Port Hedland in the Pilbara mining region of Western Australia is a godforsaken place. Beside the pool tables in the local bar there are mug-shots pasted, like in an American Western, of locals who are barred from the pub for fighting. They are mainly Aboriginals but there are fair few who look like they wouldn’t be out of place here and the surnames suggest this is where they came from way back.
Today, the next wave of Irish — the new emigrants — work in the open cast mines of the Pilbara, driving the enormous diggers that gouge out the iron ore. The ore is then sent to the Chinese port of Ningbo, where it is smelted into steel for China’s once-booming export industry.
The Irish lads working there now are but a small part of the enormous Irish community in Australia. If you find yourself, as I did two years ago, on Bondi Beach, you hear the accent of the Irish exodus. The beach area and Bondi Junction a little further inland were full of young Irish workers. The stories were typical: young professionals, who had been working in Ireland and had been laid off in the boom, were starting over in Australia. They worked in the waterfront bars and cafes of Bondi, getting back on their feet in the hope of rebuilding careers Down Under. Since then the numbers have swelled.
It’s obviously not just Australia: London, Toronto and New York are full of our brothers, cousins, sons and daughters.
With all this renewed talk of turning corners, the IMF telling us that we are fabulous, Mario Draghi stating that we are a model of compliance, we should not forget that on the streets it doesn’t feel like that. Some 76,000 people left this country last year, that’s 1,460 a week or just over 208 people a day. The drain has continued apace this year as the real economy — the one we all work and live in — continues to scrape along the bottom.
Recently, I spoke to the younger brother of a friend and he told me that many of his mates in Dublin were single, not for the want of trying. Initially this puzzled me.
Now I know why. It is because the complexion of emigration has changed dramatically in the recent past. These days you are much more likely to see young women at the airport. At the beginning, the recession was what we could call a “mancession” as the numbers of men laid off on the sites spiked sharply.
Today, we are seeing the feminisation of the downturn. As the recession has broadened, particularly into retail, the number of women on the dole has skyrocketed. Many thousands are heading off.
According to the CSO: “The number of women emigrating increased by 51.8pc in 2011 from 2010, the number of men emigrating fell by 4.4pc in the same period.”
And the women are leaving at younger and younger ages. For example, take the midlands of Ireland, the heartland of the country that has been badly hit by the collapse in house prices and house building.
The number of women between the ages of 20 and 24 fell by 8.7pc between 2010 and 2011. While this is a startling figure, it doesn’t compare to the fall in the young female population of Dublin.
The fall in the population of young people in Dublin is quite shocking. Overall, between 2010 and 2011, the population between 20 and 24 in Dublin has fallen by 11.9pc but the disappearance of young women is startling. The young female population in Dublin fell by 15.1pc last year.
In absolute numbers, the amount of young women in Dublin between the ages of 20-24 fell from 42,000 to 35,400.
Obviously, changes in the birth rate 20-odd years ago have had an impact on this figure, but emigration is playing a huge part.
These trends have enormous implications for the nature of the city in the years ahead. If young Irish women continue to leave in such huge numbers, the country will find itself with a slew of Irish bachelors like we had in the 1960s.
What if they had stayed? What would the country look like and what would the headline economic numbers look like?
Clearly these people — women and men — headed abroad because of unemployment and the collapse in demand in the local economy which provides the lion’s share of our jobs.
When you consider what the rate of unemployment would be if they had stayed while the local economy remained paralysed, it is easy to see that the bullish statements from the Government this week ring hollow.
For example, the unemployment rate for young women aged between 15 and 24 right now is 22.8pc. Had their friends not headed to the likes of Bondi Junction in the past year, this unemployment rate figure would be 35pc. This is at Great Depression levels.
For young men, the figures are more worrying because the level of unemployment among young men in the 15 to 24-year age group is so high already.
Today, the rate of unemployment for young men is 36.8pc. This figure would leap to 45.4pc had the 15,000 young lads in this group not emigrated and stayed out of work here last year.
For the older age group, between 25 and 44, female unemployment would go from 11pc to 14pc had there been no emigration. For men in the same age cohort, the rate of unemployment would go up from 18pc now to 20.3pc.
This is what is happening on the ground in Ireland: people are leaving in droves.
But the gradual arrival of a slowdown in the global economy may cut off the traditional exit route from a stricken Ireland.
When this happens, it will take more than an IMF-inspired ‘think-in’ to come up with ideas for real change to get us out of this mess.
Yes David yes this is the system and the cover up, things here are not improving they are getting worse . The way the country is being run is a shambles , run by a government way out of its depth. Run by a bunch of fools who dress well, live well at our expense . The proof of this will be the budget , this tuff budget will be the lowering of the coffin into the grave. We are being fed lie after lie yes there are some people out there who think the government are doing a good… Read more »
Sorry, the increasing exodus of women now is more disturbing trend than the earlier exit of in the main men?
What is the point of all of this?
And did Enda Kenny, that Noonan fella who in the main run the Irish economy not tell us it was all a lifestyle choice anyway?
This while Ireland is bled try just mainly to feed incompetent bankers and assorted fat cats?
Or did I miss something?
My wife is a nurse and was only telling me recently that 90% of the nurse who are training at the moment will not get a job in the hospital where they are training. And of the few who will get offered a job it will be a temp position more or less part time hours. Without sounding like a sexist pig but the majority of nurse’s are woman and as my wife said the majority will head to Australia and maybe the UK. We are training nurse to export them at the moment.
Good morning David well done yet again.
Can you please explain how Ireland is meeting it’s targets with the imf .
The hole thing seams like a cover up ,it’s as if we are using borrowed money to prop up the books in a sence make us look better than we really are?
Having visited a no of people in various Dublin hospitals over the past yr, I am astounded by how many foreigners (performing a variety of functions) they employ, yet our own med grads are emigrating in droves. Another hangover from our open door immigration policy. Why hire a school leaver or grad when you can get an experinced foreigner for less ? America doesn’t have an open labour market with Canada/Mexico . Smart move !!!!!!In the eighties, women complained of a male shortage in Dublin nightcloubs .LOL.
Well dome for an excellent article.
The more articles of this type which humanise what is happening the better. I think that the answer to the problem of too many young people idle when china crashes will be to mobilise the army and control them that way ie in it’s ranks. The other point to observe is that if so many people keep leaving will the state ultimately fail?
Michael.
But on an upside the single female 30 somethings that can’t leave because they’re tied to negative equity mortgages can now get a toy boy (or 2) to make them a bit happier about their lot.
Irish women go out but women are also coming to Ireland (unless all those cited to have entered last year are men, which is clearly absurd).
Ireland was full of hot air during the Celtic Tiger, fine it has some American IT multinationals, a bit of this and a bit of that.
At the end of the day, it is a very small country, small population, small economy which is now even smaller, so what are qualified, young people who want to live going to do, as they say ‘the fundamentals are definitely not ok’.
We are governed by very imcompetant people – we always have been since “Independence” . Government is mainly made up of primary and secondary school teachers who are “on leave” ( hanging on to old job) and who have absolutely no business sense. Emigration , yet again , is draining the lifeblood out of Ireland and young Women going abroad is hardly a surprise.Public Servants and Politicians think that they can continue to put thier hands more deeply into our pockets through taxes and “charges” to ensure thier salaries , perks , pensions and expenses continue to be paid. They… Read more »
Great stuff. We are humans and not robots. Glad you gave the banks a rest today.
You should write more about Ireland and how it’s people are faring under this economic occupation
Debasement of Irish Citizenship The real tragedy in all this includes the disenfranchisement of all those that leave our shores and their inaccessibility to be able to vote in foreign lands while at the same time more foreigners are replacing those lost votes in their places upon their nationalisation to The STATE. The STATE does not hearthen to ‘ The People of Ireland’ . Instead appellations are given of us as ‘the electorate ‘ , ‘the tax payer’ , ‘the social welfare applicant ‘ , ‘the parent’ etc . It is consistently in adversary position to the welfare of its… Read more »
By pointing the finger at the political body, the church, the bankers and whoever else is in the queue is in reality pointing the finger at ourselves. In my mind they all come from the general populace and share the same psyche. They are indicative of the general citizenry because they too are citizens. Fashioned from the same fabric of society. Nobody screwed up, we all screwed up. And those who didn’t partake in the screw-up also screwed up by sitting on their hands. We are all adults on a small island and the sad truth is we screwed each… Read more »
How to defeat the Eloquent Insiders? “In my youth, I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them. The great orators who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence are in general men of the most mediocre political talents: they should not be opposed in their own way; for they have always more noisy words at command than you. Their eloquence should be opposed by a serious and logical argument; their strength lies in vagueness; they should be brought back to the reality of facts; practical arguments destroy them. In the council, there were men possessed… Read more »
I think we are witnessing a displacement. Jobs that may traditionally have been occupied by a certain class are now being filled by Chinese, Pakistani national’s – both male & female….who in my experience from working in England, predominately occupy employment in the retail sector. Moreover, I rarely ever seen Chinese, Pakistani’s, working in Construction! It’s unfortunate, but at least by’ our children emigrating, they may realise their full potential in life, elsewhere!
Movement of Jah People.
Quote:
“But the gradual arrival of a slowdown in the global economy may cut off the traditional exit route from a stricken Ireland.”
Maybe the people emigrating from Ireland are not leaving for ‘economical’ advantage….but seeking a country that practice’s it’s core value’s and respect’s it’s people!
A form of societal collapse in motion.
There is something highly disfunctional in the Irish labour market.
Young women have different lifestyle expectations to young men. Maybe they are not too enthusiastic about the negativity, the new taxes, and the general grind that has become the Irish Labour market. Women do not waste much time in an unhappy situation, and make tracks. Men on the other hand have a tendency to fight out their corner, before then packing it in.
To help readjust the compass of lost Irish sea-farers, this is essential : http://laroucheirishbrigade.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/south-korea-signs-arctic-development-shipping-agreements/ Sept. 12, 2012 (LPAC)—South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg held summit talks in Oslo, Norway, and signed a memorandum of understanding pledging to help shipping firms of their nations open new sea lanes over the Arctic. “Prime Minister Stoltenberg and I agreed to forge a future-oriented partnership aimed at tackling climate change and environment-friendly development and preservation of the Arctic, in order to proactively deal with tasks of the 21st Century,” Lee said. (South Korea is notable for talking “green”, but… Read more »
Court Gives Hint: Exit from Euro Would Solve the Problem Sept. 13, 2012 (EIRNS)–A second look at the 85-page text of the German constitutional court’s ruling of yesterday reveals what none (!) of the mainstream media mention in their coverage of the ruling: the justices gave a hint, actually, at the very end of the text, as to where the solution to all the euro-related problems lies: namely in the exit of Germany from both the (Lisbon Treaty) European Union and from the euro. Should Germany end its membership in both institutions, the court states, all risks and liabilities from… Read more »
Mining commodities and agriculture is the place to be.
Ireland for food production and related tech industries.Austalia and Canada for food production and mining
Stagflation coming
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2012/9/14_Norcini_-_A_Violent_Wave_Of_Short_Covering_In_Gold_%26_Silver.html
There are less unemployed Irish people here than you think. David fails to mention what % of our unemployed are non-Irish. The non-Irish unemployed won’t emigrate, they will stay and take all the benefits.
Have I got this right the government can’t touch crow park but they want to hammer the very people who are going to pay for it in the private sector.
So the government want to steel of me and you to prop up a system that favours people in the public sector.
It’s been a few years, but I could have used a few colleens when I lived in Port Hedland, many years ago. Back then, the ratio of men to women was 5:1, and the women that were there were no oil paintings. Mind you, nether were the men. A combination of heat, flies, dust and heavy drinking puts years on people up there. But they’ve definitely earned their coin in the last 5 years. Now, like all good things, that time is coming to an end. It looks like Fortescue Metals (Australia’s third largest iron ore exporter) is about to… Read more »
Another good article. David has been consistent throughout. I posted this quote a few years ago ( from Joe Lee’s History of Ireland): “Emigration was not unique to Ireland. But the type of emigration, the scale of emigration, and the impact of emigration were. In no other European country was emigration so essential a prerequisite for the preservation of the nature of the society. The interests of the possessing classes came to pivot crucially around emigration. But as the spread of emigration during the nineteenth century chanced to coincide with the growth of national political consciousness, with emphasis on the… Read more »
And here’s one from Breandán Ó hEithir’s “The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics” (1986: “Despite the little bits of bother, particularly that Northern business that did not seem to be going away, the country was not doing badly at all. With almost no strenuous effort emigration, the greatest bulling cow scandal of them all, no longer existed. Every week the Irish Post, voice of the Irish in Britain, was full of advertisements for properties in Ireland and for the removal companies which would transport all you had back to booming Mary Horan’s country. Many of those who returned had plundered… Read more »
And while I’m with it I can’t leave out Raymond Crotty (Ireland In Crisis (c1985) whose opening line is, I think, “This book was written for the plain people of Ireland”): “An era now appears to be ending in the metropolitan West. The capital-less, proletariat class, which has been the product of factory capitalism, can no longer earn a living by their labour. This appears to be due to the combination of (1) the ending of capitalist colonialism and of the export of metropolitan unemployment to the colonies; (2) an increasing inflow of products from non-western, non-colonized Japan, Korea, Taiwan… Read more »
With our brightest leaving the country and the dullest staying, it’s going to be a dark country in which to live. The poorest and least educated along with the immigrants are having the most kids, this combined with an ageing population will lead to a problematic and challenging future for all of society in the EU.
David, your article reminds me of a piece by the Dutch travel writer Carolijn Visser (Brandend Zout, 1986). She visited the opal mines at Coober Pedy and spoke to a Lithuanian immigrant called Crocodile Harry who left the Northern Territories when crocodile hunting was outlawed and turned to mining. Anyway, in another part here is here description of an Outback café (bar??): “The carpark in front of the café was full of autos but there were also patrons arriving by fot. A group of Aborigines had appeared out of the wilderness and entered the cafe before us. There we found… Read more »
I believe the figures hide a huge additional segment of the population both male and female who are just over the threshold of 46 years old, in particular in relation to Australia, I for one would have been gone but for this! So as such the feeling that at the mid to late forties so many people will be consigned to the scarpheap as unemployable/ too old etc is rampant, this is just one other issue which never gets into the mainstream media discussion but affects a huge amount of people, after all we can’t all drive taxi’s, work in… Read more »
At least two people in the IMF have had a ‘think-in’. They recently published ‘The Chicago Plan Revisited’ which promotes full reserve banking as a solution to the crisis.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.pdf
It’s well worth a read as it describes the problems of allowing private banks to create the national money supply before going into the benefits of publicly created money.
There are women everywhere at my local tennis club {all ages and shapes and varieties]
It’s still a grand country. 188 a week without getting out of bed and being hassled by the goms … Can’t be bad wee man. If someone was offering 400 a week clear then that would be a reason to get shaved and out the door every morning right? We are all foreigners now. Foreigners in our own country and foreigners if we travel to the next county. It’s all the fault of the foreigner Foreigners are a disease. An abomination not to be tolerated. Auschwitz the fuckers right? Plenty of Irish would agree but a true Irish soul would… Read more »
German President Signs ESM Treaty before Amendments Are Ready! Sept. 14 (EIRNS)–The only logical interpretation of the German Constitutional Court’s ruling of two days ago, is that the European Stability Mechanism treaty is not fully ratified and therefore can’t go into effect, before the amendments which the court requested have been added to the document. But the EU, the German government, and German President Joachim Gauck are still trying to pretend that nothing really happened in the court: Gauck signed the ESM ratification yesterday, without the amendments. And Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble does not even want the Bundestag to convene… Read more »
World-Class Loser Jamie Dimon Pronounces Glass-Steagall “Stupid” Sept. 14 (LPAC)–Calls for Glass-Steagall re-enactment are very useful; so, occasionally, is a denunciation of it from the right person. Jamie Dimon, the investment banker and JPMorgan Chase head at the center of the MFGlobal and Lehman collapse scandals and an attempt to rig the world derivatives trade by his own bank’s London office, thinks a Glass-Steagall return would be “stupid.” Dimon knows from stupid. In fact, he is world-class in it, as in everything else. On Sept. 11, at a forum organized by Barclays Capital (!), Dimon was asked about returning to… Read more »
MITT ROMNEY PREVIEWED HIS DEBATES ARGUMENT on “Good Morning America” on Sept. 14: “What Bernanke’s doing is saying that what the President’s saying is wrong. The President’s saying the economy’s making progress, coming back. Bernanke’s saying, ‘No, it’s not. I’ve got to print more money.'”
—-
Well That goes for Draghi too!!!
Portuguese Leave Homeland; Seek Jobs in Angola, Mozambique, Brazil Aug. 9, 2012 (EIRNS)–According to a new statistical report, about 150,000 jobless Portuguese who have lost any hope of finding employment in their own country again, have, since March 2011, left Portugal to make a living abroad. Many of them are well-qualified, and during the emigration waves of the 1970s and 1980s, would have gone to Germany or France. But now, they are going to the former colonies Angola and Mozambique, as well as to Brazil. Such mass exportation of its population is actually official government policy. Last December, Portuguese Prime… Read more »
Hunger Gets Nasty in Spain August 9, 2012 (EIRNS)–The Andaluz Workers Union (SAT) deployed several dozen members en masse to two supermarkets this week in Andalucia, the region with the highest unemployment in Spain, to carry out “forceful expropriations” of basic food items to be delivered to local charities and food banks. The first operation, near Seville, was elaborately planned, led by a United Left-linked local mayor, and succeeded, with nine shopping carts full of milk, pasta, rice, vegetables, sugar, oil, etc., taken away without paying. The second attempt was made in a town in the Cadiz mountains region where… Read more »
EASY DECISIONS, TOUGH DECISIONS
http://laroucheirishbrigade.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/easy-decisions-tough-decisions/
As DMcW wrote “But the gradual arrival of a slowdown in the global economy may cut off the traditional exit route from a stricken Ireland. When this happens, it will take more than an IMF-inspired ‘think-in’ to come up with ideas for real change to get us out of this mess.” He is quite right and the reason as I try to show above is the dominant “thinking” of that IMF is, well, bankrupt. Now any other “think-in” that promotes the policies of that IMF must be checked, as I tried above, for fatal flaws before exactly the same intellectual… Read more »
German Constitutional Court plans public hearing on ECB The fact that the public and juridical debate on ESM and ECB is not over after the Sept. 12 ruling of the German constitutional court against injunctions, is shown by the announcement made by the judges that they will have a public hearing on the ECB’s role in the near future. It has to be noted that the court threw out a petition by anti-ESM plaintiff Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider requesting that the court deal with the ECB issue, about half a year ago. It is also the first time that the German… Read more »
I just returned from some time in canada, by and large the biggest demand is for construction trades and welders, i met young graduantes who are working in constuction and hospitality, this is. where the jobs are , also the work is in the remote areas where canadians dont want to work, so i think the big demand in both canada and australia is for young men with trade skills willing to work in remote areas, another thing i noticed which you dont see that much in ireland is women working on building sites and driving trucks etc. I dont… Read more »
David could please do a article on the pensions in Ireland as the figures look very bleak and there’s going to be a lot of very un happy people out there ,who where expecting a certain amount and there’s going to be a hell of a short fall.
What’s this shite in the SINDO about Teacher’s been imposed with a “Forty Hour Week”….every teacher anecdotally say’s, they work more than that anyway!
Enda Kenny say’s: “If we can’t touch their money, we’ll make them work longer hour’s”!
It may not be much of a shock to the Teacher’s cos, they knew this would be first contention, regard’s CPD review.
Also, OECD report say’s they are the “fourth” highest paid Teacher’s in the “world”…..not even taking in to account all of their benefit’s!
Unless and until the financial markets are reined-in and shut down there can be and will be no resolution to the global financial crisis.
The longer this obvious truth goes unacknowledged, and the obvious course of action is avoided, the closer we move to the destruction of the physical economy and our civilisation.
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/moment-power-shifted-markets-200314129.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS2x7A5A_wc
Plenty of lovely foreign girls around minus that self entitlement baggage. :-)