Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, and MEP for Labour, Emer Costello, were out meeting and greeting students at the Trinity Labour Youth stand in Front Square today.
Speaking about youth emigration, Minister Burton told The University Times that “we have different kinds of emigrants” leaving Ireland and that there is a high proportion of youths that are leaving Ireland to gain experience abroad. She referred to a study by James Wickham, the Director of the ERC, and Jean Monnet, the Professor of European Labour Market Studies, in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, that showed a high proportion of students that come home after gaining experience abroad.
“At the moment we have a lot of recruitment from English financial institutions with big employment opportunities in the city of London. I know people who have done BESS (Business, Economics and Social Sciences) a couple of years ago who are taking up those opportunities.
“We have people who are moving too; many of them are from the country, who would be moving up to Dublin or Cork, or even over to London. Traditionally, lots of people from rural areas have migrated to the big towns and cities in Ireland.”
Burton was also optimistic that youths looking for work in Ireland would find it a lot easier, as “in the six months to the end of June, we have 33,800 extra people back to work”. She assured students that a lot of those positions will be filled by new graduates, so those people would not have to experience unemployment.
Despite new emigration statistics from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) that have shown that 243 people are leaving Ireland each day, the Minister believes the words “lost generation” cannot be attached to the students in higher education today.
“We have an awful lot of very smart people intent on building a future for themselves and for this country. I am somebody who has lived abroad, a lot of people want to gain experience abroad, and it changes perspectives and ambitions.”
MEP Emer Costello, speaking at a separate occasion, is also a “great believer in going away for a year”. However, she is strongly against forced emigration and said it was the reason why she entered politics.
“I came home from France after a year and a guy in FÁS told me that I would be doing people a favour to leave the country,” explained Costello. “In the 1980s, Brian Lenihan Sr, the Minister for Finance at the time, told youths that the country was too small and that young people should just leave.”
