The great migratory flight is on. From Boston to Barbados to Brisbane, those who live abroad are heading home for Christmas. They will be resting their weary heads on air beds in box rooms next to long redundant exercise bikes. They will be greeted at the airport, first with hugs then a reminder to get moving because as much as their father loves them, he hates paying “those robbing bastards” for parking more. They will try not to count the days until they have to leave again, dreading the reverse journey to departures. The awful silence between a parent who wants the best for their children but longs to keep them close and a child racked with guilt, who wishes it didn’t have to be this way.
Those are the lucky ones. There are many others who can’t afford the flight at all. From mid-December to mid-January air fares can double and sometimes triple, even though it’s the exact same plane with the exact same staff levels and exact same tinfoiled gruel being served for dinner. That’s because every airline knows Christmas over Zoom just isn’t the same.
Recently as a form of self-harm I’ve been watching reunification videos at Dublin Airport. The one that got me good was a video of a woman waiting to welcome her grandchildren. It was their first trip to Ireland, her daughter having lived in Australia for 14 years. It’s impossible to watch without welling up.
But why does it have to be this way? Why are so many Irish grandparents and parents separated by seas? I don’t know this particular family’s story. But I do know that not everyone emigrates out of choice. My own family were economic migrants but if you ask them they would say they were economic refugees. The sad thing is I’ve met people who emigrated half a century later from the same parts of Dublin who say the same.
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This is a tragedy. People leave their country when it has let them down – through lack of jobs, economic opportunity and now, housing. Do not swallow the line sold by those who have the responsibility to solve these problems but haven’t, that Irish people simply come to Australia to top up their tans. Instead, ask if those with money and power are the ones with empty chairs at Christmas dinner? Are their children emigrating to Australia to work the mines or build the roads? Are their children working jobs outside of their degrees purely because it’s on the sponsored skill list? Or were their children able to secure well-paying jobs and/or live in one of the family’s investment properties instead of paying €1,000 for a single room in an Irish city? Were they able to give them a deposit on a home? Being able to remain in Ireland is a privilege. It always has been, but now more so than ever.
[ Brianna Parkins: I don’t enjoy Christmas as much as I did as a kidOpens in new window ]
And the Irish Government response? Spending nearly half a million euro on ads asking “you built Sydney, now come and build back home” – with no offer of matching Australian wages, pensions that employers pay on top of salary, or the government guarantee that allows them to buy a home with only a 5 per cent deposit. No offer to scrap USC to lower taxes, or help to find places to stay. Instead the Irish Government was relying on its “research” that said “life can become difficult” for Irish emigrants, and that it’s “as hard to buy and rent in major cities as it is in Ireland”, including Sydney.
I dropped out of maths at 16 and studied basic economics at the University of Wollongong (heard of it? No, exactly!). So it is genuinely terrifying that even I know how wrong that research is. I pay less rent on my apartment with uninterrupted water views of Sydney Harbour than I did on my last Irish place with a dodgy water heater off Cork Street. I applied to one place in Sydney and I got it. That’s unheard of in Dublin.
The only way I could afford to come back to Dublin is if the Irish Government hired me for a very specific role. The Department of Housing’s recent “how to move home with your parents” campaign aimed at a generation locked out of leaving home by the housing crisis suggests they have a Marie Antoinette-level ability to read the room. My job will be to stand at the back of the office and if anyone tries to suggest anything like that again I will ring a large “Are you actually well” bell. Think of the bad press and money we would save. We might just be able to use it to keep people home and at the Christmas table.
Between this column being written and published, the worst terror attack on Australian soil was committed in the city where I live, Sydney. Our Jewish community was the target. I was on the ground at Bondi reporting last Sunday and while it’s my job to find the words when there are none in a situation, I can’t bring myself to write about it just yet. Thank you for your readership this year.
