The Sunday Times (London)
February 6, 2011 Sunday
Edition 1; Ireland
IT’S OUR FUTURE, SO WHY CAN’T WE VOTE?
As one forecast predicts emigration will reach 1,000 people a week, Irish expatriates express anger at not being allowed to vote.
Ciara Kenny writes;
NIALL JUDGE felt so strongly about exercising his right to vote that when it was announced the election would be on March 11, he took a day off work and booked a flight home from Brussels.
Then the date was brought forward to February 25, and it was too late for Judge to change his flights. He is disappointed at missing out on having his say, although technically as a non-permanent resident he has no entitlement to vote.
“Every election is important but in this one people will have the chance to vent their anger at how the economy has been so badly mismanaged during the last decade,” he said.
The 26-year-old, who has worked for a data marketing company in Brussels for two years, is one of tens of thousands of young Irish people who have emigrated in search of work. As unemployment reached nearly 14%, an estimated 27,700 people left last year, double the 2009 figure. The Central Statistics Office predicts 100,000 Irish people, or 1,000 a week, will emigrate over the next two years.
So it is no surprise that jobs – and the lack of them – is the number one issue in the election for many people. It certainly is for Judge’s mother Maura, who lives in Kinnegad, Co Westmeath. Last August she waved goodbye to her second son, Declan, who left for Perth, Australia, in search of work as a civil engineer. Declan, 24, had spent almost a year trying to find a job in Ireland. Even his offers to work for free, in order to gain experience, were ignored.
“I was brought up Fianna Fail, and I always voted Fianna Fail, but not now, never again. I am totally disillusioned,” Maura said. “The government lost the run of themselves, and the victims now are the young people who are left with nothing. They didn’t seem to give any thought to the creation of jobs at all.”
Her eldest daughter is on an Erasmus year in France studying international business, and Maura worries that she will also have to move away when she graduates. “So many parents around here are just devastated seeing their children heading off, and we wonder if they will ever come back. It’s very lonely,” she said.
Although Niall Judge would like to come back to Ireland eventually, he doesn’t see it happening any time soon. “I feel locked out of the country now,” he said. “Before it was a choice to live abroad. Now it’s a necessity for me and thousands of others.”
Judge points out that whoever comes to power in the next government will be in a “financial straitjacket”, but he hopes they will be able to implement job creation measures to stimulate the economy.
Judge is far from the only emigrant feeling disenfranchised. “For our generation, this election is about getting closure on the devastation of the country over the past three years,” said 23-year-old Eoin Delap from Clontarf, who left for America after he graduated with a masters in Irish literature last September.
“Just because we are not in the country at the time of the election, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have the right to exercise our citizenship. I think it reflects the general disenfranchisement of our young people, and the fear shared by those in power that too much vibrancy among young people is destabilising,” said Delap, who is working in the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in New York. “I think that’s why the issue of emigration was ignored by the government for so long, because it makes their lives easier, by closing off that section of disillusioned voters.”
Research carried out at University College Cork shows that most Irish emigrants intend to return in the long term.
“I don’t have any intentions of staying away in the long term,” said 22-year-old Robert Hogan from Meath. He moved to New York after three years looking for work following a carpentry apprenticeship. “When you put your hand in your pocket and there is no money in it, you have to do something about it,” he said.
Isabel Hayes and her fiance Aidan McGowran live and work in Sydney and say they will wait for the economy to improve before coming back to Ireland. She believes that young people living abroad are among the most disappointed in Fianna Fail, and should be able to exercise their vote. “We see our future as being at home and keep a close eye on taxation and house prices,” she said.
Simon Mackin, an IT systems administrator who works in investment banking, left Ireland to go travelling at the height of the boom in 2007. He was offered a job in Australia. “For me to consider coming back I would have to have a lot of confidence in the government and the direction the country was going,” he said. “To create jobs the government needs to spend money. I don’t think they will be able to for quite some time.”