THERE ARE two types of Irish people. There are those who emigrate and there are those who do not. Unfortunately, the debate at home is frequently driven by those with no personal experience of emigration.
Even in the age of cheap flights and Skype, the coffin ship mentality pervades all discussions about Irish emigration.
The word most frequently used is “tragedy” and it was used again by the novelist Colm Tóibín at the recent Global Irish Economic Forum. “I think emigration out of Ireland has in general been a tragedy for Ireland and for the people who emigrated from Ireland,” he said at a debate on Irish culture.
The word tragedy suggests something that is terminal. Emigration does not have to be terminal and we, the ones who stay behind, must ensure that it is not. The tragedy, if there is one in relation to emigration, is not that people go away; it is that they cannot return home if they choose to do so.
Much has been made of the ranks of Irish emigrants cheering on the Ireland team during the World Cup in New Zealand. For many observers this is the public manifestation of our abject failure to provide enough opportunities for our people at home.
There is another way of looking at those scenes in New Zealand. Irish people have proved themselves, once again, when bereft of opportunity at home, to be amazingly enterprising, brave and resilient. They always have been.
Tóibín said the tragedy of Irish emigration was the notion that Irish people emigrate en masse whenever there is a downturn. He pointed out that such emigration patterns do not manifest themselves in places like Spain (where Tóibín has been an emigrant) or the north of England.
The Tory minister Norman Tebbit once told unemployed men in Liverpool to get on their bikes as his father had done during a time of high unemployment, but there is a world of difference between the kind of static working-class English communities he was addressing and the Irish experience.
Is it better to stagnate at home or prosper abroad? Would the Irish entrepreneurs who live abroad and who have offered to staff State boards at home swap the success they have had for a less successful life at home?
Generation after generation of Irish people have left the comfort of family and country to pursue opportunities abroad, some to their detriment, more to their ultimate benefit. You could see this as a collective failure on our part as a country; alternatively you could see it as a personal triumph over adversity for each and every Irish emigrant who makes that journey.
I lived in London for nine years. For many of those years I was a lousy emigrant. In the Celtic Tiger years, Ireland felt like a party we were not invited to any more. Consciously and subconsciously I absorbed the received Irish wisdom that emigration is in itself a bad thing, a curse rather than an opportunity and that the only place that Irish people should live in is Ireland.
It is a self-defeating mindset which is particularly prevalent among many Irish people who live in a netherworld in Britain where they are forever going home in their own heads.
There is a self-pitying streak in Irish discourse about emigration which is often not present among Irish emigrants themselves who are getting on with things while we lament their absence.
We sometimes talk about emigration from Ireland as if our experiences were unique in the world. There are a million Portuguese in France, Melbourne is the third-largest Greek city by population and there are nearly six million Brits who live abroad. Do they complain about it?
The new wave of Irish emigration has caused another bout of periodic national navel-gazing, but we are neither an exceptionally well run or badly run country. Every country screws it up in its own way for its citizens. Australia has become a veritable Shangri-La for Irish emigrants, yet it has the most over-priced housing in the developed world, according to the Economist magazine, and is ripe for an Irish-style housing bust.
There is a lot wrong with Ireland, but there is a lot wrong with everywhere. Perth in western Australian is another magnet for the current wave of Irish emigrants and is being touted as having the best lifestyle of any major city on Earth. Yet, when I lived in London, I knew a lot of young people from Perth who thought the city was as dull as ditchwater and could not wait to get out of it.
Being a returned emigrant gives a person a sense of perspective on Ireland. I like Ireland a whole lot more for not having lived in it all my life. Most returned emigrants will say the same thing. Despite Ireland’s manifest problems and lousy weather, this is still a great country to live in.
We need a mature debate about emigration. People like Colm Tóibín, whose currency is words, should know better than to use emotive terms like “tragedy” when the reality is much more complicated. We do those young Irish people who have emigrated or are thinking of emigrating a disservice by portraying it as a wholly negative experience. It is not. It is the way of the world.
To speak positively of emigration in Ireland is to risk being branded as callous or indifferent. The former tánaiste Mary Coughlan was castigated for speaking the obvious truth last year that a lot of young Irish people went away to gain experience and many to “enjoy themselves”.
This is a small country and the world is a big place. Irish people will always leave Ireland in good times and bad. Our focus should be on creating a society where Irish people do not have to emigrate unless they want to and those who wish to come home should be able to do. Some will have made happy lives abroad, it is the others we need to concentrate on.
Lamenting their absence is a pointless exercise. The best thing those left behind can do is to learn from the mistakes of the past and ensure that we never have the same boom-bust cycle again.
What we are witnessing at present is not another bloody flight of earls as the song about 1980s emigration goes. As the same song goes: “But if we see better days, those planes they go both ways, and we’ll all be coming back to you again.”