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30 October 1997 Edition

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Among the diaspora

By Mary Nelis

More than half the people born in Ireland since the famine have left the country.

In the plane from Dublin to New York last week, I was seated beside a group of some 25 young men from Cork going on a school trip to New York.

If the current emigration trends continue, two thirds of those on the schooltrip will leave Ireland permanently over the next few years, to resurface in Britain, Europe, the US, Australia and even Japan. In 1992, 55 million Irish emigrants were ``invited home'' by Bord Fáilte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. It was a cynical exercise by the tourist strategists of the two governments who hoped that those emigrants who had ``made it'', particularly in the US, would repatriate some of their accumulated wealth to the island they had been forced to leave.

The mass exodus of the Irish has continued almost unabated since the 19th century. We cannot be confident that the latest figures are a blip and we will see a return to the ``normality'' of high emigration. The millions who left at the time of the great starvation did not diminish with partition and the establishment of the Free State in 1922. Although emigration from the South has always been greater than that of the North, it was only the disproportionate rate of Catholic emigration from the North which created and has maintained the Protestant majority in the Six Counties.

The emigration debate in the North has never been separated from the issue of sectarian head counting but both parts of the island have regarded people as an export commodity. In the South, the emigration debate has created a climate whereby emigration is accepted as a fact of Irish life and relied upon by government as a safety valve, both economically and socially.

In other words exporting our young people has become the government's solution to unemployment, to the degree that many young Irish people now accept that Ireland is a place where they are born, educated and leave.

This ``final solution'' for the problem of lack of work in Ireland was clearly illustrated recently by the suggestion that 50,000 ``Green cards'' for the USA could be part of the ``peace dividend'' for the North.

The Centre for Research and Documentation in Belfast has published an excellent factsheet on emigration which makes stark reading for those who put forward the notion that Irish people don't emigrate, they just choose to work away from home. Very few of the young Irish I have met in the US have chosen to be there.

The same could be said of the Irish in Britain or Europe. For many of them, emigration is nothing more than swapping poverty, unemployment and uncertainty and almost as poor, in the countries, which they now call ``home''. They form a vast pool of labour, skilled and unskilled in the service industries of Britain, Europe and the US. You will find the Irish everywhere; in the hospitals, building works, in the pubs and restaurants, in the shops and schools. They look after children, care for old ladies, walk dogs, clean streets, and voluntarily give their time off work to teaching their native culture in language and dance to the people of the land who took them in. They are versatile, hard working and competent. They are also highly political and being forced out of their native land has given many of them a newly discovered sense of their Irish identity.

They are proud to be emigrant Irish, for they left a country where an Irish identity was akin to that of a neo-colonial clone, a paler shade of green with a Dublin 4 accent. The Celtic Tiger has not roared for them, the Irish Diaspora, as former President Mary Robinson called them.

They will not, like that other dispossessed group, the Northern Nationalists, be allowed to vote for her successor.

The Irish emigrants have been pushed out of their native land, and abandoned by its governments, concerned lest they become the radical voice of the New post-British, post-colonial Ireland.

Their leaving has produced a crisis in the conservative state they left behind, manifested by the current political atmosphere where the Presidential election campaign has been turned into the Irish equivalent of the Nuremburg Trials. We who remain live in a country where all that is good and noble in the North is the subject of a McCarthy witchunt and all that is young and radical in the south is exported, expelled and forgotten.

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland