Even all the way from Australia, the tedium and generally hopeless mood around the election was palpable. As though Ireland as a country was engaged in some form of collective performance art when we all knew the outcome would be more of the same no matter who got in. After indulging in yet another vent at a friend here in Canberra about Ireland, they pointed out that I appear to be more personally invested in a country I don’t currently live in than the one where I do live.
The reality is that, like many emigrants, I am more invested in Ireland.
Like a family member I’m at my wits’ end with, I am profoundly interested in its welfare. I am weary of its bullshit. I am angry with it and attached to it in a way that is irrevocable, joyous and sometimes kind of hurts. I would love Ireland to be somewhere that stops feeling so often like a bit of a mess. Like a country filled with excellent people who continually elect governments that can facilitate the building of data centres, but not hospitals. People who consider government both the cause of and solution to pretty much every problem, but don’t consider the deep problems inherent to that very attitude.
Like many Irish people both at home and abroad, I would like to have a rail connection from Dublin Airport into the city. I would like my two-year-old nephew, who I wrote about recently, and who has a disability, to be a person who is valued and fairly represented in the country of his birth. I would like to come from a culture that is willing to consider the calcified clientelism within it, which goes so much deeper than politics and in which we are all participants.
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Australia offers me a more dignified life than the one I had in Ireland. It’s not unpatriotic to say so
It makes sense that emigrants often care so deeply about their country – as much as those who are privileged (or unlucky, depending on who’s making the judgment) enough to be able to live at home. It’s true that you become more Irish when you leave, in part because Irishness ceases to be a neutral quality shared with most people around you.
It becomes a central, unavoidable element of your identity.
Like any national identity, Irishness is multifaceted. I’ve been writing about being an Irish emigrant in Australia for a year now. The similarities and differences. About what it is like to be part of a wave of Irish people, like so many at previous points in history, to move here, so far from home to a country so many Irish people celebrate and admire. There is a view of Irishness, common at home, that suggests that the moment you leave, your relationship to Ireland must change. Namely, your right to despair over Ireland, or to criticise your culture and homeland disappear. It’s all suddenly supposed to become irrelevant or alien to you, from deep irritation at Simon Harris acting like a fussy baby when confronted with the hopeless, furious desperation of a disability worker, to your favourite chipper closing in your hometown.
In the eyes of some, you lose this element of your claim to home along with your vote.
“Stop being critical of home and just write about the beaches and the weather in Australia,” one deeply irritated reader wrote to me after reading a column that compared the housing situation in the Australian capital with Ireland’s own. Canberra is inland and has a freezing winter, so we’ll forgive the snafu there, but the attitude is common – “you’re not here, so you’re not really one of us”. Criticism from within is how Irish people bond. Criticism from without is bad PR. A liberty.
It’s difficult to live abroad and know that you have no say in the direction your country takes
People don’t necessarily leave Ireland in large numbers without the push factor of the conditions they live under. If our country was less broken, we might be able to make that argument. But there is widespread agreement that our housing crisis is one of – if not the – worst in Europe, the cost of living is pushing out our young people, access to medical care is astonishingly poor, there is an unacceptable shortage of school places, numbers of children living unhoused or in poverty continue to grow and the country is hobbled by lack of imagination and unwillingness on the part of consecutive ineffectual governments to address the big problems that only bloat further with each election.
We accept that Irish emigrants have much to offer the countries they move to but we don’t like to carefully interrogate why it is that they leave. Unless we can blame the British for it. Nor do we focus on what is lost to us when our young people in particular leave home to invest their education, their energy and their labour elsewhere. Their experience of other cultures, other possibilities, other ways of doing things, remain elsewhere unless we can entice them home. At present, there is little to entice Irish emigrants back.
I would love for Ireland to be somewhere that had space, employment, homes, educational opportunity and healthcare for the people who live there. I imagine many Irish emigrants and their families feel the same. Australia is not my home. It is not my country. But it is a country that offers a more dignified life than the one I come from. It is far from unpatriotic to say that this should not be the case.
It’s difficult to live abroad and know that you have no say in the direction your country takes. More so to think that if you lived at home, you would probably still feel that way, as friends and family do. In Ireland, we address the symptoms of problems and not the problems themselves.
We bash our heads against the same old wall.
It would be nice if, rather than trusting in the promises of the chump in the suit who swears (again) to build us a gate on time and on budget, we could trust one another enough to kick the wall down altogether.
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