Who is shouting stop now?

 Leaving Ireland wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. I had to go because I had no way to earn a living for myself there, and I was becoming more withdrawn from friends and family when I couldn’t find work. Ireland couldn’t offer me what I needed so I had to create a better existence elsewhere. (Laura Masterson. Irish Times 12/10/12)

The jobs fair recently held in Dublin and the attendance of many agencies recruiting personnel for world-wide destinations is a new take on emigration. Even a Canadian government minister attended the jobs fair sending a message that Irish people with skills were more than welcome in Canada. This is a monumental shift in attitude when one compares the attitude of modern Canada with the response of a Canadian government official during the second world war when asked how many Jewish immigrants should Canada take. His reply was; None Is Too Many. Now Canada recognises that in getting emigrants from Ireland it is getting an asset for free, young, healthy, educated, energetic people with an emigrant energy to succeed and be creative.    

This is a strange take on immigration at a time when the United States and European governments and their ministers consistently send out messages that emigrants are neither needed, wanted nor welcome. Indeed, in national election campaigns and at political party conferences an immigration topic is part of the menu in trying to rouse a lethargic audience. In such instances immigrants are usually included in the same sentences as terrorists and criminals. That kind of rhetoric feeds the justification of fascist thugs to attack poor immigrants as is the case in Greece and other European states. Is this history repeating itself?

But there is another side to this coin of emigration. Irish government spokespersons and their apologists are condescending, as in the past, about emigration. They are saying that the present economic downturn is a temporary abnormal blip that will right itself when growth returns to the economy and those emigrating will be back in a few years having gained experience. How can such voices and their media apologists continue to contradict history? Since its foundation, the Irish state has annually exported half of those coming into the workforce. That is the normal situation. Ireland, like other post-colonial societies depended on immigrant remittances to keep a population of parents, grandparents and children nourished.

What was abnormal in Irish life was the recent economic splurge that almost gave full employment. The reason that progress tool place in Ireland over the first decade of the century arose out of its membership of the European Union, foreign investment, low corporation tax and a well-educated workforce. That energy band in the population that kept that economy serviced is now emigrating to Canada, Australia and other places. These countries recognise the benefit of young energetic, educated and skilled emigrants as a free asset. One seldom hears an Irish institutional spokesperson equate emigration as the loss of an asset paid for by the Irish exchequer and developed by their parents and communities. Growth in an economy depends on these emigrants, the energy band in the population. Without them growth will not happen. And if it miraculously does happen, Ireland will, as the Czech Republic did after its Accession, seek immigrants from other destinations to bolster its workforce. 

Irish emigrants, like other emigrants from small, post-colonial, branch economies, are much more likely to be sceptical about return migration. Aware of the reasons for initially having to emigrate they will be hesitant about returning as small economies dependant on larger economies offer little long-term security.

Also, many emigrants carry with them unresolved anger at having to leave comfortable homes, jobs and lifestyles for the uncertainty of the unfamiliar because of economic mismanagement, cronyism and clientism. Sadly, emigration is an Irish cultural trait. Emigration, the draining of energy from society, reinforces the traditional structures whose policies cause emigration to perpetuate themselves. 

Ireland is losing an asset. Canada is getting great people.

We asked for workers. We got people instead. (Max Frisch)

A day in court

Charity  is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick, without care. (Bill Moyers)

In the first week of December 1990 I was at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. The case of six men imprisoned for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings had been sent back to the court of appeal. The appeal began on Tuesday in the first week of December at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. It was a miserable December day. Getting to the Royal Courts on the Strand was an ordeal. Apart from the sleet and snow there were security alerts all over the transportation system.

After a few days of hearings the case was adjourned until the following February. The weather was inclement all that week. On the day the appeal was postponed, the men were sent back to prison. They had been in prison already for seventeen years. They were distraught but resilient. Their families, wives, children, brothers, sisters and friends went home distressed and those of us involved in their campaign for justice were deeply disappointed not just at the postponement but the fact that the men could not have been allowed to go home with their families until the appeal resumed.

Trudging up to the tube station at Leicester Square to catch the Northern Line on a snowy, dark and dank London winter’s evening I felt miserable not so much with the weather and the callous postponement of the appeal, but with the misery of a system that ground so slowly particularly when it was concerned with the powerless. Lord Denning’s “appalling vista” statement that brought the 1975 appeal of the same case to an end kept ringing around in my head. As it did I steeled myself with positive thoughts, first, that there was something radically wrong with the justice system that feared evidence against it, and second, that one day these prisoners would walk free.

As I walked in the door of my residence wet and hungry, the phone rang. I picked it up thinking that it might be for someone else in the house. It was for me. Eve Ritchings, a journalist at Sky Television was on the line. She requested that I go back down to the Sky studios in Westminster, beside the Houses of Parliament, for an interview regarding the appeal, its postponement and the overwhelming disappointment of the families and all involved in the campaign for justice. She offered to send a taxi. I accepted, and replied that I would use public transport. Somehow there was a spring in my step as I made my way to Hampstead Tube Station. The fact that there was someone out there who was interested in the raw human emotion of the disappointment, despair and rejection of the families gave me something to hang on to. What I was going to say at the interview didn’t cross my mind. As I neared the television studios I tried to gather my thoughts but nothing was happening. My mind was blank. All my energy was focused on just getting there, finding the place and the person whose name Eve had given me to contact regarding the interview.

The person at the reception desk sent me down two floors or maybe more on the lift. There I was met by another person who took me to a vacant studio. On the wall was a monitor that relayed the news as it was broadcast. The attendant positioned a chair in front of a screen that had a London scene as a backdrop. He told me to concentrate on a camera high up on the wall and wait until called for the seven o'clock news. Not knowing what the questions were going to be from the interviewer I tried to keep a clear, objective and factual mind.

As I watched the seven o’clock news break my antennas sharpened. The first item on the news was the about a certain businessman, Asil Nadir, the head of a multinational company, being held in custody for the night in some London prison. His wife and some family members were interviewed regarding their husband, father and friend being held in prison for the night. They were distraught, disappointed and dismayed at the justice system charging him with alleged fraud and holding him in prison. Also, there were worried as to how he would cope with the nocturnal incarceration. I empathised with their distress as they faded out of the picture. But their worry about his incarceration gave me a pointer as to how I would manage the interview.

The interviewer then addressed me inquiring, first, as to how the men going back to prison felt, and second, how their families felt? The Nadir family in their response actually made my answers easy. I replied “if the Mr. Nadir is going to find prison difficult for one night spare a thought for those six innocent men who are going back to prison after having already spent seventeen years in prisons throughout Britain away from family and friends.” Equally, I empathised with Nadir’s family fears, anxieties and loss and emphasised the extremely difficult plight of the families of the men who were without their husbands and fathers for the past seventeen years. Imagine, I suggested to the interviewer, the heroism of those wives who for seventeen years dragged their children as often as they could afford to visit their fathers in prisons throughout Britain. They were poor. 

However, given all that about the people I was interested in, nevertheless it is important to recognise the trauma, fears and anxieties of those whose near and dear were going to be in prison for the first time.

Asil Nadir had many friends in high government places. He allegedly supported political parties and designer charities. In spite of many friends in the corridors of power he was later held in custody while awaiting trail from where he escaped in 1993. He sought refuge in Northern Cyprus from which he could not be extradited.

He returned to Britain to stand trial in 2010. He was allowed to live in luxury with his family in Mayfair for the past two years awaiting trial his legal team largely funded b the taxpayer through legal aid. Different treatment to that of the Birmingham Six who remained in prison until their appeal was upheld at the Old Bailey in March 1991. 

Today, twenty years later, Asil Nadir was found guilty of the theft of £30 million from his company Polly Peck. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. His wife read a statement outside the court in which she said her husband was a “man of great character, integrity and honour, who gave in abundance to charities and worthy organisations for many years.” (The Guardian, 24/8/12)

Where are his political friends now?

At a time when opportunism is everything’

when hope seems lost,

when everything boils down to a cynical business deal,

we must find the courage to dream.

To regain romance.

The romance of believing in justice, in freedom and in dignity.

For everybody.

(Arundhati Roy)

            

Appalling Vistas

“Migration is a fact of our world as is, sadly, the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. Human trafficking facilitates the slavery of our times. As a society drained by a never -ending cycle of emigration we should have enough empathy with the plight of economic immigrants to Ireland to offer basic protections to those in need of them. It is after all the very least we would expect for Irish workers building a new life in a foreign country. (Irish Examiner, 1/9/12)

One of the most horrible episodes of British and European colonial history has to be the slave trade. It was  perpetrated by European empires exporting people from west Africa to the Caribbean and Americas. The purpose of the slave trade was to supply sugar, spice cotton and other commodities to the European consumer market. Carried on outside Europe it was the best kept secret of European brutality until it began to be exposed in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Campaigns to bring an end to this brutality were initiated here in Europe and among those enslaved in the Caribbean and Americas.

In 1823 the Anti-Slaver Society was founded. It is the oldest human rights organisation now under the title of Anti-Slavery International. The Slave Revolt in Jamaica took place in 1831. The brutality of its suppression shocked all decent-minded people. In 1834 slavery was abolished in the British Empire. But of course it took much longer to get rid of the construct of slavery. The deplorable conditions of the working class in Europe is well documented as is the struggle for decent pay, working conditions, trade unions and rights. As recent as the middle of the last century segregation existed in the United States.  The Slave Trade left a trail of deep-seated institutional racism that reappears on a daily basis in work places, football matches and even at political conventions an example of which occurred just a few days ago at the Republican Party Convention in the United States.  The intertwined world of sugar and slavery created the unjust global trade and economic structures that are still to be dismantled.     

However, there is one incident in the abolition of slavery that still resonates in modern times. The British government set aside £20 million to compensate the slave owners for the loss of their property, their slaves. Its equivalent in today’s currency would probably be in the billions of pounds. The slaves were discarded even though their labour was needed to harvest the various commodities needed for the local and European markets. Their owners who exploited them in every possible way for their gain were untouched, even rewarded for the loss of their assets, people, men women and children. The slaves, the workers who generated wealth, were discarded as rubbish. Corporate examples of the Slave Trade are still evident in the modern garment sweat shop and other industries.  

A sharp example of the legacy of slavery was recorded during the past week in an Irish Court. In 2002, a Pakistani man, Mohammad Younis, was brought to Ireland by his cousin, Amjad Hussein, owner of restaurants, to work as a tandoori chef. Hussein acquired a work permit for Mohammad from the Department of Trade and Enterprise. When the permit expired Hussein, his employer, did not renew it as he is supposed to if he wished to keep Mohammad in his employment. Mohammad, who did not speak English lived and continued to work in Hussein’s premises.

In 2009, still without a work permit, Hussein’s wife brought Mohammad to the Migrant Rights Centre to try and rectify situation not caused by him. He gave evidence of his working and pay conditions to the Labour Court. The Labour Court awarded him Euro92,000. Hussein, his employer, refused to pay taking the case to the High Court claiming that since the validity of the contract between him and his cousin, Mohammad, depended on a work permit which Mohammad did not have through no fault of his. The High Court upheld the employer’s appeal and quashed the case. Judge Hogan, appalled by the exploitation, declared that Mohammad had no standing to invoke the protection afforded by employment legislation since a contract of employment  was illegal in the absence of an employment permit, which he, Mohammad, did not have. The judge added that the Labour Court could not lawfully entertain an application for relief if the employment contract was substantively illegal and for that reason its decisions could not be allowed to stand.  

As an exploited undocumented migrant Mohammad has no rights or protections in Irish law. Like the slave in European slavery he is invisible, to be exploited and then discarded while his employer walks free of any obligations. Just like the slave owners of the past.

Truly an appalling vista in a global economy in which millions have to emigrate to have a life. The weakness of a global system that protects free trade and the movement of investments but ignores the protections needed by people to participate in that economy is evident once again.  Of course it is not surprising in the light of exploitation in European history that no European Union member state has signed and ratified the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Migrants and their Families. Equally, an appalling vista.      

Are there no human rights instruments that can protect exploited people like Mohammad Younis? Because if there are not Ireland is fast becoming a scavenger’s paradise run by predators. An appalling vista indeed.

1/9/12

 

      

    

The New Conquistadors

“It’s no surprise. It’s natural to look for something better, and Portuguese people always emigrate. It’s a habit of ours since the 16^th century…We are the conquistadors. When things aren’t good, we go where it is best. We’ve done it for generations.” (The Guardian.23/12/11)

The headline in the tabloid set out the agenda for the new year. It stated in bold front-page letters that MIGRANTS DO TAKE BRITISH JOBS.  It then claimed that the report affirmed what it had been saying all along. It went on to say that “immigrants snatched 160,000 jobs from British-born workers in just five years.” Does the use of the word “snatched” mean that theft was committed? 

In another article on the same tabloid page another headline read-3,000 British workers go for 36 jobs at South Pole. It went on to say that “unemployed Britons are willing to travel to the ends of the Earth to find work-after it was revealed record numbers of tradesmen are applying for jobs at the South Pole.” In this report there is no mention that British workers were “snatching” jobs from anyone at the South Pole.

In many European Union member states there is regular media menu of anti-immigrant, angry, xenophobic headlines about jobs been taken by immigrants. In sections of the same media, unemployed Europeans, like the Portuguese lady quoted above, see no dichotomy between the European anti-immigrant attitudes and her and her generation having to emigrate to other countries in search of a life. How can they be so intellectually obdurate as to lack understanding that their emigration to other countries is no different from people in those countries emigrating to Europe for a similar reason, to better themselves?

In a special report on Greek emigration, The Guardian highlighted the departure of young, educated, highly- skilled Greeks to Australia, the United States, Russia, China, Iran and beyond. The word exodus was used to describe the haemorrhage of young Greeks leaving to search for a life denied them at home. 

  Helena Smith writing from Melbourne, Australia describes the arrival of Greek emigrants; In scenes reminiscent of the great gold rush at the turn of the 20^th  century, the men and women have travelled to the other side of the world in search of a better life. Unlike the Greeks of old, however, these new émigrés are noticeably accomplished, with hard-earned degrees won in some of the toughest fields. They’re all university graduates, engineers, architects, mechanics, teachers, bankers who will do anything for work. (The Guardian 22/12/11)

Her description of the Greek arrivals in Australia is an apt description for many of the modern emigrants departing depressed areas of Europe. But what few, if any of the leadership, in the respective European Member states seem to realise is that emigration is the loss of an asset, the energy band of society. But, not just the energy band of society but the young, skilled, healthy, talented and idealistic that are needed if economies and societies are to be renewed. This is an asset that the European Member state’s taxpayer has invested in only for it to be a lost asset. The countries receiving those emigrants are getting an asset for free. Just watch the development of those economies that get this energy band of emigrants for free.

Sadly, few if any European Member state leaders are shouting STOP to this loss of talent and energy. And in not shouting STOP one is left to wonder, as in the past, are they silently relieved seeing them leave, because their leaving is a social safety valve for the political structures they are leaving behind.

Some Irish people are resigned to seeing their young leave. Like the Portuguese lady comparing herself to the conquistadors, there is a tendency in Irish society for people to resign themselves to say; we are always migrating, as if it was the divine will that the Irish should always be migrating nomads. Emigration is not of divine origin, it is caused.  Lisa O’Carroll, writing in The Guardian, put the present cause of Irish emigration in the following terms, Corrupt politicians, greedy builders, lax financial regulation, incompetent banking management and hubris at all levels of society during the Celtic tiger years have all been blamed for this disaster, which will leave Ireland’s economy scarred for years to come. (2/4/11)

The Irish Times, like other media outlets, tends to present modern emigration from Ireland as it did in the 1950s, 1980s, a temporary economic glitz. It seems to give the impression that emigration, coercive, economic migration, is a temporary phenomenon. One frequently hears and reads the expression, well, it’s a temporary situation until the economy gets back to normal in Ireland.  A recent example are the remarks of an Irish emigrant in the Middle East; We have an income here, which is the most important thing, especially as the daily new from Ireland gets worse and the EU bid to resolve the debt crisis slides into disarray. When the time is right to go home we will, but for now, we are making what we can of our time here, rather than wishing it was somewhere else. (Irish Times, 4/11/11) It sounds like the old song, It’s a long, long way from Clare to here. Hopefully, returning won’t get further every year. But evidence and history seem to contradict an easy return.  

As if the recent economic boom in Ireland was normal. It wasn’t a normal situation. It was abnormal economic boom due to the benefits of Ireland’s joining the European Union and foreign direct investment.  It wasn’t an indigenous led economic boom. Emigration is a good indicator of the flow of investment. The movement of people indicates the flow of investment. In the recent past investment has been leaving Ireland. Really, the sovereignty of small populated, newly independent states, like Ireland was thin anyway long before the International Monetary Fund arrived.    

 The normal economic situation in Ireland since the foundation of the state has b(een an annual average emigration of at least half of those coming into the labour market. This indicates a failure of an independent state, Ireland, like many newly independent states, to offer the population an opportunity to access the economic band and generate a way of life for themselves and society generally.          

 One wonders how indigenous populations of Canada, Brazil, Australia, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Angola, New Zealand, China, Iran and others view the arrivals of new emigrants from European failed economies? Do they see the arrival of European emigrants as invaders, conquistadors, burdens on welfare, health and housing, taking local’s jobs as the arrival of emigrants in Europe are seen by the European tabloids?  

Everyone knows the way to the airport (Dublin): Emigration has replaced property speculation as the number one topic of dinner party conversation. (The Guardian, 2/4/11)

James Taplin, an emigrant in Dubai, speaking to The Irish Times put emigration in context when he said;

        To the Government, those who emigrate are just numbers. We make the unemployment figures look a little more palatable. But we are fathers, husbands, uncles and sons. We are lovers and brothers and corner forwards on the local team. We are friends and neighbours, but above all we are human beings. We are never just a number.(13/1/12)

I agree.

13/1/12

       

Return Journey of Hope or Hurt

I’ll take you home again Kathleen

Across the ocean wild and wide

To where your heart has ever been.

(Irish emigrant song about returning home)

RETURNING HOME.

Cynthia emigrated from Jamaica to Britain in the 1950s. There she met her Jamaican husband Timothy. They both worked for British rail. Like many other immigrants they planned to return home and bring up a family in Jamaica. They had two children and decided for the children’s education and for financial reasons to remain in Britain until retirement. They returned annually on holidays to Jamaica and on one holiday bought a plot of land on which they would build a house which would be their new home on return. They enjoyed their holidays in Jamaica, free from racism and the starkness of London streets in winter time. They looked forward to return. Retirement day arrived, they packed up and returned to an almost complete house that they struggled to complete with an indecisive contractor. Like other houses, it was surrounded by a high wall they thought would give adequate security. They were mistaken. Regularly robbed, unwillingly they decided to steel grill all windows and doors for their own security. But they felt more like prisoners. Their relatives consistently begged off them and if they refused to give they were insulted. Gradually they got the message that they were unwelcome even if the Jamaican government of the day officially welcomed them back. They longed to be back in Tottenham. They felt trapped. Having sold their house in London and invested in a house in Jamaica they felt they made a huge mistake. However, they decided to tuff it out. Then Timothy, who more than Cynthia had a return bug, died suddenly of a heart attack. Cynthia was always betwixt and between about returning to Jamaica in the first instance. Her lived experience of their return to Jamaica helped make up her mind to return to London after Timothy passed away. She was not enamoured by their relatives and some neighbours who resented their presence. So, she made up her mind to leave whether or not she could sell the house. She sold the fittings and house furniture. Then she went to meet the local priest, a foreigner, and requested to stay in the rectory for a few days. Though she was of a different faith she felt that he would be sympathetic to her plans. He understood. She then employed a bulldozer operator, paid him, and had the house she and her husband constructed razed to rubble leaving nothing for anybody to pilfer. The next day she took an Air Jamaica flight back to London.        

I left home young and not till old I do come back,

My accent is unchanged, my hair no longer black,

The children don’t know me, whom I meet on the way,

“Where d’you come from, reverend sir?” they smile and say.

(He Zhizhang)

There is a tendency for those who are emigrating to idealise their destinations. However, as the time of departure nears, leaving home, family, friends, city, town and village become part of the internal preparation. In making a decision to leave there are a myriad of relationships that are broken. As the day of departure draws near another tendency to idealise where one is leaving surfaces.  It happens at a point when one realises that they are not part of future plans or events. A throwaway remark by a friend may spark it off. A feeling of exclusion emerges as one is caught betwixt and between. But since departure is planned there is no turning back. One is left in a vacuum, neither at home nor away. 

At this point in one’s confusion a tourist brochure memory of home emerges to compete with the ideal of the destination. The memory of home dominates. It is a kind of nature’s sanity shield in coping with the separation of departure and the future confusion and discomfort of the unknown. It is this memory that one carries for the rest of their lives even if it bears no relation to the humble, deprived situation left behind. A tourist brochure memory is not reality but it is a comfort blanket to return to in times of confusion and discomfort in the new. It also keeps alive a strong return migration tendency. Returning on holidays at holiday times of year in the home country feeds this memory and encourages return. During holidays the weather is good, there are people around and they know that one is here for the holidays. The first question probably that an immigrant is asked on return is; where are you now and when are you going back?

In the minds of the locals, family, friends and neighbours, a returning immigrant is placed somewhere other than where they are standing just now. An immigrant is supposed to be away, somewhere. The immigrant on holidays in their former home is emotionally porous and that condition remains after return from holiday, pulling at the heart strings with a return tune that seems easily accomplished. As they return from holiday they feel caught between two homes, past and present.  Thoughts of return migration seem a reality. Sadly, for some they pursue a dream that has not been properly thought out, objectively analysed based on economic, social and cultural facts. The tourist brochure picture distorts the facts, a hasty decision is made to uproot on the assumption that there are now opportunities where in the past there were none.         

Now that Ireland is experiencing emigration again comparable to the worst decades of the past there is a regular mantra from institutional leaders in public life that emigration is a temporary glitch that will reverse itself when the “economy picks up.” In a celebrity-driven world optimism is an opiate, a myth,  that is used to divert attention from a harsh reality that the future for many is not coming back nor is it going to be better than the past. Continuous economic growth is an enduring myth that a fragile public need to be nurtured with by institutional leaders even if the opposite is true.

The democratic, equality aspired socialist order that evolved after the second world war began to decline in the late 1970s. A realisation that not everyone would have in the future their own house, two-car garage, children at university or that the next generation would be better off than their parents began to emerge. Various emergencies, food, oil, riots, three-day weeks signalled to the populations that the socially underpinned deals of the previous three decades were off. According to the new dealers, society did not exist, implying that the structures that underpinned society did not exist either. Essentially, this meant that it was the individual that succeeded or failed by his/her own wit or weakness. The social partners in society were undermined. Everyone could have political rights but they do not provide jobs and incomes. Competitiveness became the key word. The link between productivity and reward was blurred, wages stood still or declined, wealth was transferred to the top of society ending up chasing speculation in markets detached from manufacturing, commerce and everyday life. Wage earners, like the mythical Syd, were encouraged to invest in the market particularly in those state agencies that were privatised. Risk replaced trust, designer charity replaced justice and jobs were outsourced to China.

The public was also told that if at thirty three they were using public transport to get to work they were failures. At the same time they were advised to aspire to own their homes. However, this time the home was equated to a casino chip that had access to endless refinancing in the mortgage casinos. The credit card became the pass to any possibility. Interest rates were liberalised by effective lobbying in parliaments making the institutions of the state, courts, lawyers, police, sheriff, banks and licensed debt collectors. Sadly, when the economy failed, people were left scampering for survival, emigration again became a reality, this time from opulence at home to hardship in a foreign city. Abandoned and massaged by their leaders they leave in the false assumption when “things get back to normal and growth takes hold” they will be back.          

However, both at home and away people need to be given the painful facts regarding the possibility of return migration. This would prepare them to make long-term decisions in regard to settlement, investment in property and integration. People left hanging between two cultures, like broken tree branches, perish. Few in public positions are telling the public how it came about that too many people are now chasing too few jobs. About thirty years ago Europe and the United States began to export manufacturing jobs that came cheaper elsewhere. Only a tenth of the investment flowing into stock markets ended up in industry. The rest chased speculative casino-type profit. According to the gurus of the day the future lay in financial services, a European carry-over from its past-get others to do the dirty work. Even now, unemployed Europeans are still being advised that their futures are elsewhere, new conquistadores, and when things improve they will be back having acquired work experience and new skills. 

A few things that need to be kept in mind about return migration.

*Get objective information about the economy that one plans to return to.

*Work opportunity, housing, health care, communications, children’s education, security.

*The returning immigrant has a lived experience of emigration.

*Those who haven’t experienced migration are acting out of the anecdotal accounts of others.

*There needs to be a shared experience of home and away.

*Those returning have had a three-phased life-before leaving, living abroad and now returning.

*The home economy may not need the skills acquired by the returnee.

*Those at home may view the returnee as a threat to their jobs.

*Realise that nothing is the same as before.

*Industrial skills are of little use in a service economy. 

*Return can be as traumatic as leaving.

*Be prepared for culture shock, the discomfort of change and the emotions of departure.

*In a family each member has a personal journey to travel.

*Each individual needs time to process their journey home.

*Odious comparisons hurt.

*Home and away cultures are not perfect.

*Be aware of being a “when I was.”

  The boy came home from a foreign land,

Weary and wan with his staff in his hand;

Five years’ absence had left their trace

On golden hair, on sunny face.

His gait was weary, his limbs were sore;

His youthful friends knew him no more.

(The Return. Patrick MacGill)

The Left and Bereft

EMIGRATION BREAKS RELATIONSHIPS.

The modern city is a place where everyone’s a stranger, so it seems, on his way to somewhere else…Yet what makes an airport especially curious is that its look-alike settings are the scenes for the most emotional moments in our public lives. People break down at departure gates…Part of the pathos and stress of the airport is that lives are being changed irreversibly, and people have nothing to steady themselves with but a Coffee People outlet, a Sky Plaza…all the comforts of home, made impersonal. (The Global Soul. Pico Iyer)

In school in the 1950s our teacher national school pondered on emigration seeing it as a failure of the Ireland he belonged to. It was as present as the rain in the area in which I grew up. Every family had someone who was an emigrant and would be an emigrant. They were resigned to a future that would see the past repeated. I didn’t understand his anguish about emigration. The returning emigrants that I knew were home on holidays, well groomed and dressed and with money in their pockets. I wondered why the anguish about emigration and the traumatic, grief-laden departures.

The village seems strange; this

     is separation as if my beloved

     has left it.

The grief of separation is so cruel

that it is not scared of anyone;

(Shahzeb Faqir. Poetry of the Taliban)

In October 1956 I was at Galway railway station waiting for the Dublin train that would take me back to college after playing a rugby match. The station master announced that this train was bound for Dun Laoire and the mail boat to Holyhead. As people made their way into the station my attention got locked into a group in front of me. The group was comprised of a man, woman an three children, a family. The man carried a small suitcase indicating that he was travelling. They stood close together and carried on a conversation that was for themselves only. The children were huddled between both parents giving the impression of a clutch of chickens. Eventually, the station master announced that those with tickets should board the train. The scene changed. The wife, mother, picked up the suitcase and handed it to her husband and children’s father. In doing so she was asserting her new role as both father and mother. She gave the suitcase to her husband. He took it and left it at his feet. She beckoned the children to give their father a hug which they individually did and then she did the same. She said, Dia Leath and he replied Dia Liv. She took a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped his tears as he stepped towards the train. She then wiped the children’s eyes and lastly her own.

As I stepped on to the train I too cried. There and then I understood the full meaning of emigration. Primary relationships broken, husband without wife, wife without husband, children without a father, a father without his children. A mother playing two roles. All separated, gone and left behind.

As I travelled back on the train I pondered the scene at the station. Having left home to go to boarding school my own goings and comings over the previous few years flashed through my memory. Homecomings were happy occasions, departures were heart rending, not just for myself but for my mother and father. We were all losing something of each other that only afterwards we could articulate. It wasn’t just me that was hurting at losing them. They were hurting too on losing me. There was loss on both sides and all of us had to deal with loss in our own way. There were no lectures about leaving home, emigrating. Anything we knew about leaving home was picked up by observation at moments of departure, going away parties, American wakes. It was an awkward time. Indeed, there were some would could not deal with departure by the front door, so to speak, they just left without saying goodbye, by the back door. Leaving by the back door was a cause for greater grief because parents were left to wonder if the silent departure was their fault. This grief took a much longer time to heal as parents were left to ponder why they were rejected, abandoned. The song, Steal Away, depicted that.         

Years later, retuning on holidays from overseas I was visiting my neighbours. Emigration had begun again. In one house I visited three children had just departed. A  cloud of grief filled a hole in the house. All of a sudden a father and mother were left behind. One could touch the emptiness. They were trying to understand the causes of emigration and at the same time deal with the porousness of their emotions. In the conversation one of them said, “Ah, the houses are quiet now” and the other said, “sure, and the countryside is quiet too.”

That said it all. Those who left had to deal with the hole in their hearts, culture shock, the discomfort of the unfamiliar and the fact that they were not at home any more  Those left behind, the bereft, had to realise that those who had left were not going to be at home any more  All, those at home and away, were on their own now. Primary relationships were broken. They would not be the same again. New aspects of these relationships would have to be invented. Those having left would develop tourist brochure memories, of home, parents and friends, that they would in times of confusion seek shelter in. Those left behind would do likewise. The danger of frozen tourist brochure memories is that they can become prisons of nostalgia that are difficult to break out of.

Sadly, governments and other institutions of society are slow to get involved in enabling people with relevant information so that the emigration experience be productive and healthy for all concerned. It is not a lack of knowledge that has kept it away from people. Unfortunately, emigration is looked at through the lenses of economics, loss of a national asset by the emigration countries, the gain of an asset for free by those nations that receive them. Immigrants are commodified as units of labour needed in economic prosperity, discarded in economic failure, and worse still scapegoated as was the case in the recent French, American and Greek elections.

Since the demise of communism new enemies are needed. This time immigrants are portrayed as a risk generally mentioned in the same media sentence as terrorists and drug traffickers.  Emigration, a journey of hope of the heart in the internal landscape of the soul, was always a risk and still is. Why, turn on those who generate economies away by their work and at home by their remittances? European history has a history to scapegoat the weakest minority. Is the only certainty we learn from history that we do not learn anything from history?

The task of migrant nations, like Ireland, calls for at least an awareness of the emigrant condition and to recognise the contribution they make at home and away. It is important to remember that it was the success of those Irish abroad that gave confidence to the people at home in the past. Irish emigrant remittances between 1950-65 from Britain was the equivalent of seven billion £s. Yet, the Irish government was slow to involve itself during difficult times in the Irish Diaspora. Also, the Irish government does not hesitate about running to the Diaspora seeking help having bailed out those at home that caused the economic malaise.

Emigrants deserve decent services, objective information and recognition.

Tommy was my neighbour in Montego Bay. A fine looking young fellow. His mother saw no future at home. When Tommy was five she left for the United States leaving Tommy in care of a relative. She sent back money for Tommy’s education. I got to know him because he asked me to write letters to his mother in New York. The relative did not value education leaving Tommy illiterate. He also had a serious stammer. Neighbours related that his stammer set in after his mother emigrated. They believed that Tommy’s stammer was caused by the shock and loss of his mother’s departure.

Grace Nichols, the Jamaican poet, catches the grief and loss of those left behind. In small populated island nations, branch economies like Jamaica and Ireland, emigration to the trunk economies is always on the horizon.

His cane-shot eyes

his voice cracked as he wails

what his bones know for certain:

‘Nevaar to meet again

Nevaar to meet again.’

Come, Hanuman,

only your many arms

can help console this man-

still waving to an empty sky

the white flag of his handkerchief.

(Grace Nichols, Jamaican poet.)

  

  

Jamaica - No Problem Don't Stop the Carnival

The Pinta

The Nina

The Santa Maria

The father son and holy ghost

Coming across the water-

The billowing ships

Full of adventurers and seasoned sailors

All scrambling around the decks

Like mutinous spiders….

Startling the flying-fish

And the long sleep of history.

(Grace Nichols, Jamaican poet)

In 1962 Jamaica became an independent state. Jamaica has had a troubled history from the arrival of Columbus at Discovery Bay in 1494 up to the present. The Spanish settled Jamaica until 1655 when they were chased out by the British, legend has it, from the aptly-named Runaway Bay. Jamaica was the reward for Cromwell’s soldiers after their conquest in Ireland. They took with them 5,000 young boys and girls from Ireland to settle Jamaica. They were the first slaves. Seeing that Jamaica was an ideal place to produce sugar and spice for the European market the British initiated the African slave trade to meet such needs. Much of European aristocracy owes its wealth to Jamaican and Caribbean slavery. The indigenous population of Jamaica, Arawak Indians, are extinct.

Thus began a brutal period of Jamaica’s history that is conveniently bleached out of European history. People were worked to the bone in cruel conditions leaving Jamaica with a culture of brutality that was not purged at abolition in 1838. Abolition was earned by the sacrifices of many members of the Baptist church who gave their lives for freedom, decency and equality. 

The slave owners were indemnified, like the modern bankers, while the freed slaves were left to fend for themselves. The local plantation economy then tried to import poor Europeans, Irish, English, Welsh, Scots, and Germans to occupy the highlands forcing the recently freed slaves to live in the plains adjacent to the sugar plantations. That venture failed so they then brought indentured workers from China and India. European prisoners of war were deposited in Jamaica during the Second World War. Over time many other people arrived and settled from a wide variety of cultures giving Jamaica a reason to describe itself at Independence in 1962 as “OUT OF MANY ONE PEOPLE.” Grace Nichols weaves the human multicultural quilt that is Jamaica.

But there were other ships

Rocked by dreams

And fears of and promise

Rolling

with new arrivals

across the Atlantic

from the fields of Bengal

and Uttar Pradesh,

from Kowloon

and Canton.

from Madeira

and Ireland.

As in many other newly independent states, little time or thought was given to confront the past and its inequities. There was a rush to change signs and symbols. The education structures needed to change attitudes of subversion developed to cope with life during slavery and colonisation, the low self esteem of subjugation, the social violence that was normalised, were inadequate to steer Jamaica towards a different future. The legacy of violence, unresolved anguish and societal fragmentation in Jamaica is still apparent in many ways particularly in the annual murder rate of over 1,000 in a population of just over two million. Violence is de-creative.

However, given the ills that country suffers from, Jamaica is a beautiful country with great people. One can only admire the spirit of a people that suffered so much but came out of it in the end with great dignity, creativity, energy and enterprise. But, like many other small populated island economies, Jamaica has not been able to offer its people the choice of remaining at home. A large Jamaican diaspora annually remits about two billion dollars. Tourism is the industry that offers most Jamaicans employment and foreign exchange. But there is a lot of seepage due to food imports for the tourist industry. This is due to poor organisation of Jamaican agriculture. Yet, Jamaica exports many commodities such as sugar, rum, a wide variety of spices, bauxite and of course music. Ask any high school class if they know any famous Jamaican and they will answer Bob Marley. Right now Bob’s popularity may be threatened, at least for this weekend, by Usain Bolt and the other excellent Jamaican athletes taking part in the London Olympics.

Jamaica’s cuisine is as multifaceted as its population is multicultural. Traditional Jamaican breakfast is salt fish from Newfoundland, akee and breadfruit brought by Captain Bligh from the South Pacific and kalalou.

Ireland has many connections with Jamaica. The first slaves were Irish. Salt beef and other products were exported from the port of Galway. Jamaicans are quick to inform that many of the plantation managers in slavery were Irish. At independence in 1962 a number of the ministers in the new government, Drs. Herbert Eldemire and Marco Brown, were graduates of the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin. Dr. Eldemire was the first minister of health in the new government and Dr. Brown was the minister for tourism. There were many other Jamaican graduates from Irish universities who contributed to Jamaican life. 

Jamaica will celebrate its independence in the usual carnival spirit with reggae, jerk chicken, rum and gold medals from the London Olympics. The three hundred and fifty different Christian denominations in Jamaica will add their own biblical spice to the festivities. But these alone are not sufficient to deal with Jamaica’s debt, greater than Greece, a 1% growth rate and high unemployment since independence. At independence Jamaica had a 6% annual growth rate. Yet, Jamaica has been hospitable over time to those refugees seeking shelter from upheavals Haiti, Cuba and elsewhere.      

All Jamaican institutions will be challenged to renew, reform and plan a way forward that unites rather than divides and overcome the tendency of most post-colonial societies to pull apart rather than pull together in the national interest. Loyalty to political tribalism that fights over scare benefits and spoils is a disservice to a people who came through hell to be free.

Hopefully, the spirit of Bob Marley’s One Love/People Get Ready will inspire the leaders of Jamaican society to cast off the traits of the past and unite for a better future.

One love, one heart

Let’s get together and feel all right

Sayin’, “Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right.”

Sayin’, “Let’s get together and feel all right.”

Bob Marley.