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Danny Boy by Daniel O'Carroll

GAA beginning to feel the pinch of uncontrolled emigration

Posted on Monday, February 07, 2011 at 11:21 AM

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Above: passengers waiting to board a flight at Shannon Airport, Ireland's Western gateway to the US. Unless students demand of politicians that they take steps to address the emigration problem, there'll be plenty more of these flights.

Excuse me if I've come to be known as the weekly bearer of doom and gloom from Ireland, but there's so much about student emigration that's worth reporting on, and so little seemingly being done about it.

I found a few pieces from Ireland's newspapers this week that shed more light on what's becoming an unstoppable problem for Ireland.

Ranking them in order of misery and dismalness, this piece from the Irish Independent surely leads the field: the GAA is losing 250 players a week to emigration.

This is a fairly shocking fact. The gravity and scale of the emigration problem is perhaps better and more keenly felt when you limit the statistics to a certain group or class of people rather than just paint the picture in terms of the entire country, which makes it fairly difficult to get a grasp on just how many people are leaving when the numbers are so large.

That fact about the GAA is far from the worst of the statistics, though. The ERSI (Economic Research and Social Institute), widely regarded as Ireland's leading think-tank, has estimated that 100,000 young people will leave Ireland between Apr. '10 and Apr. '12 alone; that's a shocking amount that is in fact even worse than the recession of the '80s when the net outflow reached a mere 44,000, but in truth both are catastrophic figures.

Other countries are certainly beginning to take cognizance of this problem, which perhaps is not surprising giving the enormous scale of it. A Dutch television station is to make a documentary on the situation, according to this morning's Irish Examiner, but what's revealing about that is a quote from the documentary's maker which shows just how unusually strange and terrible our situation is: "In Holland people emigrate because they have to, in Ireland it's an economic necessity," the documentary maker says.

In Canada, a traditional stronghold of Irish emigrants, they're even offering a new visa which will make it easier for Irish emigrants to extend their stay in the country to a second year and perhaps even longer.

The point of all this wordage, besides to show how bad the problem is, is to highlight that nothing seems to be being done about this.

Student unions, such as the national USI, have made some tepid steps towards highlighting the situation, but this has amounted to little more than an angry march on Dublin city centre which saw a few arrests and the surfacing of allegations of police brutality, but nothing substantive was done, no commitments were made, and the problem remains as bad, or worse, than it ever was before.

Coming into the upcoming general election now is the time for Irish students to get on the backs of their local politicians and ask them what they propose to do to solve this problem.

The alternative is a very bad one.

Post-script: I noticed a Google video ad for Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny in the sidebar of Irish Central when editing this post. That in itself is a huge positive for me as a 22 year old voter. Neither Fianna Fail nor Labour have bothered to make anything more than perfunctory use out of social media which for me is a sign that they're out of touch with young people and how they're influenced. Use of social media should be preached as a fundamental when devising national election campaigns. I think that a party that ignores this crucial area is simply shooting itself in the foot...

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cillowen | Feb 08, 2011, 09:17 PM EST

All that is required to Big Time clamp down on protesters is for America's funded Egyptian army being instructed to beat heads. The well managed media will in tandem provide the requisitive words for cover as the unfortunates are rounded up for torture. What a sweeter con can be better than that.. 70 billion worth oligarch Mubarak with interest in US / UK / and elsewhere and being one with the worldwide oligarchical brotherhood will ensure Mubarak carries on as long as the phoney proclaiming powers feign their support of freedom for the powerless. Nice twistings by Obama who after all was placed there by his powerfully monied benefactors. The Egyptian protesters don't stand a chance. ===== sample on how its done ====== like perks given by pharmacutical companies to push their drugs. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said Mubarak the Egyptian president lent him and his family a plane during a holiday in Egypt at new year. Hosni Mubarak, who is facing widespread anti-government protests, also paid for Mr Fillon's holiday accommodation. Another French minister has faced calls to resign after saying she used a Tunisian businessman's plane during the country's uprising.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 08, 2011, 03:00 PM EST

I'm surprised that MacEnri doesn't know who the Immigration Lobby in Ireland are. They're the attorneys and well-funded pressure groups etc. who make a living out of Mass Immigration, in the form of legal fees in defending foreign migrants' "rights" to stay in Ireland when they are not wanted, or bodies which make a living out of lecturing and hectoring the Irish people on their "racism" (sic). Some of these people are Irish, some are foreign migrants. Foolish Irish taxpayers sometimes bankroll them, or else foreign interferers such as the Atlantic Philanthropy group. Irish taxpayers continue to be fleeced by these people. One case is that of Maurice Manning, head of one of these unelected outfits, who earns more--no one knows what he actually does for a living--than the President of the United States. The Irish are crazy to put up with this, but I guess that's why they're broke and without two nickels to rub together. There's also of course the capitalists and bosses in Ireland, these are the ones who benefited from Mass Immigration. They're not as blatant or shrill as the Mass Immigration advocates, but there's no doubt that Finna Fail, Sinn Fein and the other parties do their bidding when it comes to insuring that the supply of cheap labor doesn't dry up.

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jacersagain | Feb 08, 2011, 02:39 PM EST

Georgie Dear, you are such a lovable oul' dotable dolt that we cannot but give you a pet name (others do too, ya know!) And if you bother to read my posts, as I do yours, you'll notice my comments are frequently in agreement with yours but not using the same disparaging words as yours. Put that in your spittin' pipe and smoke it.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 08, 2011, 01:27 PM EST

jacerthedope: My name is clearly published on my posts. Kindly use it if you are referring to me. Refrain from your silly effort at familiarity--I am not your friend, and this is not a bar.

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jacersagain | Feb 08, 2011, 01:08 PM EST

Post script for Danny - I've seen a Fianna Fail box in the side bar on ICentral. But why FG and FF even bother to do that on a site dedicated to Irish disapora who can't vote beats me.

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jacersagain | Feb 08, 2011, 01:03 PM EST

Maceinri is about right on the percentage of Irish who are leaving Ireland. A man I know who works in the heart of economic analysis and he tells me that of the 100,000 who left last year, 60,000 were former immigrants. If this is so, then it is still a very small number of all the immigrants. Polish immigrants during the noughties accounted for more than 300,000 alone – enough for Dublin’s newspaper, the Evening Herald, to see enough profit in publishing a subsection several pages long entirely in Polish. A recently retired schoolteacher friend of mine, whose school became “very colourful” (his own words) told me it is becoming less colourful – that is to say, the immigrant students and their families are leaving too. GeorgieBoy need not worry too much. It is sadly true however, that GAA and soccer clubs are seeing members depart our shores.

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cillowen | Feb 08, 2011, 09:35 AM EST

counties which some measure of available jobs will be winning all-ireland medals for some years to come. 70 billion oligarch Mubarak with interest in US / UK / and elsewhere and being one with the worldwide oligarchical brotherhood will ensure Mubarak carries on as long as the phoney proclaiming powers feign their support of freedom for the powerless. Nice twistings by Obama who after all was placed there by his powerfully monied benefactors. The Egyptian protesters don't stand a chance.

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maceinri | Feb 08, 2011, 08:32 AM EST

I'm not in any way trying to minimise the situation, having written about it myself here and elsewhere, but there is a deal of misinformation or misinterpretation in some media comments as well. The ESRI's predictions are just that, predictions, whereas the CSO's data comes nowhere near such statistics. More importantly, saying the situation is worse than the 1980s is simply inaccurate. Even if one accepts some of the higher figures being floated now, these are for migrants out of the Ireland of _all_ nationalities. The CSO data shows that about 45% of those leaving are Irish. I don't know who the 'Mass Immigration lobby' is (maybe some unscrupulous employers prepared to exploit foreign workers for low pay) but to the fair to the GAA they have welcomed young players of all backgrounds and there is a rising generation of new talent.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 08, 2011, 12:11 AM EST

pmunited: "it would take another decade for this to reach the senior level." You mean there are no young men and women aged say 18-35 among the hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants in Ireland? What nonsense. The migrants CHOOSE not to get involved in GAA. Just like they CHOOSE not to try to learn a little of the ancient Irish language or the history of the country they are ethnically cleansiong.

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pmunited | Feb 07, 2011, 03:36 PM EST

Three of the current Cork football team are unemployed, and last year's Clare hurling captain has gone to Australia. I do not recall things being this bad in the 80s - most of the top stars then were able to get jobs in banks or as salesmen. With respect to the immigration in recent years, you are seeing some evidence of that in the under-12 and under-14 grades, but it would take another decade for this to reach the senior level.

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GeorgeDillon | Feb 07, 2011, 01:10 PM EST

What's the problem? Didn't the Mass Immigration lobby promise that the GAA would soon have countless Africans, Indian, Poles and Pakis playing? I can just see it, the feared forward line of say County Leitrim: Obszynski, Ngomo, Lubumba, Patel, Singh, Petrov, Yang-tse, Chi Lao ... Bound to win an All-Ireland!

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