Sir, – Alan Barrett of the ESRI overlooks a key fact (“Emigration to fall as economy improves”, Front page, December 25th, 26th & 27th) that your “The picture improves” Editorial (same date) also overlooks.
Your Editorial states, “employment has increased significantly, with 58,000 more at work, a 3.2 per cent annual increase”. Besides the fact that the 58,000 figure was based on a limited survey and may be out of line, a significant thing about it is: two-thirds of the work was of the low-income sort that is more attractive to immigrants than to our “highly educated” natives. Such work is like asking our highly-skilled young jockeys to settle permanently for being point-to-point riders instead of going abroad permanently to get money to afford expensive US lifestyles when married. Mr Barrett ignores that lifestyles factor.
We’ll continue to have some high-income work. But most of the new work that will arise as/if our economy improves enough, to offset the further shrinkage that is still necessary in some public and private sectors, will be of the low-income sort. At best most of our “highly-educated” will use them as temporary stop-gaps.
We should cheerfully think and plan in terms of 75 per cent of our current generation cheerfully emigrating permanently by the age of 30. – Yours, etc,
JOE FOYLE,
Sandford Road,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.