The people of Ireland go to the polls Friday to deliver what's expected to be a knock-out blow to the governing party. But many are choosing to vote in a traditional Irish fashion: with their feet. Tens of thousands are joining in a new wave of emigration, turning their backs on a country mired in economic malaise, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Martin Lynch's family is one of many that are being scattered to the four winds. In the past year, one son has moved to Germany, another to England. His daughter is planning her departure for London, and Mr. Lynch and his wife are bound for Australia.
"Ireland has let me down," says the 62-year-old, a retired caretaker of the local technology institute here in the southeastern town of Carlow. "We just seem to be incapable of governing ourselves."
Nothing seems to better symbolize Ireland's economic crisis than the re-emergence of large-scale emigration, a scourge many hoped had been slain for good. It's a theme that has cast a long shadow over the campaign for this election, which polls suggest will uproot Fianna Fail, the party that has dominated Irish politics for 80 years.
On the hustings and on voters' doorsteps, emigration is on everyone's lips. For many it encapsulates the sense of hopelessness that has descended on Ireland as the country grapples with one of the worst economic crises in its history.
Forced emigration was long Ireland's curse. A million fled in the decade after the great potato famine of the mid-19th century, which killed some 800,000 people. There was a huge exodus a hundred years later, with thousands lured away by a building boom in the U.K. Another mass migration followed in the 1980s.
The country's fortunes appeared to change for good in the mid-1990s, when years of big spending on higher education, low corporate taxes, generous European Union aid and an influx of foreign investment helped transform Ireland into the "Celtic Tiger." Between 1995 and 2000, the economy grew nearly 10% a year on average, and Ireland began to catch up with its richer European neighbors. The country's far-flung diaspora started trickling back to feast on the new opportunities.
However, by 2008, as Ireland's banking crisis triggered a deep recession and unemployment soared to 13%, the tide turned again. Ireland's Central Statistics Office predicts that 100,000 people will emigrate over the next two years, more than twice the number that left in 2009 and 2010. That comes to about 1,000 per week, and exceeds the last peak in emigration in 1989 when 44,000 people moved away.
The overall figure represents just over 2% of Ireland's population of 4.47 million, which economists say by itself isn't enough to prevent a recovery.
But there are fears that the more people leave, the greater the tax burden on those who stay and the bigger the decline in public services like education and health care.
And while demographic data on emigrants is scarce, many of those leaving are believed to be well-educated professionals—precisely the people Ireland needs to lead a recovery. "In a modern, knowledge-based economy, dense, diverse cities full of highly-skilled people are a critical competitive advantage," says John McHale, an economist at the National University of Ireland, Galway. "If the most enterprising people leave, you undermine that advantage." Read more. (Subscription required.)
