Yet again hundreds of Somali and Eritrean refugees have drowned off the coast of Lampedusa, the small Italian island close to northern Africa. It’s a key destination for refugees and asylum-seekers. They are ferried by gangsters in coffin ships: the recent horror is but the latest in a long line.

Nobody knows how many lives have been lost over the last two decades but the Italians estimate it at 20,000. Lampedusa is just one entry point and Africa is just one source. A boat carrying almost 500 Syrian refugees arrived hours before the latest sinking. Refugees and asylum-seekers are part of a much wider pattern of migration across the world. The UN estimates that there are 232 million migrants worldwide. They include millions of destitute labourers from the Indian sub-continent, who are mercilessly exploited in oil-rich countries around the Persian Gulf.
This vast, ruthless and tragic global backdrop sets our own, sad emigration issue in perspective. Of course, emigration is deeply ingrained in Irish culture. Myriad songs and stories speak for the lonely emigrant leaving the shores of Éireann and of the separation and loss endured by those left behind. It’s just taken for granted, the default option. When times are bad, get the hell out of this miserable country and failed society.
This narrative is rooted in a time when the Irish fled conditions comparable to those now encountered in parts of northern Africa.
The story is so deeply embedded in the national consciousness that it’s rarely subjected to any kind of reasoned enquiry. So, when the Central Statistics Office recently published figures on outward and inward migration, the immediate focus was on the numbers who were leaving. In the year to April 2013 there were 89,000 of them, an increase of 2.2% on the previous year. Of these, almost 51,000 were Irish. The number of Irish who left since 2008 stands at over 200,000.
Politicians and pundits pointed and wagged fingers and declaimed the failure of the State, the economy and the society that couldn’t provide employment and meaning for its young...
Few demurred, with the honourable exception of academics in NUI Maynooth, Trinity College and UCC. Freed of the need to kneejerk, they took a wider view and pointed out that half of emigrants had a job in Ireland which they left; and they pointed out also that immigration into Ireland has also increased, with almost 56,000 people immigrating in that same year. Yes, only 16,000 or so were Irish but over 120,000 Irish have “returned” to live here since 2008.
This suggests something much more complex than old-style emigration is going on. Also, research carried out by UCC’s Émigré project found that 62% of emigrants aged 25-34 have a third-level qualification compared to 47% of that age group in the population overall.
National flagellators interpret this as a “brain drain”. Those who disagree with current political and economic policies delight in the notion that the best and brightest are abandoning Ireland for better opportunities in warmer climes.
However, a quite different view was expressed by speakers at the Global Irish Economic Forum. For example, Seán O’Driscoll, chairman and chief executive of Glen Dimplex, said that there is a huge shortage of skills in the economy. In his view, one of the reasons for that is that “we have a profusion of university courses that are producing graduates for which there is no market.” This has created a mismatch of skills. It also explains why a lot of graduates might migrate to where their skills are needed…
Meanwhile, higher education colleges are not producing enough of the skills that are in demand. Last year, one fifth of all jobs advertised here were IT-based. Yet a study by UCD and Dublin City Council, part of an international study by the World Class Cities Partnership in Boston, found that more than half of the ICT jobs in Dublin are being filled by talent from abroad. This is echoed in a study by the non-profit training promotion agency FIT (Fastrack into Technology), which found 4,500 jobs available in Ireland’s IT sector that are not being filled because of “the severely limited supply of suitably skilled applicants.”
And it’s not just in IT. The National Skills Bulletin 2013 reports persistent skills shortages in hi-tech manufacturing, agri-food, sales, marketing, business, finance, and healthcare. It is also clear that the Irish education system no longer produces enough people with intermediate skills and therefore they have to import people with these skills.
Employers are also critical of the job-readiness of many (though clearly not all) young Irish people, citing inflated self-importance, unrealistic expectations of salaries and working conditions – “they want to be running the firm before they have swept the floor” was one comment the Hog overheard – and the difficulties many find in dealing with the routines of working life, for example handling conflict. You can’t just un-friend a colleague you don’t like …
Of course, when you look at the motivation of Ireland’s outward migrants there’s much with which to empathise. Forty six per cent lived with their parents before emigrating. The act of separation, while painful for all, has clearly allowed them to step away from that dependency. And the finding by the Émigré project that emigrants report higher levels of employment, earnings and quality of life abroad than they experienced at home is justification enough for migration.
But we have to be honest: migration by choice with low-cost air travel and a college qualification subsidised by the taxpayers in your pocket is a function of an affluent society, however troubled. It’s mobility – and that’s good. The same is not true of the unfortunates who drowned off the coast of Lampedusa. Their voyages are born of desperation, mingled with just a smidgeon of hope. I’d bet that they’d regard Ireland, for all that’s wrong here, as a kind of paradise.
After all, they lost their lives in trying to get to Europe.