http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...oung-liverpool

Like Boston and Glasgow, Liverpool has long been synonymous with emigration from the Emerald Isle. For a while, the Celtic Tiger roared and the direction of travel was the other way across the Irish Sea. But the economic sands have shifted again, and Merseyside is the destination for a new generation of migrants.

Up to 75,000 Irish citizens are predicted to emigrate in 2012 – higher than the levels of the late 1980s. In a country with a population of 4.5 million, such shifts generate intense interest and the Irish Times has even created a Generation Emigration blog, with the headline styled up as a departure board.

With rising unemployment, young people, particularly men in their late teens and early 20s, are turning to other European countries, Australia and the Middle East for work. There are now 356,000 Irish nationals livingin the UK, latest Office for National Statistics figures show, with the number of arrivals second only to Polish immigrants.

Emigration has not run at such high levels since 1989, when 44,000 people left. Its impact was underscored when the Gaelic football association was unable to field teams last winter because there weren't enough men on the Dingle peninsula.

Liverpool, which has a long history of immigration from Ireland – up to three-quarters of its residents claim some Irish genes – is experiencing a new wave of Irish migration.

An academic and former journalist, associate professor Michael Mulqueen and his wife, Fidelma, bought their dream house in 2008, when he was lecturing at the University of Limerick. Their two children were settled in school and they had close family nearby in County Clare.

Then he was offered a job as head of the department of politics, media and communication at Liverpool Hope University. "It was a hugely difficult decision on the family front, because we didn't want to uproot the children," Mulqueen said. "There was the instability, but there was also the lure of the job."

Initially, Mulqueen commuted from Ireland each week with great support from his faculty dean, who had been a similar situation. He would leave on Sunday evening and return to his family late on Thursday. "It was an intensively busy time with very long and challenging days," he recalls. "During the week we'd have Skype conversations, but the children intimated that they were not terribly happy with that. We made the decision that we'd have to go for it and emigrate."

The family arrived in Liverpool in February 2011. His wife was still working in Limerick, so began commuting in the other direction for a couple of months. Finding a place in the right school for their children proved complex and he imagines it would be much worse with English as a second language. The family enjoyed their first Christmas in Liverpool, are making friends and say they settled quickly.

Mulqueen says there are similarities between Liverpool and Limerick. "While Liverpool's regeneration is yet to be fully realised, it has made enormous strides since I first came here as a visitor in the early 1990s. Limerick, on the other hand, is a city that's experiencing almost identical problems of social deprivation, housing and estates that are zones of despair."

Mulqueen grew up in Galway county, which had pockets of social disadvantage and in the early 1990s after university, a tranche of his peers migrated from Ireland.

Does he feel guilty about leaving? He says the Irish government has realised the huge contribution that education can make to economic growth and has invested heavily, so he believes it won't be such an issue for future generations.

Michael Noonan, the Irish finance minister, caused consternation in January when he branded migration "a lifestyle choice" and said it wasn't to do with the economic crisis. Noonan, who has three children living abroad, said: "There are always young people coming and going from Ireland and some of them are emigrants in the traditional sense. Others simply want to get off the island for a while. A lot of the people who go to Australia … it's not being driven by unemployment at home, it's driven by a desire to see another part of the world and live there." He later said he'd been quoted out of context.

Willie O'Dea, a Fianna Fáil spokesman, called on Noonan to apologise. "Of course there are many young people who, after college, travel abroad. But there is an undeniable link between the high rate of unemployment and the number of people seeking work abroad," he said.

The Generation Emigration blog is full of stories of Irish nationals moving further afield, such as Ruth Barrett O'Sullivan, a teacher, who followed husband Jer, an engineer, to Saudi Arabia, last summer after almost a year apart.

The couple, who have three children, married in the hazy days of the Celtic Tiger in 2007. They now live in a compound in Riyadh. She wrote: "The weather is fantastic, and there's lots of organised activities for the kids. We have made friends with families from all over the world. We are not necessarily looking at this as a permanent move, but we have no plans to go home any time soon. We have nothing to go home to."

Alan Barrett, of the Economic Social and Research Institute, described the return of emigration as one of the most traumatic elements of the Irish collapse. "For all the years from independence to the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s, people born in Ireland could never assume that they would work in Ireland. That changed with the Celtic Tiger, but has now reversed again.

"As was the case in previous emigration waves, the UK remains a main destination for Irish emigrants. However, the poor state of the UK labour market and the relative strength of the Australian economy means that Australia is attracting more Irish people in this wave."

He did not share the concern that this outflow would limit Ireland's chance of economic growth. "The experience of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that while people will go when times are bad, they will return when things get better."
-75 000 emigrants expected this year (1.7% of the population)
-more and more going to Australia