Where are they going and who are they? Patterns of Irish emigration in the 21st
“And so it is that our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history. No people ever believed more deeply in the cause of Irish freedom than the people of the United States. And no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony, and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived in the United States. They left behind hearts, fields, and a nation yearning to be free. It is no wonder that James Joyce described the Atlantic as a bowl of bitter tears. And an earlier poet wrote, “They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.”
- United States President John F. Kennedy in his address to Leinster House, Dublin, 1963
It’s a commonly held trope that above all, Ireland’s largest export is people. Murphy, often held as the most common Irish-origin name of all, sees far more people carrying it in the United States than Ireland. Since the early 1800s, over 10 million people have left Irish shores for other destinations. This is recounted in countless books, stories, and songs, with the majority of them focused on the Great Famine of the 1800s and those, like my family, who decided to come to the U.S. more recently than that. Yet what often goes unspoken and uncovered centers on the profile of those are who are leaving Ireland in the 21st century after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economic reforms in the mid 2000s.
A study conducted by University College Cork in 2013 sets out the most extensive set of research on just who is leaving the country and why. I’ll do a more in depth study on the piece, but here are some basic takeaways:
- One in four rural Irish households has had a family member leave since 2006
- Emigration levels have quadrupled from levels a decade ago
- Most of the Irish who end up leaving are educated formally
In terms of where most Irish are going, they’re off to English speaking nations, primarily the United Kingdom (due to proximity). But Australia and the United States aren’t far behind, with New York City itself boasting an Irish population of over 50,000, which increases by nearly 2,000 to 4,000 any time a wave of J1 students arrive in the country. It’s a topic that’s in desperate need of further study, which I am excited to undertake. The Central Statistics Office in Ireland estimated in 2013 that 243 people leave the country every day. With a changing Ireland, there are consequences that indicate the tip of the iceberg of a larger problem.
