Emigration II - The Sequel

There’s a feeling of dislocation that accompanies me a lot of the time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. It could I suppose be most adequately described as being between two worlds, two lives and not being sure to which you most properly belong. The feeling is most acute I would speculate in people of my age who have incorporated diverse chapters into their lives.

To grow up in Ireland in the eighties and be faced with the almost unavoidable spectre of emigration is something that our most recent generation have not had occasion to give much thought to. There is a general feeling now however that such an option may begin to re appear on the radar screen after a twenty year hiatus.

If you live abroad for an extended period you will inevitably absorb something of the character and the fabric of that place. You can try to remain as culturally exclusive as you can but a certain amount of the host country’s identity will diffuse into your being. And once it weaves it’s way in, it’s in for good.

In my case I went to England in 1994, returned to Ireland for a few months in 1997 and then moved to the north eastern United States until 2006. I am conscious every day of the effects on my character of this movement. The stay in the US by virtue of it being considerably longer of course but also because of my positive disposition towards the place, the region and its people in particular made a profound impact.

In my college years recession was the unchanging backdrop in this country, the background noise. We may have been through cycles before but I don’t think normal people really noticed, time passed amidst the hum of making do, of getting on with it.

And people did get on with it, it’s one of the great myths that has sprung up in the last decade that pre 1997 the country was merely sleepwalking through it’s existence. We did things - we went out for the occasional dinner, students went away on J1 visas every summer, we had a few pints at the weekend, we went to rugby internationals. We did all these things and squeezed more glee out of them than we do out of the equivalent things now, because they didn’t come easy.

I remember going to a match in Landsdowne Road with my father and a friend of his who was a bank manager. Part of the preamble to the game was the bank’s hospitality suite in Clonskeagh. We surveyed the scene like the Israelites did the Promised Land - all manner of exotic finger foods, wine, beer, desserts, help yourselves lads.

In subsequent years such opulence became the stuff of legend as tales such as the one of getting the bartender to fill an empty lucozade bottle with brandy on our way out were told to hysterical approval. If you were to lay out the same feast today it would probably impress very few, the hors d’oeuvres would probably draw scowls of disapproval from certain strands of our nouveau riche.

The idea that we were all moping miserably around waiting for the gods to bestow an economic miracle upon us is just nonsense. In fact I would suggest that the Dublin of that era was a lot more urbane, sophisticated and downright cool than it is now when you allow for the economic status of the place at the time. I’d rather talk about the blues with some stranger over breakfast in the Red Rose for a couple of hours as I did one morning back then than talk about negative equity with someone nowadays.

The inescapable truth of that era though was that when the college party was over jobs needed to be got and Ireland could not provide them, not in my discipline at any rate. And therein lies what I think is the fundamental difference between that generation and this, we had an expectation that things wouldn’t be easy, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to get the show on the road and if that meant heading for Dublin Airport then so be it. We almost embraced the notion of leaving, I didn’t see it as being bad or good, I never once stopped and made a judgment on it, it was just how things were.

Graduates over the past dozen years have stepped into a full employment economy. Lavish starting salaries, cheap used cars, competition in the market to insure them, easy credit - these things have all made it relatively easy to hit the ground running and stay running.

Now comes the real test. Because it’s pretty easy to move into a bedsit in Ealing or a dingy studio in Dorchester when what you’ve come from is barely comparable if not worse. The transition is harder when compromises have to be made, when maybe for the first time you are reliant on help - maybe from a relative, a family friend or whoever.

It’s easy to be smug, there seems to be a lot of schadenfraude around at the moment. It’s also easy to forget that amidst the train wreckage that sees greedy builders and unscrupulous bankers get what many see as what’s coming to them are also entangled the fates of people who didn’t decide where we were going or how we were going to get there but jumped aboard because they just wanted to go somewhere. Derailment wasn’t their idea.

And here we are, emigration is back on the table. It’s back because anyone with a shred of common sense knew that what emerged here over the last dozen years couldn’t last forever. We didn’t expect it to come to such a shuddering halt either. Boom then bust, it’s a cycle as old as money itself.

Emigration. Not a dirty word, embrace it, if viewed as an opportunity for personal development, growth and enrichment then it’s not too scary a concept. To live somewhere else, to soak it up and allow the experience to enhance you and broaden your view, even to become dislocated is not as irreversible as it sounds. I have in fact only good things to say about the feeling.

We at least have the comfort of knowing that, despite years of political ineptitude, we are better placed now to participate in whatever type of recovery presents itself than we ever were twenty years ago. We will never return to the days when emigration decimated families and butchered communities all over the country.

Emigration II - This time it’s not so personal.