Brain Top Off!

The old cliche is that the greatest of all Irish exports are its people. The Emerald Isle seems to have a most tragic association with emigration. The Irish Great Famine of the 1840s killed 1 million and displaced another million to countries around the world. By the end of the decade, half of all immigration in the United States was from Ireland. The phenomenon of emigration has rarely abated in Ireland, and the population has never returned to its pre-Great Famine levels. In the last few decades we’ve seen the end of the Troubles and a general economic improvement for the Irish people. As a result, Irish emigration started to slow in the last two decades. But it wasn’t to last, and the trend is again towards massive emigration, thanks to a crippling budget and economic crisis. The latest estimates suggest that around 1,000 people per week will be seeking overseas property insurance.

These figures come courtesy of the ESRI, the Economic and Social Research Institute. And the most worrying aspect of the news isn’t entirely unexpected: the young are Ireland’s greatest loss. Graduates especially are trying to find jobs and property abroad, seeking House insurance Spain and in other EU countries. Graduates are clearly not putting much faith in Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s proposed recovery package. Ireland has been hoping to create jobs around boosts to the export sector, but the assumption is that the majority of these jobs will not be targeted at graduates.

A rate of 13.5 percent unemployment is projected by the ESRI, and this figure obviously doesn’t include those who’re simply no longer going to be resident in the country. The biggest worry is that, tempted away by higher pay in other nations, the mass exodus of skilled youth will store up problems for the future. But when they’re got their French property insurance and the rest of their new life tying them down, it’s going to take some kind of economic miracle to tempt them all back?

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