THE devil is in the detail.
The announcement that unemployment figures had fallen for the 25th month in a row was greeted by many eager voices as if the blip in the Tiger years was over and we could all go back to wine on the decking and new cars in the driveway.
Indeed on RTÉ radio the report on unemployment figures was followed by an interview with a new car dealer celebrating a rise in new car sales. The interviewer, the journalist, treated the man's joy as if the car dealer were some kind of Mother Teresa figure announcing how much he had done for mankind.
It seemed to be a given that the general well-being, emotional health and cultural future of the Irish was completely bound up in how many new cars we were willing to buy.
Many people have been left bewildered by Ireland's financial crash. It is fair enough that this should include journalists too but when they simply become cheerleaders for a self-serving sector of the economy, well, we've been down that road before haven't we?
Next up, the return of the 'celebrity economist,' as the voice of impartial reason and unquestionable wisdom and we can all pretend 2014 is 2007 and none of this recession, austerity lark ever happened. After all, weren't we told that if we talked the economy down it would go down?
Wasn't it even suggested that to do so might be the equivalent of economic treason? So presumably if we talk it up, if we let a new generation of Bill Cullens, but please don't mention his money woes, a new generation of 'entrepreneurs' assure us that by giving them our money we are committing a social good, then hey presto?
And if we have a media that abrogates any investigative role and sits by the side nodding their heads enthusiastically then we will be right back in the Promised Land and nothing bad will ever happen again children, will it? We might not believe in the 'little people' anymore but we still believe in any number of tall tales.
Of course, all of this may well sound just cynical and bitter, the complaints of the complainers. And we have had those before.
Didn't Bertie suggest those criticising back in the day should go away and commit suicide? Do you remember that sensitive gem?
Still, is it worth pointing out that the drop in the unemployment figures still leaves over 400,000 people on the dole? Is it worth pointing out that there could be a correlation between the amount of people coming off the dole and the amount of people leaving the country?
Would it be worth pointing out that when it comes to exporting social problems, social issues that Ireland has previous? Exporting unemployment? Well, we've exported our survivors of clerical abuse, industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries, poverty, economic injustice, political failure, for decades haven't we?
For decades and decades and decades.
It's not as if emigration hasn't been Ireland's answer, is it? The novelist Joseph O'Connor wrote a few years back that in Ireland we 'export our poor, our uneducated, our weak. We throw out our suffering, our homeless, those who are as utterly dispossessed in their own country as any refusenik.
We expel those who are inconvenient to our fabulous dream of ourselves.' The truth is that the fall in unemployment, the story of Ireland's economic recovery, is as much about the departure of those inconvenient ones, in this case Ireland's young, as it is anything else.
As always, that will not be part of the official narrative and those missing from the story because they are in London, Sydney or Toronto will simply be left unmentioned.
And soon, if we sit idly by and let Ireland's agenda be set by those who have always set it, those who have left will suddenly become those who turned their backs on us, those who bailed out, those who failed.
We won't have forced them out they'll have simply fled. And the whole upside down story, whereby those self-serving few who stayed and protected only themselves were being true to Ireland and those who emigrated failed, can begin again.
See More: Celtic Tiger, Ireland Recession, Irish Economy
