Home thoughts from abroad can cause serious January blues - New year blues for immigrants leaving their families again

Heading back to reality after the holidays can be hard

As I start writing this, on the 6th January, it's not the just the Christmas decorations that are on a come down.

Post-Christmas malaise hitting you like a juggernaut of omni-problems and January's role as an austere counterweight to all the December revelry is a familiar trope and a feeling we're all au fait with, but for the emigrés among us who returned home for the holidays, the feeling hits a little harder.

I, for instance, now living in Manchester, got home for a little over a fortnight. At least, that's what the calendar indicated, but I'm convinced I've been swindled by the space time continuum somehow. There's no possible way that lightning fast pop-my-head-round-the-door of a holiday was 16 days long.

There's a lot to pack in to such a short space of time, and that's what makes that great big expanse of January all the worse. While at least you get some degree of solid family time, it's the important people outside that circle that proves problematic. You try and catch up with all your friends, but inevitably there are a few you can't meet up with, and that's vexing. But what's almost worse is the friends you do see, but just barely. When there are a slew of people you want to catch up with, people you might not have seen in ages, a whistle stop visit a mile wide and an inch deep doesn't really cut it. In the season of goodwill to all, you really want to have time to say more than "Merry Christmas!" to them all.

Meetings can also be bittersweet because the geographical distance can show up other forms of distance. When you don't see someone in ages, and you have a long list of developments to share in a short space of time, the new names and new factors you've been missing out on while away can cause considerable lament.

With the new year rattling inexorably on, full of appraisal and longing as much as hope and resolution, the one thing we in the places we've left behind can resolve to do is make sure the links of our life don't become rusted over. "No man is a failure who has friends", so said Clarence the Angel in the Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life. The festive season may be over, but the effort to make time for the people who matter to us most shouldn't stop, whatever the time, and wherever you are.

President Higgins' last big push to hear the voice of the diaspora - Seeking a new vision of Ireland

Ireland's President Michael D Higgins wants to hear from the Diaspora

The President’s landmark series of Young & Irish seminars may nearly be at an end (the final seminar takes place this weekend in Galway) but there is still a chance for young Irish people abroad to have their say on the burning issues affecting them, with the deadline for submissions to The President being the 29^th September. In fact, that’s why the seminars are so-called.

Speaking to a small group of reporters (of which I was one) on Saturday in Monaghan, President Higgins revealed that originally the title of the series was Young in Ireland, but was amended to facilitate the great throngs of young people who have since left the country and to make sure they were not forgotten. Higgins takes his role as President of all the people of Ireland very seriously and is confident that the emigration of now is not the same as that of the 50’s or 80’s, due in no small part to the advances in technology. He said that Ireland’s young people abroad, no matter how let down by the country they’ve felt, are determined not to turn their back on the country and noted that submissions to him both foreign and domestic were very similar in tone and scope. No matter where they were, young Irish people’s hopes and dreams for the country were one and the same.

One thing that has been remarkable about the seminars so far is the way in which the young people attending have responded to the President, and how he responded to them. During the day he said that no young person wanted anything at the expense of anyone else, they just wanted a better Ireland. In a world where young people are often portrayed as selfish, wanton and inert, it goes a very long way to hear someone in authority say that as clearly as President Higgins. Young people respond to him because of the clear respect he shows them, and his want and need to go to bat for young people is clear.

And ultimately, that is what we all, not just young people need: someone to go to bat for us. To fight our corner. To be an assuring force in a very uncertain world. The scope of the Being Young & Irish seminars is very wide and everything from education and innovation to tourism, sport and national pride have been mentioned in the discussions, and they’re vitally important things. But, the world could be instantly made better with two things taken into consideration: that your opinions and aspirations as a citizen no matter your status matters, and that the hard work and effort you do to express them and make it real is appreciated. President Higgins knows this, and lives this.

All over the world, young people from Ireland are currently living and working, trying to make their way in the world, but not giving up hope on the country from whence they came. If you’re one of those young people, The President wants to hear from you, and though your vision for Ireland might be several years down the road, Michael D Higgins wants to travel it with you. 

You can submit your vision of Ireland to the President by the 29th September at http://www.president.ie/makeasubmission/

Being Young And Irish - taking care of the Irish Diaspora around the world

Irish students protest forced immigration at the Famine memorial Dublin

As I write this, I’m just in the door from the Donegal Youth Council’s end of term celebration evening. For the past two years three dozen young people aged between 13 and 18 have given up large swathes of their time to use their electoral mandate to serve others in a dazzling array of ways, from improving local facilities to shaping national policy. But even without their substantive list of legislative achievements, the Donegal Youth Council and the extraordinary young people who make it what it is embody a civic pride and duty and willingness to discuss and take on issues without fear or rancor. These are the qualities which will be the building blocks of the new Ireland. And yet, Ireland is currently squandering this talent as it loses fantastic young people like this all the time to emigration.  

A cursory look at my list of Facebook friends alone makes for stark viewing. Scores of people I know from home or college or generally being around have in the last few years changed their location header to London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brussels, Chicago, New York, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. It’s bad enough that they had to go to find work abroad in the first place, but worse still is the attitude our national governments have taken to an ever-burgeoning diaspora, which has ranged from passive indifference to apparent relief of using the emigration “release valve”.

It’s not that working on another continent is an inherently tragic thing; it is of course enriching in a whole host of ways, but as with most things compulsion rather takes the edge off. Fundamentally the reason so many young people are leaving our shores is because they don’t feel their talent is appreciated or facilitated, and that gulf only widens with time and geography. If Ireland is ever to get back on its feet, it needs to get serious about integrating the diaspora and keeping them involved in the affairs of state.

Plenty of other nations do it. In the US absentee ballots from international locations are a normal part of the electoral process. Italy and France for example have representatives of their ex-pats in parliament too. And yet, despite perhaps the single most extensive ethnic connection network in the world, Ireland doesn’t extend the same rights, responsibilities or entitlements. That needs to change.

Granted, there is some opposition to such measures within Ireland itself, with suggestions that by leaving the country you just forfeit your right to vote here. But this is a globalized world, and the decisions made here matter a great deal everywhere else. Our diaspora have an incredible amount to offer us and we could do with utilizing and being thankful for the skill and wisdom. Émigrés know this all too well.

The word “shareholder” has quite negative connotations at the minute, but in a national sense it’s vital for Ireland’s future that we give our citizens living abroad a sense of belonging and value they probably didn’t feel while here, and which factored in their decision to leave in the first place. If Ireland can’t provide reasons for young people not to go, it should at least give them some not to stay away.

I sat yesterday evening beaming with pride at the Donegal’s Youth Council’s Celebration Evening. Not just for their achievements, but for the love and self-worth and common purpose they provided each other with by serving the public and bettering their community. As a nation, we need to do so much more of that. No matter where our citizens go, it’s vital their promise isn’t squandered or their civic pride quashed. The Proclamation urges us to cherish all the children of the nation equally, it shouldn’t have a distance limiter. 

Being Young and Irish - Our disappointed generation should learn from past mistakes and make Irish education something to be proud of

During tough times in Ireland education is key

Being a young Irish person is hardly something that lends itself well to a one size fits all definition. But there is one unifier this generation does have in common: a collective sense that things aren’t quite going as well as we’d hope.

For young people in their twenties, there’s an overriding sense that the life we’re living wasn’t in the script. When people of my age went to college just as the century turned, Ireland was reveling in a Gilded Age where it seemed opportunity and prospects and hope were going to be plentiful for ever more. Emigration was something you saw referenced on Reeling In The Years, and foreign travel didn’t have the specter of necessity about it. For those in their teens they face a situation where, through no fault of their own, their chance of enduring employment at home after third level education is starkly diminished. That is assuming they’re able to afford third level education in the first place.

It’s not that young people want or feel entitled to instant success, far from it. Success is something you should work hard and strive for, but it should feel within reach eventually. It should be difficult to get your big break, it shouldn’t be impenetrable. Chasing dead ends and living with disappointment is just part of everyday life for this generation.

But even despite our current difficulties, resilience and positivity will always shine through. For President Higgins’ upcoming Being Young & Irish seminar young people are making suggestions on how to make Ireland’s future better, on a wide range of topics. For me, with such challenges for young people finding their way in the world, and the best way to use their skills, my main priority is education.

If Ireland is to advance in the future, it needs to seriously overhaul what we teach and how it’s taught. 100 years since Pearse blasted the murder machine, it’s still fully functioning. The Leaving Cert, the results of which had thousands of students nationwide up to high dough this week, is a pathetically inefficient method of measuring achievement, value or talent. In a world of high speed bullet trains, the Leaving Cert is a pony and trap. But mild-mannered reform of the Leaving Cert won’t be worth a hill of beans unless the lead up to it is also drastically overhauled.

In my experience, every ten year old I’ve ever known has possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of something. Sometimes it’s football, music, a particular TV show or film or something more academic like history or geography or dinosaurs, but I’ve never met a 10 year old who can’t rattle off knowledge about their interests at the drop of a hat. By secondary school, that instinct to learn what interests you is blunted. In focusing such rigor on exam preparation, the whole education system funnels people into a format which seriously undermines creativity, independent thinking, open discussion and deeper exploration. Knowledge, such as it is, is crammed into the short stay car park of our minds for the purpose of splurging it on as many pages as you can as quickly as you can. You literally have no time to think, and there’s our problem.

Now more than ever, Ireland needs people of skill, talent and imagination to speak up and share the ideas that will shape and influence the way we think, act and work well into the future. We owe it to ourselves and to generations ahead to build an education system that helps encourage that, and all the incredible things borne of such a system. Ours is a generation that faces disappointment regularly, but we have to use that disappointment to strive to do better for ourselves and the young people that come after us. Ireland needs to learn from it’s mistakes, and then become a better teacher.