Irish people, like many nationalities, are obsessed with perspectives on themselves. What do people think of us? How do they view us? How would they characterise us?
Since the crash, we’ve become obsessed with what emigrants think and feel. Maybe it’s easier to be told how and who you are by someone outside the country, rather than figuring it out from within.
Emigrating gives those who leave an opportunity to view the home place and the people from afar. But I wonder why in Ireland, so much room is allowed for the opinions, viewpoints, ambitions, criticisms, and lives of young emigrants, and so little is devoted to the opinions and thoughts of young people who actually live here. (It is almost impossible to discuss this without emotions flaring or resentments – from both the leavers and the stayers – creeping in.)
I don't buy the narrative that people made a choice to stay on in Ireland to change their country for the better as some kind of collective noble cause, any more than I buy the narrative that emigrants are going to return and sprinkle us with magic fairy dust from their lands of faraway learning. Plenty of emigrants from the 1980s and 1990s returned to Ireland at the start of the Celtic Tiger, which didn't exactly birth a brave new republic. People come and go out of self-interest – they do what suits them at a particular time. And that's fine.
We all know the diverse reasons for emigration. We know that these reasons can be economic and personal and creative and practical and impulsive and planned and necessary and adventurous and sad. No one need justify their desire to leave a country for whatever reason. It’s a personal choice. No one need justify staying either, although the narrative we have concocted around emigration insinuates that those who leave are spreading their wings or reaching for bigger opportunities. The idea of a brain drain is true in some respects, but it’s also frustrating, because it insinuates those with brains and talent are the only ones filtering out of the country, and those who don’t emigrate lack pizzazz. This narrative also puts pressure on emigrants, I think, by implying that if you leave you are somehow destined to be more successful than you would have been at home. Maybe you just want to get on with your life.
When we have conversations about young people in Ireland, they are framed awkwardly. When we talk about young men, the conversation inevitably strays into mental health difficulties. When we talk about young women, we have a tendency to talk about “the pressures” on them, though that narrative is changing somewhat with third-wave feminism. But when we talk about emigrants, we talk about the great loss to the country – which the mass departure of any group of people is. But why is one sector of our population (or ex-population) lionised and mythologised, and the other largely ignored?
Irish emigrants are not magic people. They are just Irish people living somewhere else. Irish people who remain are not necessarily any less ambitious or creative. There is a tendency – and indeed a temptation – to assume that leaving means you must be worldly and staying means you are close-minded. But why are we not telling our young people that they can fulfil their potential in Ireland? And if we really think they can’t, why aren’t we changing that?
During the marriage referendum, young people across rural and urban Ireland showed themselves to be extraordinarily civic-minded. They exposed themselves in many ways for the pursuit of the greater good. They organised on a mass level. Yet in the aftermath, Irish society displayed a complete failure to tap into that energy and ability. We praised young people for five minutes, and then moved on to give out about identity politics, and label an entire generation “Snowflakes”. Such an attitude is energy-sapping and defeatist and ignorant. But it also illustrates the absence of a general willingness in our society to embrace the energy of the young people we have here at home.
Every young person here has something to offer, yet we look away from them to their brothers and sisters who left. Emigrants talk about valuing Ireland more when they leave it, yet Ireland itself seems to value those who leave more than those who stay. It can often feel like we look for answers to the country’s future everywhere apart from the most obvious place: at home, amongst ourselves, right here, right now.