IT IS difficult to come to terms with the fact that since the end of the 1980s net emigration from Ireland has ceased. The return flow of earlier emigrants, in cases accompanied by spouses and born abroad, has been balancing continuing outflow of mostly highly educated younger people.
Is this the end of the drain on our population that has persisted for several centuries? That is not certain; in the years immediately ahead the outflow from our educational system will attain the highest level in 100 years. One cannot, therefore, exclude the possibility that for a few years around the turn of the century a temporary increase in the numbers completing their education and seeking work outside Ireland might briefly outnumber older emigrants returning with their families to take up employment here, and bringing with them the benefit of experience gained abroad.
But if this happens the resultant net outflow is likely to be both small and temporary. Within half a dozen years the diminishing numbers who will then be leaving our educational system are unlikely to leave in search of careers elsewhere on a scale that would outnumber the inflow of returning emigrants and their families.
This pattern of balanced migration will have implications for our population. Even if our birth rate were to decline somewhat further - and it is not certain that it will - the annual excess of births over deaths is unlikely to fall below 20,000, to which any net inflow of people would have to be added. So within 15 or 20 years the population of our State could easily rise from 3.6 million to four million.
BUT while there is virtually no net emigration at present, this fact is the product of two very large movements outwards and inwards, which just happen to be offsetting each other almost perfectly.
I am not speaking here of the enormous numbers of Irish people going away on holidays, or visiting relatives abroad, or travelling on business; for one or other of these reasons 2.7 million journeys are made outside the island every year by the 3.6 million people here. But in addition, each year some 35,000 people go away for a period of a year or more - and each year the same number come from outside this island to live here.
Of course, not all of these latter are returning emigrants. Data from the 1991 Census give us a very rough indication of the probable breakdown of this inflow between different categories.
While any figures for the current situation based on flows six years ago must necessarily be very approximate, it would seem that over 10,000 of those currently coming to live here each year may be children or young people still in the educational system, most of them accompanying parents moving here and many of them born outside Ireland.
A further 4,000 are probably wives of immigrants who do not themselves enter the labour market here. And another 3,000-4,000 or so are probably not Irish, but people of other nationalities coming to work here.
The number of former Irish emigrants returning to work here is probably around 15,000 a year - and further thousands return from Britain to unemployment here.
The number of young people accompanying their parents here each year adds substantially to the domestic annual inflow into the Irish educational system. And the inflow of 15,000 emigrants into our workforce each year must fill between a fifth and a quarter of the 70,000-80,000 jobs becoming available each year - which consist of just under 30,000 vacancies arising from retirements or deaths, and 40-50,000 new jobs created annually in recent times.
Incidentally, this recent external inflow into our labour force must have been playing a major role in the growth of the number of households that has been occurring for some time past. For, whereas the great majority of emigrants are young people who have previously been living at home with their parents, a substantial proportion of those returning to work in Ireland are married people establishing new households here.
This must be an important factor contributing to the strong demand for housing and to the rise in the real value of house property in recent years.
Ireland may be unique in drawing so heavily on earlier emigrants to supplement domestic labour resources. The proportion of our labour force who have worked abroad for a year or more is very high. In the case of people in their 40s with higher education this proportion is as much as a third.
A RECENT ESRI seminar paper provides valuable information on the educational levels of those migrated in the late 1980s.
This study identifies the location, type of employment, and educational level in 1992 of a sample of young people who had left school in 1985/6. And it is clear from it that even a decade ago most emigrants were well educated.
In 1992 only 5-6 per cent of those young people who had left school without a qualification were abroad, and 78 per cent were living where they had been brought up. By contrast, 15 per cent of those with Junior or Leaving Certificates were outside the State by 1992 - as were about 25 per cent of those with a higher education qualification.
Of course, these figures relate to emigration in the late 1980s - when the outflow was almost twice what it is now, and the numbers returning were substantially lower. But there is reason to believe that the educational pattern of emigration revealed by this ESRI study retains much of its validity today.
This study also provides interesting information on internal migration. It reports that a significant proportion of those who had initially migrated to get their first job eventually returned home. Thus by 1992 a third of those who had to emigrate initially and three fifths of those who had to move to another part of the State to get their first job were back in their own areas - although less than half of those with third level education had been able to get jobs in their home areas.
Data from these different sources on the recent patterns of emigration and internal migration are, I believe, of major interest, especially as the radical changes that have taken place in these patterns are still little understood - so pervasive has been the impact of our past bitter experience of losing half of each age cohort to a combination of death from infantile mortality, TB and emigration.
Today, instead of half, or less than hall, of each cohort surviving and gaining employment in their own country, this proportion has risen to over five sixths - and we can expect that some of the remaining one sixth, who for employment reasons at present have to remain abroad for a number of years, will be able to return to their own country eventually.