February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Ray O’Hanlon
What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, the Irish on the move were pouring over books about making it in America.
A favorite read in the late 1980s and early’ 90s was "Immigrating USA, A Guide For Irish Immigrants."
It was published — with help and advice from the Irish government — by Project Irish Outreach, a division of Catholic Charities in New York.
The guide included sections with headings such as "Encounters With The Immigration and Naturalization Service."
Not a few Irish who survived such encounters and established new lives in America are now contemplating a return to Ireland.
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But Ireland is not the place in was 20, 15 or even 10 years ago so the Irish government has produced its own book for returning emigrants.
It’s entitled "Returning to Ireland" and it was unveiled in New York last week by Ireland’s minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, Dermot Ahern.
"Returning to Ireland" is described on its cover as being a practical guide to accommodation, health, tax, pensions and social welfare" for those who want to make a fresh go of it in Ireland’s booming "Celtic Tiger" economy.
But it’s no siren song. The potential difficulties that returning Irish might encounter in the country they once couldn’t leave fast enough are not brushed under the pages.
Right at the outset, "Returning to Ireland" advises the reader that he or she needs "to make decisions based on the facts as they are, not on your memories of how things used to be."
Turning a page reveals another cautionary note: "Returning to Ireland demands a lot of thought and preparation; you need to prepare even more than when you originally left."
In more than 50 pages that follow, "Returning to Ireland" addresses many of the practical considerations that individuals — and now very often families — must take into account when it comes to moving from the U.S. back to Ireland.
According to Minister Ahern, 30,000 copies of the book are being printed and it will be available in the coming weeks from Irish Consulates in the U.S., the embassy in Washington and from Irish immigrant advice centers in various U.S. cities.
Ahern, who spoke with reporters at the Irish Consulate in Manhattan, struck a cautious note himself, even though he and his government colleagues want to see as many Irish as possible return to a country that now urgently needs skilled labor to keep the economic engines working at full throttle.
"There have been big social changes. Ireland is a completely different place," he said.
One of those big changes was announced by Ahern himself just before his departure for New York. It was the fact that unemployment in the Republic has now dipped below five percent.
Many Irish who left for America, during the 1980s especially, can recall unemployment at four times that rate.
On the other hand, they will also remember a time when an Irish traffic jam was a few dozen vehicles in length and a house could be purchased for merely one or two proverbial limbs, the remaining ones being kept for the inevitable rainy day.
But Minister Ahern was not ducking the new, less positive, realities. He made the point that a fair bit of the money fueling the surging cost of property in Ireland had actually been earned in America by the very emigrants who had returned, or were contemplating a return to Ireland.
That Ireland is now a practical place, a country which, for the first time in its history, has the capacity to recover some, if not all, the people once lost to its cities, towns, villages and countryside.