I propose to share my time with Deputy Gerry O'Sullivan. Last night I reviewed our historical experience of emigration and the neglect of this subject in orthodox thinking. I want to make a few points and the first one extends logically from what I said last night. Bleeding heart speeches about emigration and buckets of crocodile tears are of little value if the people who support conservative economic policy insist on dividing economic policy from the social problems of unemployment or emigration. The fundamental point I am making is that you have to put emigration in the context of the population pressure that produces it and the unemployment figures that feed it.
Last night I spoke of the myth of voluntary migration; I said that most of it was involuntary. The people who spoke so eloquently last night about those they found in London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and New York will have a chance, when we are debating financial policy, to decide whether they want to put employment creation to a higher point on the economic agenda than it is at present. This is the reality, it is an old technical problem. It is rather like when the debate on the welfare state was taking place in Britain. There were different models, some people wanted to give what the market would bear to the poor but others wanted the market to work out first and to give the crumbs which were left to alleviate poverty. Of course, there was a great egalitarian tradition which said that social policy must not only compensate those who have been forced over the edge but that it must redistribute.
Our economic policy — this economic mantra about which I spoke last night — as outlined in the Minister's speech, talked about the nation's finances coming under control and so on. It is telling the emigrants and the unemployed that they must wait, yet no serious economist who studied the problem for even half an hour would agree that better export and trade figures, low inflation and lower interest rates, while providing a favourable climate, would solve the problem. The linkages are missing for positive employment creation and the positive side is that we are in the process of destruction of direct employment creation. That is why there has been a unique conservative consensus on all sides of the House that the State must not take the lead in providing jobs, that the semi-State bodies must be rolled back and that privatisation must be pushed along, often by stealth and by those who have no mandate from the people.
I listened to lectures from chief executives of companies set up in the name of the people and they spoke of their bullish tendencies to go private. They are the culprits in the exile of so many of our people. By 1 January 1993 these people and their economic policies will be responsible for the exile of at least 200,000 people. If we want to do anything about it we should have a genuine debate about changing the status of employment creation as an economic priority. Dr. Kennedy, the director of the Economic and Social Research Institute, is unique in this regard because he said that he worries about this and I pay tribute to him.
If so many of our people are forced to emigrate it is scandalous that the Minister for Education has not incorporated in the curriculum some preparation for a life often on the margins of society in London. She said recently that she wanted religious studies to be an examination subject in the curriculum despite the fact that last summer she said she intended to introduce political and social studies which might create some kind of morality of citizenship which would tell the people at second level that there was a chance they would be unemployed and to prepare for it. After all they have the second best chance in Europe of being unemployed, closely followed by the Portuguese. That should be a part of life preparation in the schools but of course it will mean puncturing the rhetoric.
The agencies should be adequately funded. There is a generation problem in relation to some of the agencies. The figures I gave last night showed that there was enormous emigration to the United States in a particular period. These people are now in some of the agencies and in voluntary organisations in the United States. Their children are American citizens and they are in competition with the new wave of Irish emigrants competing for the same jobs. I do not know how long all these visitors spend talking to emigrants but that is a reality. These agencies need to be made effective, extended to the west coast of the United States and properly and adequately funded.
As I said last night, it is terribly important to bear in mind that the figures the Department get wrong are those in relation to Britain. Having made that allegation last night, the onus is on me to give some substance to it. The official figure in 1985 for emigration to Britain was 6,000. The real figure — that projected from Professor Damien Hannon's work and others — was 25,000. In the event the figure turned out to be over 20,000. They are always wrong about the British figures because they refuse to recognise that kind of emigration. If we are serious and take into account what is happening in relation to emigration to Britain, we should be conscious of the fact that there are 400,000 people unemployed in London, where a considerable number of people are homeless or living in guesthouses. The Irish in London are calculated to be between 15 per cent and 18 per cent of those listed as homeless.
Let us cut out the crap about the new kind of emigrant who will waddle off with a bundle of degrees and so forth. Yes, it would be very valuable if they remained at home. However, a large proportion of our migrants are still those vulnerable people. One of the great changes between emigration in the eighties and in the fifties is this — that 1990 will be our year of scandal because, in that year, the largest number of Irish people will leave since the foundation of the State. The previous worst year was 1955. In 1955 those who went were from rural areas. To a large extent they went to work in the construction industry, now capitalised and much less labour-intensive. Those who are leaving now are more urban sourced than rural sourced. If one looks at those who are in hostels the longest time in London, one finds that they carry the myth with them that they can go to a building site and get work. The building industry has changed; their myth that work is available has not changed. That is why they are remaining longer than female emigrants.
In the end all this means that if we are unwilling to change the structure of our policies, we must look at the quality of the emigrant experience more sensitively and carefully and we must give them greater assistance. Perhaps we will also have to build it into the school system.
I want to end with a very simple point, which is this. After 20 years studying migration one inescapable fact is as clear to me now as when I started. If one says we are putting human lives on the marketplace and we are going to let the level of investment and human beings find their level, we will always have enforced migration. It would be very useful indeed if some brave person stood up and said: all these conservative economic policies have entirely failed us and we should go for something else. There is even a middle position that could be adopted. For example, in Austria they went for a slower rate of growth, sustained over a longer period of time which was more labour intensive. The Finnish and other economic strategies were similar. What we witnessed in the last Dáil and are now in the 26th Dáil is the pathetic parity of imported, right wing, discredited ideas from the mouths of one Minister after another all beginning with the type of futile phrases with which I began. People have learned those phrases by heart after two or three years, phrases such as: in these difficult economic times in which we find ourselves; when at last the nation's finances are being brought under control, and so on, as if there were some new confraternity of the right——
