Emigration

Martin Murphy, managing director of Hewlett Packard in Ireland had an important opinion piece in the Irish Times newspaper today. It prompted me to comment with the following rant.

I agree with almost all of this opinion piece apart from the opening premise. There is a broadly-held view that emigration is a bad thing for Ireland.

In some ways it is true. Splitting up families and tearing people away from their roots is always a huge personal sacrifice. When people are forced to emigrate because of lack of options at home, it is tragic. Similarly, it is a huge waste of national funds and effort to educate our young if the result is that other economies will benefit unilaterally from Irish investment.

However this misses out on some important questions.