Want to bring emigrants home? Repeal the 8th

If Donald Trump had glanced at the Irish media this week he would have been knocked into a state of bafflement. A Government Minister proposed a special income-tax rate of 30 per cent for certain returning emigrants. (Those who invent digital stuff and devise new ways to make unearned billions from pork bellies, I think.)

“What have they got against their own wandering innovators? Sniff!” my imaginary, uncharacteristically articulate Trump wonders. “Why would they impose such punitive tax rates on them? Sniff! Do they carry communicable diseases? Sniff!”

That’s a bit of satire for you there.

The Fine Gael TD Mary Mitchell O'Connor had barely run the flag up the pole before Enda Kenny was furiously tugging it down again. "I would regard that as being unfair and discriminatory," the Taoiseach said of the proposal.

He's not wrong. It's hardly reasonable that Críostóir, recently returned from Singapore to shuck algorithms at Sponk Systems, should pay less than colleagues who endured this dump during the truly miserable years.

While we were shuffling through unending sleet as social inequalities were ignored in the pursuit of economic respectability, these fleeing hordes were having their asymmetric beards trimmed in funky Shoreditch or wolfing down hedgehog souffle in boho Brooklyn.

Maybe we really should penalise those returning to enjoy the country they spurned for so long. After all, unless they were working in Sweden they can hardly have been paying more tax than they would in Ireland. (And if they were in lovely Sweden, they wouldn't be interested in returning to this kip.) They owe something to the global purse. Fork out, freeloaders.

It’s not as if the abortive proposal were aimed at the decent working people who have, for so long, formed the tough spine of British industry and construction. A report in this newspaper tells us that the scheme was directed at “medicine, science, IT and finance”. You could hardly imagine a more regressive tax proposal if you were . . . gosh, Donald Trump really is the unavoidable punchline this year. Isn’t he?

Come back. I’m not nearly finished.

National sport 

Do we really want the sort of people who would be drawn home by a conspicuously “discriminatory” tax incentive? We’ve got enough of them already. Furthering inequity has been a national sport for decades.

It hardly matters. Kenny did everything short of rotating his finger at his temple – the international symbol for “bonkers” – when dismissing his colleague’s mayfly proposal. It has gone to the same place the Government keeps that scheme for appeasing the giant lizard people of Zexus 7 following invasion. We shall not hear of it again. So how should we set about luring emigrants back to the Republic?

Uncharacteristically, I have some idea what I'm talking about here. I assume there's a bit in the 1986 episode of Reeling in the Years that shows young men queuing up for the Holyhead ferry to The Communards' Don't Leave Me This Way.

You know how the story goes. Yet another generation is torn from the hearth and sent overseas to lonely lives of exile and despair. The finest and brightest look tearfully back at the receding shore as they distil terrors they don’t dare to articulate.

That is almost exactly how it wasn't. Just three years earlier the country had amended the Constitution to give cell clusters the same right to life that it granted grown men and women. Homosexuality was still illegal. Monty Python's The Meaning of Life had just been banned. It was virtually impossible to get a glass of beer in a restaurant. The population was almost entirely white and the food largely terrible.

Many of us, though fond of the place, felt we were leaving a monocultural backwater that was still struggling to fight its way into the 20th century. We missed our families, but few of us missed the oppressive dump that was slipping over the horizon. While the properly brave stayed home and worked to change the system we slunk away to a country where you could get a pint of lager and a chicken jalfrezi after closing time.

What brought so many of us back in the mid-1990s? The improving economy was a part of it. But the shift in social attitudes was at least as important. The church finally began to lose its grip on social policy. Immigration from outside western Europe brought greater character to the nation. Homosexuality was decriminalised. The divorce referendum scraped through. For all the demerits of the grabby years Ireland felt like a more pleasant place to live.

If we want to bring back the emigrants then a continuation of that process is vital. A worthwhile next step would be to repeal the Eighth Amendment. Give it a go.