It’s a strange thought that in the same week that Simon Harris was born, in October 1987, the then minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan gave an interview to Newsweek magazine in which he made the notorious comment that “After all, we can’t all live on a small island.” Strange too, that when the now-Taoiseach was taking his first steps, an astonishing 2 per cent of the entire population left Ireland in a single year, 1988. The vast majority were very young – 69 per cent of them were aged between 15 and 24.
The historian Joe Lee noted of Lenihan’s comment that, even though he was criticised for it, he was merely saying out loud what most Irish people tacitly believed: “It is probable that he was expressing a fairly widespread, if largely silent, assumption among the population.”
Lee expected this attitude to persist: “As long as this belief continues, so will emigration. It will be occasionally interrupted when the international economy slumps and the jobs temporarily vanish abroad, but it will resume as soon as the British, American and European economies revive. It seems likely to be as active in the last decade of the 20th century as in the first decade and to continue into the 21st century, unless we find a way of creating jobs that has eluded us for most of this century.”
Harris now presides over a country in which immigration has replaced emigration as the hot topic. Ireland did “find a way of creating jobs”, and like every other place where there are opportunities for employment, it attracts people who want to make a better life for themselves. The Central Statistics Office expects somewhere between 105,000 and 120,000 immigrants to arrive every year up to 2027.
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In this sense, Harris, who is only 37, seems very old. So much demographic change has been packed into such a short period that the very recent past really does feel like a different country. It’s not just the raw numbers that have been transformed – it’s the mentality.
Because of the scale of inward migration, Ireland has been reimagined – it is no longer the departures area but the arrivals hall. Population movement is about them, not us
Lee was not being foolish when he predicted that the flow of migrants out of Ireland was very likely to continue in the 21st century. It’s what any intelligent observer would have felt at the time. Mass emigration was (paradoxically) the great continuity of modern Irish history. It was our thing – the badge of our identity.
Indeed, the years when Harris was a little kid were marked by a more general acceptance that Ireland was a diaspora culture. The success of Jack Charlton’s Ireland soccer team, largely made up of players born in England and Scotland, Mary Robinson’s symbolic placing of a candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin and Riverdance were tokens of a coming-to-terms with emigration as a central fact of Irish life and culture.
And that’s gone. Because of the scale of inward migration, Ireland has been reimagined – it is no longer the departures area but the arrivals hall. Population movement is about them, not us.
Yet, the fact is that we still emigrate – and do so in large numbers. Let’s consider those years of the late 1980s when the Taoiseach was a child. They’re remembered, rightly, as a period of mass emigration from Ireland. But how many left? In 1987, it was 40,000. In 1988, 61,000. In 1989, 71,000; in 1990, 56,000 and in 1991, 35,000. So, on average in those terrible years, we’re looking at about 53,000 Irish people having left every year.
So what’s the story now? It’s in fact very similar. According to the CSO’s projections, it expects emigration of between 51,000 and 63,000 a year between 2022 and 2027. The average of its three possible scenarios has 60,000 emigrants leaving Ireland annually – which is actually higher in absolute terms than the disastrous figures of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I’ve often talked of Ireland shifting from ‘an emigrant society’ to ‘an immigrant society’. But what’s really happened is that we’ve gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant/emigrant society
But we hardly talk about Irish emigrants now. What’s changed is not so much the raw figures as our attitude to them. They no longer represent a national tragedy or a national disgrace. They don’t embody economic and political failure – even though some people clearly are leaving because they can aspire to buy a house in Australia or Canada, which they can’t do at home.
I’m guilty of this myself. I’ve often talked of Ireland shifting from “an emigrant society” to “an immigrant society”. But what’s really happened is that we’ve gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant/emigrant society. When it comes to people, we’re in both the export and import trades.
Why this matters is that if we leave out continuing emigration, we frame the relationship between Ireland and global migration inaccurately. It’s not a one-way street. It’s a complex process of movements in and out of the country. Yes, we live in a world where migration is one of the big stresses on social and political coherence. But “the world” is also us. We’re out there too – there are perhaps 1.5 million Irish citizens living outside the island.
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One of the ironies of the present moment is that Lenihan’s “We can’t all live on a small island” has returned with a twist. He was using the idea of smallness as an excuse for mass emigration. Now it’s being used as an excuse for anti-immigrant hysteria. The notion of containment has shifted – in 1987, it meant that Ireland could not contain its young people so they had a natural right to go elsewhere, legally or otherwise. Now it means that Ireland is a container that is already full up and can’t possibly hold more of those people who have the cheek to think they can live where they like.
If we don’t see both sides of the continuing Irish migration story, we allow this image to distort the way we see our reality. We forget that we can all live on what is not in fact a particularly small island, that some of us choose not to, and that their expectation of being able to make a better life elsewhere is entirely normal.