An Island Nation Once Called Ireland

Following on from my post here on the government plans to demolish uninhabited housing estates left behind by the evaporation of the economic mirage that was the so-called Celtic Tiger comes this news from the Irish Times newspaper:

“Ireland has gone from having the highest net immigration levels in Europe to the highest net emigration levels in just six years.

The European Commission’s statistics office figures show 35,000 more people left Ireland than arrived last year. This amounts to a net migration of -7.6 people per 1,000, compared with -7.1 in Lithuania, -5.8 in Latvia, -5.7 in Estonia, -4.0 in Greece, -3.6 in Portugal, and -3.5 in Spain.”

Of course the latter three are countries that Ireland’s political and media elites repeatedly claim are in a far worse state than we are (so just be grateful surly Seán and Síle Citizen and suck up that pain – or else…). However perhaps it is simply that the Greeks, Portuguese and Spanish have yet to hit on the Irish policy of population “readjustment”?

Michael Taft has a deeper analyses of all this with a headline that says it all: Purging Ourselves of Our Young. Taken together with the growing mountain of data on the increasing rates of poverty, crime, illness, suicide, home repossessions, bankruptcy, redundancies and emigration these reports simply serve to illuminate the moral vacuum (and moronic thinking) that exists at the heart of political and socio-economic policies in Ireland.