Remember the Aer Lingus jumbo jet? Back in the nineteen eighties, it was the most used image on RTE news. A jumbo landing in Ireland signified growing numbers of American tourists or a visiting pope. That was the good jumbo. A jet taking off signified emigration. That’s a bad jumbo. Poor Seamus was forced over to Chicago to find work. You probably remember that Brian Lenihan the First was slaughtered at the time when he effectively defended the bad jumbo, suggesting there simply wasn’t enough room on this small island for all of us.
The poor man was only pointing out that the economy couldn’t support all of us. Brian Lenihan the Second knows better than to suggest as much twenty five years later, but then he doesn’t need to. Unemployment has doubled in the past year, now standing at almost 265,000. We had net emigration in September. Get out the jumbo lads, we’re off again.
Not surprisingly, official Ireland is spooked at the re-appearance of the emigration bogey man. No sooner were the figures announced than Fine Gael’s Labour Affairs Spokesman, Damien English, started banging on about a “lost generation of youth” and bandying around the dreaded term “net exporter of people”. This is knee-jerk rubbish.
Rather than rushing to trot out the old lines about emigration, Damien should have watched Reeling in Years on RTE the night the figures were announced. The year was 1987 As the bad jumbos lined up outside, we watched a couple of culchie fellas handing their tickets to the Aer Lingus rep as they made their way out to the cruel plane that was about to take them to the modern day Botany Bay. This was followed by images of the New York skyline as the Fairytale of New York strung up in the background. We were invited to feel sorry for poor Seamus, over in New York when he could have been living at home.
Poor Seamus my arse, over there in the most exciting city in the world. That jumbo to JFK saved Seamus and his mates. They made money, drank hard at the weekend, got laid, got laid off, got new jobs, made more money, met their wives and husbands. Just because they hung around the GAA clubs in the Bronx and Chicago’s southside on Sunday didn’t mean they were pining for home. It meant they were looking for a pint and maybe a start.
Over in London, the Irish guy in the shiny suit staring into his pint on the Kilburn High Road was replaced in the eighties by a wave of Irish professionals on the make, eyeing each up over Friday night pints in the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge. A few with decent French moved to Paris, Seriously, it’s hard to feel sorry for anybody forced to live in Paris. This was no lost generation.
The real reason official Ireland doesn’t like emigration is because we’re such a needy nation. We take population movement personally. Just look at how delighted we were when the wave of immigration started here in the nineties. The media were out asking anybody without freckles how they found it here in Ireland. “Really, you think we’re friendly and welcoming. All your friends do too? That’s great. Nobody ever said that about us before.” We hounded these poor Poles and Latvians around the streets effectively asking do you like my hair.
The reverse applies with emigration. We’re hurt that anyone should choose to leave here and make a life for themselves overseas. We blame ourselves for being dumped. Bizarrely, we assume there is something wrong with us if every person born here doesn’t decide to spend their entire lives on a windswept island at the edge of Europe that boasts an eight minute summer and thirty eight different words for rain.
Do you know who is to blame for this emotional neediness? Mammy. The Irish mother is the only person who takes it to heart when a child takes off to a better life elsewhere. She’s the one crying at the airport arrivals gate when Seamus comes home for Christmas, hugging him like a crazy dervish as he stands there awkwardly, pointing out that he only moved to Berlin and he was home last month.
Mammy will encourage Seamus’s father to feel upset but you just know that he’s delighted the young fella is getting to see the world, not to mention getting a bit of action with them German ones. If the father feels anything, it’s envy.
Back on the left-hand side of the brain, we are faced with the rational argument in favour of keeping Seamus on the island at all costs. We know it as the brain drain. This assumes that the brightest are the first to scarper when the going gets tough. They leave behind the idiots who couldn’t figure out how to use the internet to find a job overseas and book a flight to get there and now spend their days sitting around in a sand pit trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.
It’s bullshit. The recent economic boom wasn’t master-minded in London or New York; it was planned and executed by those who stayed at home. The multi-nationals arrived to find a bunch of bright people, of all ages, bursting to make the most of themselves at home. It was only when they got the ball rolling that the emigrants of the ‘80s generation decided to come back. It worked for everyone.
Emigration isn’t an insult or a brain drain. It’s an opportunity. You only had to look at the people interviewed on RTE news at the recent Working Abroad Expo in the RDS. There was no dejection or resignation, just hope and a general sense of thank Christ we’ve got this as an option. And don’t worry, Mammy, Seamus will be home at Christmas and even if he brings home that size eight jezebel of a Brazilian girlfriend he met, just imagine what the grandchildren will look like. Line up the jumbos; it’s time we took off again.
