"There are always young people coming and going from Ireland. Some of them are emigrants in the traditional sense, but simply there are people who want to get off the island. For a lot of people going, it's not being driven by unemployment at all. It's being driven by wanting to see another part of the world."
With these words, and the added description of emigration as a "lifestyle choices," finance minister Michael Noonan set off a storm last week that visually eclipsed his primary intention of highlighting the fact that Ireland has been successfully ticking off the boxes - as he himself is apt to put it - and in doing so is in the good books of the troika of bailout providers, the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Minister Noonan has been around in Irish politics for a while and no doubt remembers the uproar caused 25 years ago by the late Brian Lenihan who, as foreign affairs minister in a Fianna Fáil-led government, seemed to hoist the white flag on the matter of emigration when he stated that there simply wasn't enough room or work for everyone on what was a small island.
Lenihan did not allude to lifestyle choices in his assertion - delivered to Newsweek magazine. That wasn't surprising because there was very little to do with lifestyle behind the mass exodus of people from the island of Ireland during the 1980s. The Irish of that decade and indeed the Irish of the first half of the 1990s, left so that they could simply have a life. The style would have to wait.
In more recent years, during the Celtic Tiger mania, it would be possible to ascribe lifestyle choices to some in Ireland who not only took their skills overseas, but who in fact returned to Ireland from the U.S. and elsewhere in part spurred by notions of a certain kind of lifestyle, specifically an Irish one with the hitherto unfamiliar twist of economic prosperity
That was then and this is now. Leaving aside for a moment the valid argument that travel indeed broadens the mind and that much can be learned by living in another land, the nature of departure from Ireland these days bears much closer resemblance to the kind that prevailed in the 80s as opposed to the ten or so tiger years.
Minister Noonan, it should be noted, did subsequently attempt to clarify his remarks and draw a distinction between forced emigration and migration in search of enlightenment and success.
But that he even had to do this merely underlines the sense that Irish politicians have long been too much at ease with the idea of emigration as a natural cycle, not unlike boom and bust economics, or the normal rotation of political parties into and out of power in a democracy.
Whether he meant to or not, Mr. Noonan has raised anew a deep rooted argument in Irish life that revolves around the question as to whether or not large scale emigration is avoidable, or simply inevitable, and if it is the latter case what can be done to lessen such inevitability while bridging the physical, psychological and emotional gap between those on the small island, and those who have left it behind.
Sure, there are those with wanderlust, curiosity, a sense of adventure, a desire for change. And indeed many who emigrate from Ireland carry all these urges and desires with them.
But the fundamental forces that drive Irish emigration have far more to do with economic survival in this life than lifestyle. That's not to say that the fortunes of those who have left the island cannot be improved by political leaders on it.
For one thing, those who have departed for the U.S. should be legal in the U.S., thus allowing them to return to Ireland to visit family and loved ones, conduct business, enjoy a vacation without having to worry about getting back into America.
In the short term, the more attainable means for such legal entry rests with the proposed E-3 visa program. Legality in America gives the immigrant the chance of a good life here, the lifestyle that Mr. Noonan was referring to. Securing the E3s will require the participation of the Irish government. such participation needs to be effective and consistent.
It will be neither if the view of emigration at the heart of government is of a recurring and for sure sad fact of life somehow morphing into globetrotting tourism.
