Sir, – Minister of State for Small Business John Perry told Sinn Féin’s Peadar Tóibín in the Dáil this week that people are leaving Ireland by choice and not because there are no jobs in the country.
As a recent graduate of St Angela’s College, Sligo, I now teach in Essex. Being a “young person”, as Mr Perry puts it, I have always wanted to travel and it was on my list of things to do in my life. However, there is an insurmountable difference between wanting to travel and leaving your home, family and friends for a job. Just because we are young and may not have families or commitments, emigration is not as easy and exciting as it seems in the idealistic view.
There is a strange numbness to living and working abroad with no one close to you. We are not here on a holiday; we are here because we need to be. Yes, when the initial move happens, leaving can build up a level of excitement. It has to. It’s either that, or cry!
However, within a few days, weeks or maybe months, that excitement fades and you are fully faced with reality.
You are faced with the reality that you are away from all your family and friends. The disturbing reality that you will miss important family events. You miss being there for the major milestones; your parents’ birthdays. You will miss being there for your siblings as they go through their Leaving Cert; you will miss their debs. These are the most important days in their lives.
You miss the excitement that a family shares with the news of a family member expecting, you miss the news of friends getting engaged. You miss the local news of the community, football results, and deaths in your local area, closure and opening of businesses, birthdays; the list is endless.
Every time you ring home you and speak to the family that you miss so much, all of these things, no matter how big or small, build up in your heart until that night when you’re sitting in your new “home” alone, feeling lost.
It’s hard to understand the difficulty of being away from home until you experience it. Personally, I forget that life goes on back home while I’m here and therefore when news arrives it takes me by surprise. There are two things you can do: accept that your life is different now and that you won’t be as involved in family life as before, or refrain from settling in your new niche and live in hope of the day that you can go back home.
Mr Perry states, “You just cannot wave a magic wand”. I fully agree, but the situation is not as simple as to say, “It’s a choice!”
I could be at home right now in a country that cannot support me, and claim social welfare rather than live away from loved ones, lonely (despite the friends you make abroad it is not the same!), work endless hours and try to make pennies stretch so that I can support myself. Which would the Minister prefer me to choose?
We need to do all we can to find that magic so people like me can get home to their families and live at home. As the saying goes, Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.
Don’t stop fighting to keep people in their homeland because of a false belief that it’s their choice to go, because I for one would be in Ireland if it were my choice. – Yours, etc,
UNA O’NEILL,
(From Galway),
Westbourne Grove,
Westcliff-On-Sea,
Essex,
England.