New Exodus of Young Talent Worries Irish

Behind the rosy cheeks and cheery smiles, a sadness hangs over Ireland. The young people are leaving. Again.

“For years you never saw anyone crying at the station, but you do now,” said Una Ainsworth, glancing out her living-room window to nod toward the railroad line linking this remote west Irish market town with far-off Dublin and a more distant world beyond. “We’re back to that again.”

The tears at Castlebar station, like those in the countless other communities that dot Ireland’s gently rolling hills, are part of a new wave of emigration from an island nation where past sufferings have repeatedly forced its sons and daughters to search for better lives across the sea.

In the second half of the last century, Irish emigrants to the United States alone topped 4 million--more than the 3.5 million who live in Ireland today.

So far, neither the level of Ireland’s latest emigration nor the conditions that foster it approach the traumatic upheavals of the past. The estimated 125,000 to 175,000 people that government planners expect to leave over the next five years is lower than the scale of the last large emigration, that of the 1950s.

But it is still significant in the context of Ireland’s small population. It would take the departure of 8.5 million to 12 million Americans to make a comparable dent on the population of the United States.

The economic malaise of low growth and fewer jobs that fuels the new exodus from Ireland does not exhibit the past signs of seering deprivation, since the benefits of the European Economic Community’s farm price supports and regional development schemes provide a deceptive veneer of prosperity even in the country’s poorer western region.

National Morale Shaken

But for several reasons, the exodus has badly shaken Ireland’s national morale, brought new worries to those planning the country’s future and injected an emotive new dimension into the political debate.

Indeed, the emigration and the economic crisis that spawned it were key issues in Ireland’s national election last Tuesday. Political analysts here attributed the defeat of Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald’s government and the victory for opposition leader Charles J. Haughey’s Fianna Fail Party to the ills of the economy and FitzGerald’s prescription: strict austerity.

In part, the impact lies in a jarring disillusionment that the rapid industrial and economic expansion of the 1960s and 1970s has not ended emigration from Ireland after all. Many now wonder if the ‘60s and ‘70s were an aberration and if emigration is a curse that even a modern Ireland must endure.

Too Few Jobs

The quality of the emigrants has only added to the general concern. For the first time in memory, emigration is claiming a large number of highly qualified university graduates--the cream of Ireland’s future--who are now being snapped up by rapidly growing companies abroad because there are too few jobs at home.

Government statistics show that the percentage of college graduates who take their first job outside the country has risen to 13% in 1985 from 4.9% in 1981. In some key professions such as engineering, the figure is much higher.

Stringent U.S. visa restrictions, coupled with the demand of large European companies for bright English-speaking graduates, has redirected, at least partly, the flow of migrants away from the traditional destinations of North America and Britain toward countries such as the Netherlands, West Germany and France.

43 Hired on the Spot

William Watts, provost of the University of Dublin’s prestigious Trinity College, recalled recently how Philips, the Dutch electronics company, flew a group of 44 final-year engineering students to the Netherlands for interviews last year and hired 43 of them on the spot.

“The question wasn’t why the 43 went, but why the 44th came back,” Watts said.

American and British financial institutions, including Morgan Guaranty Trust, Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co., have also reportedly recruited Irish business school graduates to join rapidly expanding operations based in London following deregulation of the financial markets there last fall.

Salary offers of up to twice the levels in Ireland merely add to the attraction of foreign job offers.

“It’s an odd contradiction,” Trinity College’s career planning officer, Dermot Montgomery, noted. “The students have never had it so good, but in terms of the national fabric, it’s not good.”

Change Seems Unlikely

With the number of overseas job opportunities at Montgomery’s office currently exceeding domestic ones by a ratio of 20 to 1, any imminent change seems unlikely.

“Our lifeline, our future, is being exported,” said John Galvin, general secretary of the Episcopal Commission for Emigrants in Dublin, an organization created in the early 1950s to ease the departure of a previous generation.

“If we can’t offer these people anything, we’ve got no hope,” he added. “We’re suffering a crisis of national morale.”

One particularly graphic example of the exodus lies in an advertisement sponsored by the Irish Development Authority featuring a photograph of 20 proud university graduates posing with their diplomas under the caption, “We’re making Ireland the best business base in Europe.”

Less than a year after the photo was taken, seven of the graduates have left the country.

Thousands of Jobs Lost

If Ireland’s economic crisis has robbed many highly educated people of a chance to start work here, it has also cost the jobs of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers.

Among 25- to 29-year-olds, who make up the biggest single chunk of emigrants, unemployment currently runs at more than 25%, one of the highest levels in the European Communities.

Here in Castlebar, for example, a subsidiary of Baxter Travenol Laboratories, the American hospital equipment manufacturer, was easily the area’s biggest employer in the 1970s. But it has gradually cut back its work force to about 250 from a peak of 1,250, and the plant could be closed completely by the end of the year.

Eighteen months ago, Una Ainsworth’s older son, Tommy, left to work in London. While two daughters have settled into marriages and are unlikely to stray from Ireland, she worries about the future for her youngest, 15-year-old Rory.

“He’s already a bit fidgety,” she said. “It’s a worry.”

For people like 26-year-old Geraldine Ward, who lost her assembly-line job at the factory nearly two years ago and fears that her husband many soon lose his, emigration has suddenly become a more immediate option.

Only watching her parents’ anguish at the recent departure of her two brothers has kept her from pushing harder to leave now, but she says that she, too, may eventually go.

“You can get jobs here, but not the right kind,” she said. “The future is elsewhere.”

Britain Still a Lure

For those like Ward who lack the university degrees that make them attractive to companies on the Continent, the traditional destinations, Britain and the United States, still are first choice. In the case of Britain, the fare is cheap, many Irish have relatives there, language is not a problem and there are no restrictions on entry.

Father Paddy Curran, an assistant parish priest in Castlebar, now lectures to young people from surrounding schools, cautioning them on the difficulties of life in a new country but also providing a checklist of steps necessary to succeed abroad.

“Emigration on a large scale is now part of Irish life again,” he said. “There is little enough we can do about this except advise people to be sensible.”

A growing number of young, invariably single Irish have skirted U.S. immigration controls by entering on tourist visas and then slipping into a vast Irish-American network for jobs and housing.

Avalanche of Applications

When U.S. immigration authorities last month offered a special, one-time quota of 10,000 visas on a first-come, first-serve basis to residents of the 35 countries whose quotas were adversely affected by the 1965 Immigration Act, an avalanche of nearly a quarter of a million applications reportedly came from Ireland.

“It showed the morale of the country isn’t very good,” Trinity’s Watts commented.

The full impact of the renewed emigration on the country is a matter of debate. Some note that it remains Ireland’s great safety valve and is better than the alternative of a generation of sullen youngsters with no hope of jobs.

“In the short run, the government must heave a sigh of relief,” noted Terry Baker, a senior research officer at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. “It’s no tragedy for a young graduate going to Philips in Eindhoven.”

Hope for Return

Others recall that it was the successful who came back from previous emigrations and that this time too, Ireland’s brightest may one day return with valuable experience and energy for the nation.

Still, in human terms, there is little argument that the outflow hurts, especially in a society possessing what one sociologist called “a uniquely strong sense of peoplehood and homogeneity.”

“A lot of people are those who went out in the ‘50s but came back, and now they must watch their own children go,” said Damian Hannan, a social scientist at the Economic and Social Research Institute. “That’s really hurtful.”

Parents like the Ainsworths express bitterness about the conditions that they see threatening their families, but they admit that cheap travel and frequent telephone calls make emigration less final than it once was.

“My grandmother said goodby to her brothers and never saw them again,” Una Ainsworth recalled. “My son’s been home once, and he’s coming for a week at Easter.”

Prime Minister FitzGerald made a similar point recently while talking with a group of foreign journalists.

“All of us, all of us, have relatively close relations who have disappeared and we’ve never heard from them again,” he said. “It isn’t like that now.”