Madam, – The statement by Brian O’Connell (Life Culture, October 1st) that 65,000 people, half of them Irish, had emigrated in the first four months of this year is not correct.
The CSO figure of 65,000 gross emigration is a full year, not a four-month estimate. The figure is also misleading in that any balanced discussion on emigration at national level must also deal with immigration. Mr O’Connell’s statement is in the same vein as other articles in your newspaper which ignored the immigration factor. The result is that people are left with the impression that there has been net emigration at 65,000 in each of the last two years and that the mass “export of our children” has returned.
In the year to April, 2009, against the 65,000 who left, 57,000 immigrants came into Ireland, giving a net emigration of 8,000. Despite numerous references by politicians and other commentators to the 65,000 Irish who were supposed to have emigrated last year, the CSO estimate was that there was no net Irish emigration. This year the estimate is that 65,300 again left but that only 30,800 came in to the country giving a net emigration of 34,500. Among the emigrants were 27,700 Irish, while there were 13,300 Irish among the immigrants, indicating the first resumption of net Irish emigration over 14,000 in the year to April.
And while every single individual forced to emigrate represents sadness and separation for entire families, at national level the emigration of under 15,000 Irish in the past two years is a far cry from 30,000 or more in four months.
Given the appalling banking, economic and unemployment crises of the last two years, it is the absence of mass Irish emigration rather than the resumption of net emigration which is the big story. (The Annex to the Quarterly National Household Survey for the second quarter of 2010 published on the same day as the Population and Migration estimates seems to suggest that even this relatively low figure of net Irish emigration may be too high).
A positive indicator from the estimates is that the number of families with children who are emigrating is only half what it was at the height of the boom and that there were still three times more families entering the country than left it in the year to April, 2010.
The most significant negative result from the Population Estimates is at regional level; the net outmigration from Dublin of over 36,000 people and an actual decline of over 10,000 in Dublin’s population over the past two years. – Yours, etc,