Sir, – Only in Ireland could the continuing mass emigration of our youngest and brightest be spun as a good news story. Under the heading "Emigration to fall as economy improves, says ESRI" (Home News, December 27th) your report confirms an ESRI estimate of 78,000 people who will leave the country in the year to April 2014. As this figure represents a drop of 14 per cent on the previous year's exodus of 89,000, it is trumpeted as "the lowest net migration figure since 2008-09."
It might be appropriate to put these latest figures into an historical context. Of the last 10 decades of our so-called independence, eight have been marked by mass unemployment and mass emigration, a pattern that continues as strongly today as it did when my father was forced to leave these shores in the 1950s and before him his eldest sister in the 1920s. I had to repeat my father’s journey to England in the 1980s.
Now I look at my children and wonder where they will they end up in the decades ahead as this State faces into decades of repaying the debts of private bankers.
This is the shameful legacy of unbroken conservative rule in our country, a rule that our electorate still seems determined to cling to despite all the evidence of its failure. The carnival of reaction continues. – Yours, etc,
PAUL GAVAN,
Inis Cluain,
Castleconnell, Co Limerick.