Ciara O’Meara, 26, arrived December, 2009. She is an advertising art director working freelance. “I worked as an advertising art director in Ireland — I have a master's in advertising from the Dublin Institute of Technology," she said. "I have family in Canada and I wanted to move up in my career. Unfortunately, with the recession in Ireland, I didn't think I'd be able to get the same opportunities there as I might somewhere else. Back in Dublin, my employer had just moved into a modern new office around the corner from the Dáil, which meant we saw and heard all the weekly protests outside the government buildings. It's hard to think that only a few years ago everything was so good, and now it is quite the opposite. However, I believe we will come through it. We are a strong nation. We will once again weather the storm and come out better as a country for it.”Reynard Li
Ireland has always been an emigrant society. During the Potato Famine of the 1840s, at least one million Irish nationals fled the country, and millions more would leave in the decades to follow. In the 1980s, when unemployment hit record levels, an average of 35,000 people left each year for better opportunities overseas - a mass migration known as "the brain drain," since many were university and college graduates.
The tide turned in the 1990s, when the so-called Celtic Tiger began to roar. Taking advantage of ultra-low corporate tax rates, foreign tech giants such as Microsoft, Dell and Intel set up shop, luring thousands of ex-pats back home. Developers went on a government-subsidized building spree. At one point, construction and related businesses accounted for an estimated one-fifth of Irish jobs.
Then it all came crashing down. Today, unemployment is stuck at close to 14 per cent - 33 per cent for people under 25. More than 1,100 companies went out of business in the first nine months of 2010, 100,000 mortgages are under water, and an estimated 250,000 homes and apartments sit empty across the country.
And the brain drain is back with a vengeance.
Workers are shipping off to the United States, Australia and, increasingly, Canada. In the first six months of this year, Canada issued 2,863 temporary work permits to Irish nationals, compared to 2,789 in all of 2009. As for one-year working-holiday visas granted to those under 35, Canada had issued 3,065 of them as of June, 2010; that is up from 2,691 in 2009.
We talked to nine recent immigrants about why they left home, and about their job prospects here in Canada.