Some people ride the back of the Celtic Tiger - others have to pull it by the tail. That's the view of Dr Jim MacLaughlin of the Department of Geography at University College, Cork. He has written extensively on Irish emigration and the phenomenon of the modern Irish economy.
In 1995, the Cork University Press published his Ireland the Emigrant Nursery and the World Economy. Next August Location and Dislocation and Contemporary Irish Society will be published. Dr MacLaughlin is the editor as well as a contributor. As he sees it, this State has put a sort of spin doctor gloss on Irish emigration.
The official view is too rosy, too sanguine. An emigrant aristocracy has developed. Those who have done well find themselves the subject of media interest. We celebrate the big success stories, putting out the message that all our emigrants are doing well. Not so, claims Dr MacLaughlin.
Not everyone is doing well out there. Not everyone wanted to go. And where, he asks, is the research on the fact that almost 50 per cent of those who have left are female.
Another badly neglected area of research, Dr MacLaughlin argues, is the level of qualifications of the emigrants who are leaving the Celtic Tiger to join the global market place, in Europe, America and elsewhere. In a study he compiled in 1991 on 1980s emigration, he found that not all the young people we are sending abroad have sufficient qualifications.
The figures Dr MacLaughlin came up with showed that 23.2 per cent of those who left during the study period had an Intermediate Group Certificate; 48 per cent had a Leaving Certificate; and 28.8 per cent had a third level qualification.
The study comprised almost 1,600 people, taking in cities like Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and running from Galway up to Donegal.
Dr MacLaughlin says that Irish youngsters are growing up in an emigrant nursery. Their fate has become acceptable, and their home place no longer has the meaning for them that it does for their contemporaries on the Continent, who expect their country to provide them with a job.
Irish history, Irish culture, the very State itself, is in danger of being sold off as artifacts in a global arena . . . . Thus, the writings of authors as diverse as James Joyce and Roddy Doyle, like the musical successes of groups as far apart as U2 and the Chieftains, are revered not for their contributions to the arts in Ireland but because they enhance the image of the State in a world composed more and more of cyberspace rather than real places.
In this Ireland, Joyce, Beckett, Synge, Yeats and Heaney, are not so much to be read and perused, as used. It is as if the very existence of these writers was ordained by today's political leaders and a corporate sector who are anxious to sell Ireland in an upmarket niche of the international economy ...
"Ireland, since the 1960s and particularly since the mid 1980s has been constantly and radically deconstructed and reconstructed in the image of far richer, more powerful and, one has to remember, erstwhile colonial and strong metropolitan societies.
"The chief losers include the traditional working class, the urban and rural poor, the unemployed and small farmers," says Dr MacLaughlin.
He raises interesting questions. But then again, if you go to the heartland, there are some encouraging stories to be found.
Sean Og McElligott is one of a family of six from Tralee. Between 1982 and 1986, he and his brother, together with their four sisters, left for America. Their driving force was to save money and come back.
Now, the six McElligotts are back in Tralee.
Sean Og runs a bar on Bridge Street, where fine traditional musicians are to be found. Other family members are in farming, the pub trade, a carpet business and a hostel.
"How did we do it? We stayed away from the bar counter and worked hard," he says.
Dr MacLaughlin will be one of the participants in an international conference on Irish emigration which will take place at UCC next September.