Reality of emigration haunts us again
AMID the grim statistics that now stalk this country, is the resumption of our wretched history of enforced emigration.
Nothing has defined us as much as that horrible trek to the emigrant boat and plane. What has brought us to this dreadful state where history is repeating itself in such a grotesque fashion?
Can we get nothing right in this country? The appalling repeated mistakes of governments is surely too much to take on board by a generation, who grew to adulthood in the height of the Celtic Tiger only to see their dreams and hopes lost in the kind of recession that puts the 1950s and '80s in the small time category.
Make no mistake about this sad and wretched fact of modern Ireland. Our young people have been sold down the river in the current recession.
In the 1980s, the mantra was that Johnny or Mary could go to London or New York and find work. Now, there is the prospect of travelling much further in the forlorn hope of securing employment. Is it always the lot of the Irish to repeat the mistakes of the past?
Having endured waves upon waves of emigration, surely our political masters would have tried to ensure that the dreadful scourge of emigration would never repeat itself?
No. Unfortuntately, no.
The Irish are on the move again, as the statistics tell us. There is the horrible reality of the grotesque repetition of history, as we factor in as a country the level of emigration that will ease our miserable financial state.
The historian and academic, Joe Lee, got it so right when he wrote that no country had disposed of its emigrants than Ireland had. And we did it with style. That political weirdo, Eamon De Valera, was sufficiently smug in the early 1950s to say that the emigrants from Ireland had the option of remaining in Ireland in better employment.
And all the time, he held back the great Sean Lemass, as he ranted on about the reuniting the country and restoring the language. God help us!
An innocent Irish public bought that line from Dev and it worked to keep him in paid employment until his 90s. And then he had to talk to Jack Lynch about his pension. And the pension was sorted out.
He said: "How happy, in comparison, and how blessed would have been the lot of an Irish girl, the poor betrayed victim of hellish agencies of vice, had she remained home and passed her days in the poverty, aye and wretchednesss, of mud cabin….''
Perhaps the writer, John McGahern, wrote it more brilliantly. "They were young, poorly educated for the most part, ill-prepared. Names like Holyhead, Chester, Crewe, were burned into the national consciouness; but this was a silent generation and it disappeared in silence." And he added: "The boats were hardly better than cattle boats, and the boat to Liverpool did carry cattle in its hold.
"The trains were no better. Strangely, those emigrants were looked on down by the new elite who had done well out of Independence; it was somewhow all their own sin and fault that they go into an unholy Britain for work.'' And what happened in that sad meantime? What was left us but that sad meaningless road to the emigration trail?
And now we are back to it again. That wretched road of emigration is the new world for the young.
And what had the brilliant Joe Lee, historian and brilliant academic to say. "It may safely be predicted that the paradoxes of de Valera will intrigue historians for generations to come.
"Explorations of the recesses of that cavernous mind reveals even more complex, even more fascinating formations. Born to an emigrant mother in America who sent him back to Ireland at the age of two when she lost her husband, he would bear the scars of maternal rejection throughout his life.
And, as Dr Lee, would record it later when recalling the poet, John Montague, poignantly recalling a later Brooklyn birth. He wrote that, "All roads wind backwards to it. An unwanted child, a primal hurt.''
Dr Lee remarked that Dev would show little compassion for his mother's plight. Lee added: "A teacher by training, he virtually ignored education throughout his political career…''
Has anything changed? Surely not.
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Weather for Tullamore
Wednesday 08 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: -5 C to -0 C
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