This is the oped, as filed, in the 13 July 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday. The things I didn’t have space to get into in this column include thoughts on a slight gender split that will be a caveat, but it doesn’t affect the main point: the difference between conditions in Ireland and the rest of the developed world was HUGE in the 1980s, it’s much less today; so the incentive to emigrate is much, much lower today and will likely remain so.

Many thanks to Rachel English for the nice mention (about 30 minutes in) on Sunday, filling in for Marian Finucane on RTE Radio 1!

BEGINS

Richard Delevan

Emigration left Ireland a pessimistic place, because all the optimists had left. The optimists settled in America, Britain or Australia and learned that hard work and courage pays off. The pessimists settled for whatever they could get and learned to tug their forelocks.

It’s now a fortnight since the ESRI used the R-word and predicted we’d soon be exporting people again. Subsequent forecasts worsened with the weather, with Goodbody’s Dermot O’Leary predicting economic contraction of 2.2% this year and no recovery until 2010. The Irish stock market has collapsed. You’d think that the chaos at Dublin Airport was due to everybody simultaneously giving up, cutting out and queuing at the Ryanair counter to peddle CVs in Kraków to work construction. Right along with the Eastern Europeans, who actually will tilt us into net out-migration.

Indeed a lot of people in the media business apparently believe that they are leaving. With a lovely sort of sunny fatalism, Dave Fanning began his Wednesday morning programme on RTE with an item on “emigration hot-spots”, the trendiest economic lifeboats that the young hipsters will swim to. (Kazakhstan, anyone?) Later on RTE television interviewed an electrician who, having been wooed by the Australian government’s three-year campaign, is now considering sunny Sydney. So from fund accountants to plumbers, for those with a portable skill it’s Ireland goodbye; hello Dubai, Shanghai or Mumbai. The Theoretical 300, the super-rich valiantly holding off the taxman while technically living as exiles, will live a little more Spartan but see their numbers grow as politicians succumb to tax temptation. Anyone remaining in the country, onto the dole queue and, please, speak only like an extra from The Commitments.

A neat, sad and familiar narrative. Fortunately, it’s complete nonsense.

They’re not going to emigrate. Not in anything like the numbers of native-born Irish that left in waves once a generation since the Famine. Not in the way that Ireland has always relied upon as a “safety valve” for society. The future occasionally will be frightening but it is no longer fixed; it will not be as depressingly predictable as the past.

Why won’t they leave? A flatter world but with higher walls, higher debts and higher expectations.

To seek a better life is the reason people migrate. For most migrants that’s an economic equation. Where can I go to get a better life for me and perhaps for my present or future children?

Twenty years ago the answer was, anywhere but here. In the early, hard years of pain that gave way to the Celtic Tiger, it really was that simple. Expectations were so crushingly low that working as a brickie practically anywhere meant improvement, even if you pined for home and sung along to Christy Moore that you’d “give all for the price of a flight”.

In 1988 Irish unemployment stood at 16.3% - a figure that masks the much darker reality. Workforce participation – the percentage of able-bodied people of working age, men and women, who are in or seeking employment – was much lower 20 years ago than today. So the unemployment figure wasn’t even counting lots of people who didn’t see a job as something even worth looking at.

At the same moment, unemployment in Thatcher’s England was 6% in 1988. Unemployment in New York was 4%; in Australia it was 6.5%. So just in terms of the prospect of getting a job, your chances were empirically better almost anywhere else in the English-speaking world.

But in 2008, the most tightly-linked economies of the developed world are all hitting a downturn at the same time – a big difference. Unemployment in New York, 5.2%; England, 5.3%; Australia, 4.2%; and in Ireland – despite having a bigger population, and a far higher percentage of that population, especially women, in work – the number forecast by Christmas is 6%.

So your chances of getting a job now are on the whole not much worse here than they are in the other traditional destinations for Irish emigrants.

And the jobs you could get would be dramatically different. It’s admittedly an imperfect measure*, but to compare like with like, let’s look at the per person national income in Ireland versus other places, in 1985 versus 2005.

In 1985, Irish real GDP per capita was $6,750; Britain, $10,910; Australia, $11,740; and the US, $16,490. In 2005, the Irish number was $40, 362; Britain, $32,390; Australia, $35,453; US, $43,801.

Enough with the numbers for a minute, but again – like the differences with unemployment – Irish income per person is now equal to or better than the traditional places Irish people went.

So the differences in your medium-term economic prospects aren’t anything like they were in the 1980s, or the 1950s, or the 1920s, etc. You might be tempted to head off to Dubai or Shanghai for a year, but settling down in a place where your kids will grow up speaking Arabic or Cantonese is not the same as settling down in London or New York.

There are higher walls. While London is as open as ever, getting to live in New York – legally or otherwise – is a far, far different proposition than it was in the pre-9/11 days. There is an anti-immigrant backlash in most of the world, and most ugly in the US, but as unpopular as America is at the moment it’s still oversubscribed. The 65,000 slots for H1-B visas in 2008 to work in the United States were taken up faster than tickets to Oxegen. How fast? All gone on the first day applications were accepted. And if you think that US immigration authorities didn’t want that random Irish kid who’d overstayed his J1 visa that they pulled off a train and stuck in jail to make the talk radio and tabloid circuit over here, think again. That was a message: Send your tired and poor elsewhere, we’re full.

There are higher debts. The Celtic Cubs, the 18-29 year olds, have piled it on like the rest of us. There’s been a lot of talk recently about this – that Irish mortgage debt is equal 162% of our gross national product. That won’t affect all of them, but many above the age of 23 may already be tied in. We’re not as bad as some for credit cards, but once you have serious debt obligations, most people want to find a way to meet them.

And there are higher expectations. The Celtic Cubs, raised on decent Indian food, Christmas shopping trips to Manhattan and outlet malls, two sun holidays a year, new cars, bigger houses, bebo, Dundrum, iPhones and Prada? You think they’re going to stop wanting those things? And when they realise that their chances of maintaining that lifestyle are no better going somewhere else than they are at home, what then?

This is why things will get interesting. Expectations are set so high for an entire generation that it’s hard to know what will happen when they suddenly look under threat. That two-to-one margin of defeat for the Lisbon Treaty among the under-30s was early thunder. Under the superficial cloud of doom, once the twentysomethings realise it’s time to get real, the results could be explosive – innovations in business, revolutions in politics. It’s all to play for, and that hasn’t been true for 160 years. Because if the optimists who suckled at the Celtic Tiger for 15 years realise that to keep what they have they’ll have to stay and fight rather than cut and run, the “safety valve” no longer functions. The pressure starts to build. Right now.

www.richarddelevan.com

ENDS

* An alternative metric to real GDP per capita would be the OECD’s calculation of Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) - a crunchy statistical model that includes purchasing power parity (PPP), exchange rates and a few other bits and bobs to try to correct for disparities in comparing real GDP per capita in different countries. For Ireland this is significant because our GDP figure is inflated by the amount of foreign investment we have, repatriated profits, transfer pricing and the like. Here’s the 2005 report with tables. The problem is that I was unable to find a table with AIC for the 1980s for comparison. So we’re stuck with real GDP per capita - if anybody comes across AIC data for the 80s (or earlier) do email me.