19% Unemployment : 250,000 Have Left Ireland, Bishops Report

At least a quarter of a million people have emigrated from unemployment-plagued Ireland in the last seven years--including 135,000 who are living illegally in the United States, a panel of Roman Catholic bishops said Wednesday. The figure is especially stark, as it accounts for 7% of the entire population of the Irish Republic--about 3.6 million.

The bishops’ panel, appointed by Ireland’s influential church hierarchy, said that the wave of emigrants, most of them young people seeking jobs, shows no signs of abating. It accused the government of not doing enough to provide economic opportunity so that they might remain at home.

“The situation has reached crisis proportions at this stage with emigration figures running at 25,000 a year,” Father John Gavin, the commission’s secretary, wrote in the Irish Independent newspaper.

“Hundreds of unskilled, unprepared youngsters pour (out of the country) . . . with no accommodation arranged, no money to tide them over and little chance of well-paid employment.”

He said that at least 250,000 have emigrated since 1980 from Ireland, a nation with a 19% jobless rate.

Gavin said statistics from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service show that almost 500,000 Irish entered the United States on visas since 1981 and that an estimated 135,000 stayed on illegally.

He has previously said that the vast majority of illegal Irish in the United States live in the New York City and Boston areas.

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Gavin charged that the Dublin government of Prime Minister Charles Haughey is not doing enough to end the emigration drain and called for a special task force “to examine the causes and come up with a policy.” He also accused the government of underplaying the number of illegals in the United States.

A spokeswoman for Haughey’s government said it has has no official estimates, “but it is reckoned that 100,000 illegal Irish are in the states.”

She pointed out that Haughey visited Washington over St. Patrick’s Day and discussed the problem of the illegal immigrants with President Reagan and congressional leaders and said that “emigration is one of his top priorities.”

“He has always said emigration is one of our greatest tragedies, and the government’s main objective is increasing employment so people will stay,” the spokeswoman said.