Each week in the run up to the General Election, JOE is asking a representitive from each of the main political parties to answer a burning question relevant to Irish men in 2011.
We’re not putting any spin on their answers: we ask the question, they give us their answers, and we print what they tell us.
Representing Labour on our virtual panel of Dáil Deputies is the TD for Cork South Central Ciarán Lynch.
Question: “What would you do, and do quickly, to stop the flood of young bright Irish men leaving our shores? Does it really make a difference which party leads the government, as many of these young men have lost faith in Ireland and can’t see a reason to stay, let alone stay and vote?”
Answered by Labour’s Ciarán Lynch TD
Speaking in summer 2006, the then leader of the Labour Party, Pat Rabbitte, addressed the topic of the large scale immigration into Ireland in recent years.
He said that: “In Ireland today we have a remarkable new demographic. It is characterised by large scale in-migration that by now critically, underpins economic growth. For as long as the economy continues to grow the migrants will stay and continue to arrive and for as long as they stay and continue to come the economy will continue to grow.”
Almost exactly four years later, in July 2010, my colleague and Labour Party Spokesperson on Enterprise, Willie Penrose TD, remarked on the latest figures from the EU statistics body Eurostat showing that Ireland had the highest level of emigration among all member states during 2009.
He stated that the Irish emigration rate during 2009, at 9%, was almost twice the rate of the next worst country, Lithuania at 4.6%. This came on top of a forecast from the Economic and Social Research Institute that up to 120,000 are expected to emigrate by the end of 2011.
Ninety years after our state was established Irish people should be able to expect to live and find work in their own country. We are already seeing the re-emergence of emigration as a direct result of our failure to create jobs at home. Ireland cannot afford to lose another generation of educated and talented young people as we did in the 1980s.
Lessons
While Irish people have traditionally emigrated to all parts of the world, and the Irish Diaspora is one of the most numerous and dispersed, one of the lessons of the last 20 years is that this does not have to be the case. When jobs, opportunities, and the chance for a sustainable life in the local community is available Irish people will remain at home and work.
It is a shocking indictment of Fianna Fail that they turned the successful economy, handed over to them in 1997, into the current disastrous situation with record unemployment and renewed emigration. It is outrageous that in four years Fianna Fail took us from practically full employment and net immigration, to hundreds of thousands of people having to leave Ireland to find work and a sustainable livelihood.
And it is wrong that, once again, young men who have to beat the familiar path to London, New York, and Sydney that so many Irish people have travelled before them in order to find work.
The full impact of renewed emigration is being felt in every town and village in Ireland. In the earlier decades it was largely unskilled people who emigrated, but now we are losing highly educated and skilled people, including graduates.
The recovery of the Irish economy and making emigration a permanent thing of the past is dependent on our ability to create and sustain jobs and get the real economy moving again. But the government has allowed job creation to remain at the bottom of the political agenda.
For that reason, the Labour Party’s focus in this election is not simply a narrow focus on cutting services in order to balance the books, but on measures to create jobs and opportunities that will provide jobs, encourage people to stay at home, and provide the basis on which we can move towards economic recovery
To help reduce emigration and get people back to work, the Labour Party has proposed the setting up of a strategic investment bank that would make credit available to small and medium sized enterprises provide, start up capital for new companies, and provide the money that is needed for infrastructural development.
We need new and innovative thinking. We need to expand our business with the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China setting up trade and investment teams in these countries.
In addition we have suggested a dedicated jobs fund in every budget to support employment creation and we have put particular emphasis on the need to improve education and training. There is also clearly a need for much greater retraining opportunities.
We need new and innovative thinking. We need to expand our business with the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China setting up trade and investment teams in these countries. We need to set up a Trade Council, establish an Innovation Strategy Agency and create a network of Technology Research Centres.
These are the measures that must be implemented from day one when the new Government takes office. But for that to happen, people must first use their vote to get rid of Fianna Fail and provide Labour with the strongest possible mandate to create jobs and prevent the flood of young people leaving Ireland.
Ciarán Lynch TD is standing for election as a Labour candidate in the Cork South Central constituency. Check out Ciarán’s website at ciaranlynch.ie
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