfers to clubs in Australia, Britain remained an important destination for players transferring from Ireland, with the numbers increasing in 2010.
Among the counties losing most players over the period 2004-2010 were Kerry (379), Mayo (369), Cork (362), Galway (338), Tipperary (267), Tyrone (261), Clare (220), Down (197) and Donegal (191), while Armagh reported a loss of more than 100 players.
The picture of clubs hit by mass emigration seemed exaggerated, she said, given there was more transfer activity in 2004. What was noticeable was the halving in the number of players transferring from abroad back to Ireland compared to 2004.
“What we’ve seen is a cutting off of return migration,” Dr Kilmartin said. “The numbers leaving haven’t changed that much but the numbers returning have dropped and what we see from the 2011 figures . . . is a very big increase in the numbers transferring to Canadian clubs, and that’s new.”