Dublin's Laura Cross, 23, has a degree in biochemistry and cannot get a job in Ireland. She is travelling to Vancouver in the hope of finding work in her field.
For biochemistry graduate Laura Cross, Tuesdays are special. She wakes early, wanders down to Arnotts department store on Henry Street, slips on her uniform and spends the day working in the underwear department.
One day a week fitting bras on plus-sized ladies is considered better-than-average work these days for an Irishwoman with an advanced degree and work experience; most of her fellow graduates can't even find that much. The rest of the week, Ms. Cross, 23, waits for the dole cheque and reads up on the history and culture of British Columbia.
On Sept. 28, she will take the bus to the airport and fly to Vancouver, a work-study visa in hand and a number of job prospects in Canadian labs. Her boyfriend, a cabinetmaker who hasn't had work in two years, will join her in December. Half a dozen of her friends and classmates are already there.
"When my sister graduated five years ago, she went straight into a good job and didn't give a thought to leaving," she says, "but for those of us trying to work nowadays, the only option is to work in a shop, collect dole or get on the plane."
After almost 20 years as Europe's strongest economy, during which hundreds of thousands of Polish, British and North American immigrants flocked to Dublin for work, the Irish are once again a nation of emigrants. Moving abroad, a response to the economic calamities of the past 170 years, has once again become the way out of an impossible situation at home, and is creating a new Irish diaspora.
Statistics show that the shift from an immigrant-receiving population to a largely outgoing one began just as Ireland suffered the continent's most precipitous economic collapse - a freefall that began with the collapse of a real-estate bubble, which in turn set off bank collapses and government-debt emergencies. The result has been double-digit unemployment.
Ireland's economy has not yet stabilized: Dublin announced further harsh budget cuts this month to keep debt under control, unemployment rose above 13 per cent and an alarming percentage of mortgages are under water. Flight has become an increasingly popular response.
According to a study this month by Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute, around 70,000 people will leave the country this year and another 50,000 in 2011, a total that could rise to 200,000 by 2015 if current unemployment trends continue.
While those numbers include immigrants to Ireland returning home, Ireland last year became a net-emigration country for the first time in 13 years, with 18,000 Irish-born people leaving.
Britain remains the most popular destination: For the first time since the 1980s scaffolding crews in London are comprised of Irishmen, after 15 years during which Ireland imported tens of thousands of Polish and even English scaffolders and tradesmen.
Second are Australia and New Zealand, which offer generous work visas, followed by Canada. According to Canada's immigration department, the number of temporary Irish immigrants shot up from 874 a year in 1999 to 2,604 in 2008, while the number of registered permanent immigrants went from 158 to almost 500 in the same period. The real numbers are known to be several times higher than the official numbers suggest, since large numbers of Irish tradespeople and construction workers arrive as tourists and work without a visa.
On top of this, Ms. Cross is one of 2,500 young Irish people each year who are granted a work-travel visa; that number is capped but is "very heavily oversubscribed now," one official said. Before 2008, Irish visa applications fell below the quota.
A Canadian official said that the numbers for 2009 and the first half of 2010 are "much, much higher," though figures beyond 2008 are not yet available.
The new emigrants are either young and unemployed, like Ms. Cross, or they are older skilled workers with houses and established lives, who are abandoning it all in bankruptcy.
That describes electrician Gavin O'Brien, who left for Toronto this spring, abandoning his family house. In the peak of the boom, earning perhaps €150,000 a year in the overheated home-construction trade, he raised his mortgage payments to €3,000 a month in hopes of paying off the house within a few years: When the construction industry collapsed completely in 2008, the mortgage company refused to lower his payments. He offered to pay them €1,000 a month or to let them take the house, then got on a plane.
That has become the Irish choice: When your house is worth half the value of your mortgage and your salary is half what it was in 2007, often the best option is simply to leave. Police frequently collect abandoned cars in the parking lot outside Dublin airport.
"Essentially, people are choosing between sticking around and sending the household's breadwinner to North America, or just ditching it all and abandoning the house and car and leaving," said Stephen McLarnon, a Dublin businessman who organizes Emigration Expo conferences attended by thousands of fortune-seekers every month.
For young workers like Ms. Cross, the decision to migrate is less cataclysmic, but the choices are equally stark. "My professors were telling me that there was not going to be any work out there for a few years and we should just stay in school as long as we can," she said.
"But I decided to get out there and face the big bad world, and things are so bad that I just want to get up and get out, get away from all the difficulty. My sister's generation were probably the first one ever who could think of spending their whole life making a living in Ireland, but for the rest of us it's back to the old ways."
Doug Saunders