Oh dear 
No Roughing It For Rory As He Buys €1.5 Million Car (Niamh Horan, Sunday Independent)
[b]I never thought I’d leave Ireland for the American dream
Emigration has become a sad reality this St. Pat’s Day[/b]
By ALISON O’RIORDAN
As of today I am officially a statistic.
I read on a daily basis about 1,000 people a week leaving the Emerald Isle in search of greener pastures for a greener future, but to be personally thrown into this mess is completely overwhelming.
How has it come to this?
I want out.
I am now one of the 1,000 this week.
Lately I had become nauseous at the failure of the Irish government to keep its people employed and prevent them from jumping willy nilly on great big planes to foreign lands.
With further cuts required under the IMF-EU bailout terms, I am at a loss for words. I feel suffocated, and the only means of resuscitation is coming from the Land of the Free.
I never thought I would choose to leave my beloved country because of economic factors. Nor return to education at the age of 30 in a foreign land. Nor look to better myself in the hands of an education system other than the Irish one.
Yet this is becoming the established practice. Emigration, so long the bitter wrath undergone by our ancestors, has come back to bite the younger generation with a vengeance, and we have no option but to all fall into line.
It was late at night when I got the email heralding a new life in America.
I applied on a whim last year, thinking it could be an option if things became bleak and dried up dramatically in Ireland, never really expecting them to for me.
However, I was shaking in anticipation as I clicked into the email from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, as I now really needed to get a place in this prestigious university.
One night two and a half years ago a small group of Irish politicians gathered in Government Buildings to make the biggest financial decision in Irish history which not only crippled our country, but derailed and damaged the lives of so many of its citizens.
What happened behind those closed doors in the last days of September 2008 is one of the reasons I know Ireland can no longer offer me anything of interest in the short term. I have become restless with it all.
I have given up on the country I love so dear, in search of a new beginning, a fresh start, a different outlook on life.
Why wait in Ireland and pick up this exorbitant tab when I could be bettering myself elsewhere and increasing my chances of job prospects in the long run?
The chilling blow of departure is only softened by the fact that many of my friends are now casually dotted across the sphere, and that I will actually have good friends on arrival in New York.
What has for generations been the land of promise is where I hope I will get my next break, like generations of Irish before me.
When I saw my application for Columbia University accepted, it was not overall joy but mixed feelings that I experienced.
Who would pay my mortgage on my Irish home when I was overseas?
What about the loved ones I leave behind?
Am I doing the right thing returning to study after all these years?
But when those people most important to me urged me to look at this as an opportunity with Ireland still being in a state of limbo as the rest of the world is on the road to recovery, I knew I must take the risk.
Jesus, that’s the first I’ve read about Alison being lumbered with a mortgage. All the very best of luck to her.
I don’t believe this magnificent statement has ever been posted in this thread. If there’s a single passage that sums up the great crook of drumcondra, then this is it:
THE TAOISEACH told Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning, it was time to abolish the law instating Tribunals of Inquiry: “I think the time has come to scrap them (tribunals) and the 1921 Act. It is an Act from the British time, it is an Act from a time when there was no fairness or justice for the small people. So it is my belief that the 1921 Act should be scrapped.”
[size=“4”]Mr. Ahern noted: “The reality of the situation is that 100 years ago it was Parnell, 10 years ago it was Clinton, today it’s me and tomorrow it will be somebody else.”[/size]
The rat comparing himself to statesmen. Comedy gold.
10 years ago it was Lowry, 5 years ago it was Lawlor, today it’s me, tomorrow it’ll be someone else would have been more apt.
At least Alison is going to study journalism now. Presumably Mommy and Daddy will cover the mortgage for her
Is Haughey really the fault line in Irish politics? Diarmaid Ferriter makes no bones about it in his book that the generation preceding that bunch were, whatever their policies, completely committed to the country above all else. Ray Burke is another one from which the cancer appears to have spread.
bertie maybe slightly corrupt(which politicans arent)but he brought peace & prosperity to this land & blair & clinton praise him highly for his role in the peace process. would Ireland be in the shit if he was still in power? probably not- he wouldnt have given the bank bailout ,of that im sure
John Drennan is six months ahead of you
Are you kidding me? Lynch bought elections and pretty much broke the country as a result. DeValera lined his pockets with State funds from the Irish Press etc etc
Jack Lynch fought back the crooks as long as he could.
Alison comparing jetting off to Colombia University with the unfortunate coffin ship masses and poverty stricken young people of the 80s is frankly disgusting.
I had a look on the site there, I assume she’s doing the MA in Journalism or similar. Total cost: $46,167.
Delighted for her if she can afford it (on top of the surely €3000+ monthly mortgage payment) but dressing it up as if she’s been forced to emigrate to make ends meet is shameful. She’s doing something most people can only dream off, spending a year in New York in an Ivy League college and won’t even be working as I assume she’ll be on a student visa. She is NOTHING like every other migrant leaving this county. 
There’d be none of this shit if the Irish Press was still around.
I’d say you’d have to go way, way back to find the fault line. The McGraths paid Sean Lemass’s gambling debts before every election when the bookies threatened to go public. Charlie just brought it all to an industrial level.
I suppose. Perhaps Haughey never had the old school smarts to carry it off with an air of dignity. I often hear though from people who would have been in the civil service through that era that Ray Burke’s antics in the mid-seventies changed the game considerably.
Either way it’s interesting that so many older people would regard Lynch as the last ‘real’ taoiseach we had. I suppose it’s partially because he was the last one to consistently wear a hat.
sinn fein would easily double their representation in the dail if the ra offed bentie, clowen and lowry. come to think of it, given all thats gone before, it’s a crying shame that no irish politician has been whacked since kevin o’higgins, but then again, the likes of tase would probably take the bullet for bertie
If you have This Great Little Nation to hand, could I refer you to p275. A telling juxtaposition on how statesmen and patriots felt about big business back then and how scum like Lowry and Lawlor etc treated their office.
I don’t. In ‘The Boss’ it’s made pretty clear that Lynch regarded Haughey and his ilk as totally unsuited to high office in the country. Whatever about Lynch’s own views, he distrusted Haughey for what have turned out to be all the right reasons ever since.
I bought it for four quid in Charlie Byrne’s at Christmas. Great little book.
never heard this before can you expand?