A chara, – It depresses me greatly to read the many negative reactions to proposals to give emigrants the right to vote. Ireland must be one of the few countries in the world with such a history of endemic and continuous emigration.
We have never reached the stage of economic development that could offer a real choice to our young generations to stay.
That they would stay is clear as the census figures of the 1970s show that it was the first decade in our recent history that we had more people returning to Ireland than emigrating.
The late 1980s brought back the scenario of more people emigrating than were born here.
Emigration has been the destroyer of communities and we have never faced up to the challenge of defeating it.
Governments have focused on job creation as a priority but have never succeeded in coming to grips with the distorting and damaging force of emigration.
Those of us who stay on in the affected communities are benefitting from our emigrants’ departure and we pursue the selfish rejection of hurting them even more by enforcing their disenfranchisement.
The emigrant vote, if given, by whatever form it takes will keep our emigrants closer to our communities and send the message that while we have not managed to secure their future on the island of their birth, that we are determined to seek their return in better times.
The resistance by some to the granting of the emigrant vote is indeed mystifying and I surmise the attitude originates in our deep-rooted exposure to emigration’s effects for so many decades thus leading us to a blind acceptance of its inevitability. – Is mise,
LIAM Ó CUINNEAGÁIN,
Gleann Cholm Cille,
Co Dhún na nGall.