A DAD'S LIFE: Spectre of travelling abroad to find work returns to haunt us
BACK WHEN the world started to implode and people began to realise that a three-bed semi in Lucan wasn’t actually worth a million, I may have been a little harsh on recent college graduates.
At the time, word went around that freshly qualified kids weren’t getting the job offers they had been promised before their finals. For the previous few years, new accountants, solicitors, architects, marketing execs and social media “gurus” had been able to stroll into blue chip companies, demand a killer salary and a company Beamer, and then jump ship within a year for a further 50 per cent bump.
But then, quite suddenly, the tap turned off and before you could say “reality check”, these jobs were gone. And the ones that were cropping up paid a whole lot less than they had a year earlier.
The Tiger Cubs began to mewl. “Oh no,” they said, “there’s no way I’m working for less than 60k. I went to the Smurfit Business School – they made a promise! If I’m going to tell companies what to put on their website and, like, get them on Facebook, they’re gonna have to sort me out properly.”
Shag ’em, I thought, these uppity little toerags with their delusions of mediocrity. Send them off to London and Chicago and Sydney where they’ll have to earn their living, where they’ll learn a few home truths before landing back in a few years as valuable commodities, much like the rest of us had to do a few years ago.
It still seemed a bit of a game back then. All that nonsense about “soft landings” had us convinced this was an opportunity to re-evaluate what was important and start over. And one of the first home truths was that there are no guarantees. A degree doesn’t make you special, you’ll have to shine a bit to prove your worth, you’ll at least have to try.
Now, a few years later, with the 23 to 30 year old population either unemployed or conspicuous by their absence, there is no longer any sense that this is a game. Another sister-in-law is hitting the emigration trail to attempt to crack the nut in NYC and this no longer feels like adventure. This feels like necessity without a safety net. At this stage, half my wife’s plentiful siblings are overseas. Fortunately, they’ve made their decision to leave without guns to heads, but a choice to return, should they wish, seems unrealistic.
The kids greeted this latest news with indignation, the elder in particular as this aunt is her godmother. She is never less than dramatic, my daughter: “You can’t go! You’re breaking our hearts!” But go she will, like a huge chunk of her peer group already has.
This never fazed me in the past. Growing up, emigration was such an accepted ideal, the thought of travelling to find work was ingrained. That, in itself, led to an expectation to travel and a belief that necessity could be a near welcome cause of dislocation. Even now, settled with kids, the possibility of uprooting and shifting to the far side of the world and having to start again from scratch, while it doesn’t appeal, it doesn’t frighten either. It’s as if that possibility never disappeared from my psyche.
I just never expected it to be a part of my children’s thinking. I may have sneered at the decidedly uncouth expectations of the Tiger Cubs and their heightened sense of self-worth, but that was the world I expected my daughters to enter, hopefully imbued with a balancing sense of reality. Not the ho-hum, gotta go work the world philosophy of my generation.
As a parent, I experience fear for how they’ll cope far beyond any worries I suffered for myself. There’s only 10 years between now and them potentially getting on the boat. And with recovery seemingly little more than a fairytale being spun as a Minister for Finance’s bedtime story, any improvements that occur between now and then look like being minimal. In fact, to be sensible, we have to prepare for further decline.
This makes me seethe far more than any loss of earnings and increased taxation suffered to this point. The architects of our current quagmire are, for the most part, retired and comfortable, while I busy myself figuring out how to pay for my brats’ education and their inevitable required departure.
Our current up-and-comers will up-and-come in other countries and stay there, as will successive generations for the foreseeable future. Without them, we are left with the buffoons who got us here in the first place. I wish my little sis-in-law the best of luck, and an advance request that she’ll look after my girls when they come looking for a start.