from the Irish Times
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Laura
Kennedy: More than 21,000 of Ireland’s young people received working
holiday visas between July 2022 and June 2023. Apparently, this the
highest recorded figure in 16 years
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There
are so many things Ireland is good at. Humour. Masterful literature.
Beards – Irish men really are fantastic at growing them. The popularity
of fulsome, seaworthy beards makes Ireland the envy of other, less
hirsute, nations.
Persistence
– we’re fierce good at that. The Irish are champion trudgers. We’ll
trudge through whatever is thrown at us, from colonisation by the
British, to the famine, to the narrative that Dublin is a major global
city and yet you can’t get a train to the country’s main airport or tap
on to a bus with your bank card.
A bus that may arrive when stipulated, but probably won’t.
What
I just did there is particularly Irish. I began this column by
generating an idea that I swear I’d intended to blossom into an actual
point of some sort. Instead, it devolved into a complaint about our
absolutely terrible buses and trains. Because (usually) affable
complaining is in our national skeleton. We bond through relating to one
another’s struggle, even petty struggles like a late bus.
[ My nine-year-old daughter has opportunities in Luxembourg she wouldn’t have in Ireland ]
Colleagues
at the office kettle exchange evidence of the countless ways the
company is being run into the ground by dullards and how Gary the
manager (chief among them) clearly suffered a loss at his weekly
ultimate frisbee game and we’re all in for it now.
And
is it just me or are the mini Twixes in the staff kitchen “minier” than
they used to be? At which point Mary from HR rushes in, crimson and
panting from her sprint from down the hall upon hearing the
conversation, to interject that she remembers a time when there were
only pink wafers in the kitchen and isn’t it well for you with your
marginally small Twix?
We
are competitive moaners. Moaning that the 15a bus will only arrive if
you burn sage, take off your shoes in the middle of South Great George’s
Street and mutter an incantation to the Pagan Gods who kept things
tipping away before the Catholic Church and Dublin Bus got the run of
the place. Moaning that our politicians are a shower of ding dongs in
ill-fitting suits who can organise nothing beyond tax exemptions for US
tech firms.
It might be time to cease looking outward for explanations and question what we are creating for emigrants to return to
There’s always something to complain about.
We
complain with an eloquence and good humour that endears us to one
another and sometimes the rest of the world. We punch up, mostly. We get
away with it. It’s the teacher. It’s the manager. It’s the Government.
We’re
also great at making the best of things (there’s that trudging
instinct). Historically, when things get dodgy at home, we’ll emigrate,
establish community and prosper across the world. No keeping us down or
some such. However, it’s worth questioning whether we should still have
to be quite so good at this. We might aim some of the blame at the
aforementioned politicians (and we do, with significant flourish and
energy) but everything gets a bit squiffy when we consider the fact that
we voted for them and their predecessors, and that Ireland looks the
way it does with our collective, active participation and endorsement.
Our leaders reflect our values and if they don’t, the inertia that led
to their election reflects our values. We forget that bit sometimes.
The
Australian department of home affairs reported that more than 21,000 of
Ireland’s young people received working holiday visas between July 2022
and June 2023. Apparently, this the highest recorded figure in 16
years. That number is double the number granted the year before. For the
last 15 years or so, we’ve had a strange tendency to consider “young
people” as anyone under 40 – it makes the fact that Irish people delay
parenthood into their 30s and the egregious disparity in home ownership
between generations seem slightly less indicative of major issues – but I
don’t qualify as a “young person”.
[ A snapshot of house prices in five cities around the world and how they compare to Ireland ]
I’m
35. I emigrated to Australia from the UK last August, and I can see why
actual young people are doing the same – because the cost of living
here is manageable, rental properties are plentiful and affordable
(compared with Dublin and London, anyway), and those who want to live
alone or with a partner, rather than six friends, or to eventually start
a family if they want to, might feasibly be able to afford to do that.
Online
commentary I’ve seen around the news of this gigantic jump in figures –
which is, of course, in part fuelled by the surging Australian appetite
for both skilled and unskilled labour – has been depressing. Social
media is rife with a lot of “they are choosing to leave for the craic”,
or “this is what young people do – they travel” comments. The problem is
that nobody emigrates unless leaving is better than what they have at
home. Australia offers many pull factors but they only look attractive
to Irish people when they consider the push factors at home.
We
have a history of emigration, which makes us feel that more than 21,000
young Irish people going through the prohibitively complex process of
obtaining and paying for an Australian visa tells us more about those
individual young people than it tells us about the home they are
yearning to leave in droves.
[ Best of five: A glimpse at rental prices in cities around the world ]
The
reality is that we are not creating space for them in Ireland, and they
are living in conditions that make a country 15,500km away seem
distinctly more enticing.
Irish people have always emigrated, we think.
Most come back, we think.
It might be time to cease looking outward for explanations and question what we are creating for emigrants to return to.
