Madam, – ESRI emigration specialist Dr Alan Barrett says current “emigration figures reflect one of the most depressing aspects of the economic downturn . . . emigration that is involuntary is saddening and brings back sad memories for people of my generation who left college in the 1980s” (“Surge in emigration as economic downturn takes toll”, Front page, December 27th).
As an economist who left college in the 1950s to take a 1956 boat from Dún Laoghaire to join the other 60,000 emigrants of that year, I could express similar sentiments. But my George-O’Brien UCD 1952-56 economics studies endowed me with a realism that is strangely lacking, it seems, in many modern economics graduates.
We saw in the 1950s that massive emigration was necessary to offload the hundreds of thousands who had been unable to emigrate in the war and post-war conditions of the 1940s, and that the Whitaker tightening-up measures that Seán Lemass adopted were needed to stop our public finances from being devastated by unsustainable jobs-creation spending. That realism says that similar massive emigration is now needed to offload the hundreds of thousands who would have emigrated during the first decade of this century but for jobs-creation via unsustainable spending financed by public and private borrowing.
The really sad thing now compared with the 1950s is that emigrants are less hardy and their income expectations much higher, emigration destinations are much fewer, those remaining are left with an unsustainable public education, health and welfare bill that is massively higher, and public and private debt servicing and repayments are set to be horrendous for at least a decade.
Successful 2011-2020 emigrants will be even luckier than the successful 1951-1960 ones. – Yours, etc,