YOU would have to have been asleep not to notice that there has been an insistent spin put on Irish emigration since the demise of the Celtic Tiger.
In this version of events emigration was simply ‘a lifestyle choice’, as Finance Minister Michael Noonan called it, an adventure, a chance to travel, an escape, a natural part of the Irish DNA that would occur no matter what.
Emigration was really a simple change of address that, with Skype and cheap air flights, had no real negative consequences at all.
Indeed, with Australia often referred to, we could almost believe that emigration is great craic altogether whereby the Irish simply go away somewhere warmer and have beer and barbecues in the sun.
Emigration is more or less an extended holiday and sure aren’t they even setting up GAA clubs in China and Dubai now and isn’t that wonderful for a small country like ours.
In this scenario emigration is not far off being one of the best things that could happen to you, one of the best things that could happen to the whole country.
Brian Lenihan Senior’s comment that we can’t all live on a small island, spoken in response to the economic woes and emigration of the ’80s, is merely echoed now.
It is no longer a shocking, callous, elitist comment from a section of Irish society that knows whoever is forced to emigrate it won’t be them.
It becomes a simple statement of fact when emigration is portrayed as being, at the very worst, a harmless experience characterised by Skype and cheap homecomings and at best a frolic in the sun.
The recent comment by a friend of mine home from Canada for Christmas that he was staying in digs ‘in the arse end of nowhere’ was, I can only conclude, the words of a man who didn’t know how lucky he was to have had to go to the other side of the world to get a job.
Unfortunately for this political and media driven spin, things like the facts keep getting in the way. Or as they taught us in school, there are lies and then there is the truth.
Of course, it should be acknowledged that there can be an upside to emigration, anyone who even grew up with immigrants can tell you that.
There is an element of escape and an element of liberation, though that escape and liberation may have been more intense for those ’50s emigrants who were escaping a far more oppressive and closed Ireland than our current version.
But still a lot of emigrants are young and a lot of them are having what might come close to an adventure.
There still remains though one defining fact about emigration, about emigrating in order to find work or escape a broken economic system, about being an economic migrant and that is that it is an action undertaken out of necessity. It is a forced departure. It is the only option.
So it was a little off-message in one way but a return to truth and fact in another that an Irish charity working in Britain, Console, should release a statement saying that of the 2,200 calls its helpline received from Irish emigrants in December 2013, 600 of them were from people the charity judged to be at ‘immediate risk of taking their own lives’.
A further 1,100 were from those judged to be at a ‘low or moderate risk’ of committing suicide. The vast majority of these callers in distress, the charity said, were young men between the ages of 18 and 30.
These are nothing if not startlingly distressing statements and ones that should make the likes of Michael Noonan hang his head in shame.
This is the factual side of emigration. The truth.
Of course the adventure and the joyous beers and barbecues are part of the truth for some too but in an age that is obsessed with good spin, with ‘positive thinking’ as a cure-all for any ill, even as a replacement for actuality, they should sober even the most dizzy cheerleader.
In the early days of the economic collapse those who pointed out what was going on were accused of talking the country down or even, in one case, of committing economic treason.
That is how the truth, how the actual facts can be treated when it comes to creating a message, or an image.
The lies about emigration run deep in Irish society and they always have. And the lies are still there now.
See More: Console, Emigration, Irish In Britain, Suicide
