Conclusion

Summary

I regard the emigration of our young people as an open gash in the nation's main artery, through which the nation is bleeding to death. Nevertheless, I do not hold that the way to stop emigration is […] by a ruthless coercion measure prohibiting our people from leaving.

Deputy Bernard Butler, Fianna Fáil, Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 97, col. 2437, 13 July 1945.

Migration is a perennial feature of Irish life, part of the nexus of low marriage and high fertility rates of the Irish population which are peculiar in demographic terms. As Coleman stated, ‘Ireland’s demography challenges demographic theory’. It is doubtful that anyone in the 1950s could have conceived that within fifty years Ireland would become a site of immigration; some were predicting the end of the Irish race. The upsurge in twenty-first-century emigration may have caused less surprise, but perhaps more dismay, as the discourses reveal in many cases an earnest desire that Ireland cease to be an ‘emigrant nursery’ for larger economies. Although not on the scale of migration from the 1920s to the 1950s, we have seen a return flow of people in recent years as outward migration has been recorded again in the 2016 Census.

Metaphors drawing upon water and blood, evocative of life itself, as referred to in the Introduction, have persisted. In the post-Second World War era there were fears of losing a particular kind of quality in the population, or, in Wills's analysis, the ‘Gaeltacht stock’ regarded as ‘“very fine” because it was hardy and robust, strengthened through frugal and simple living’. What ‘type’ of person was leaving and what ‘stock’ remained vexed interested parties. Wills has argued that literary depictions of life in the 1950s hinted at the notion that ‘the population will become too soft to cope with rural Ireland’ due to modernity and the concomitant rising expectations for quality of life.5 It seems, however, that the concern was not so much for the people – their fitness, their desires, their material needs – as with modernity itself. Ideas of ‘frugal comfort’, of Ireland being somehow above modern concerns with technology, progress and material ease, were referenced by de Valera and in Catholic social teaching (and the connection between the two is not coincidental).