Transcript

ALBERICI: The stunning landscapes of County Mayo in Ireland’s wild west. It’s hard to believe the grass could be greener anywhere else. 

ALAN NILAND: “I was working for a while and I thought things might pick up and I thought I’d sail along and see what happens, but it wasn’t really working out so I came to the conclusion then that I’d go. There was nothing else really here for me so I just thought I’d go abroad”.

ALBERICI: In a few days time, Alan Niland will leave the bitter cold of Mayo and head for what remains of summer in Melbourne and a brand new life. 
And that means leaving friends and family behind.

RITA NILAND: (Alan’s mother) “I knew there was something bothering him for a few days...... so I dragged it out of him”.

ALBERICI: “He was too worried to tell you?”

RITA NILAND: “Yeah so he said he was going to Australia (crying) and I just gave him a big hug and said that we’d support him in any way we could”.

ALBERICI: In the six years since he left school, Alan Niland has earned good money as an electrician but he’s now among the one in three Irish men under 25 who can’t find work. It’s futile looking for work here. To kill the boredom he heads out into the countryside with his younger brother, Aden. 
The keen sports shooter will be the first in his family to leave home, and the country, in search of work overseas.

(to Alan’s mother) “Did you try and convince him not to go?”

RITA NILAND: “No. No. It’s very hard to see young people.... not getting up in the morning..... lying in bed until 12 o’clock so it was the right decision for him. It’ll be a good experience ....... It’ll be hard to see him go, but it’s the right thing to do”.

ALAN NILAND: “I’d imagine it to be an awful lot harder if I didn’t know anyone over there, you know? If you’re going, just going out there and didn’t know anyone. I don’t think I’d do it then”.

ALBERICI: He’s never been to Melbourne but it won’t be entirely foreign to him. Many of the players from his local sports club have already made the trip. Gaelic football may be played with a round ball, but it’s the closest game in the world to Aussie Rules and his expat friends have found their skills are in high demand by AFL teams.

The Aghamore Club in Mayo, just like any other in Ireland is as much about the sport as it is a social centre where lifelong friendships are made and held. Alan and his mate Donal Bryne have known each other since they were in little league. But soon it will be time to say goodbye.

DONAL BRYNE: “It’s you know terrible times. I’ve been to the train station in Ballyhaunis and I’ve seen all these lads leave and come back and think oh, they’ll be back in two years - but things get worse and more are going. Of course Alan’s going on the 22nd so I’ll have another trip to the train station. There’ll be no one left soon”.

ALBERICI: Two years ago the Aghamore Footballers were the County’s reigning champions – now they can barely field a team. 

DONAL BYRNE: (pointing to pictures) Stephen Leneghan was in Melbourne. He’s in Melbourne. Stephen Brady’s in England. Shane Morley was in Melbourne. David Kilkenny is still here..... Gordon Cribbin..... Paul Hunt, his brother James who’s under subs is in Melbourne. Colm Garvey was in Melbourne and Sydney. He’s only home. Stephen Coyne is still there. So if you take any ace out of a fifteen squad team you can see the difference (shows picture of boys in Australia shirts off, Santa hats on celebrating Christmas). It’s a massive, massive loss. There’s no work here. There’s nothing round, we’ve nothing to look forward to. I’m nearly the last man standing and that’s the way it is”.

ALBERICI: Irish musicians have been writing about the pain of emigration for as long as anyone can remember and it’s these upbeat but bittersweet songs that are the soundtrack for a struggling community preparing to farewell another one of its sons.

ALAN NILAND: Leaving here, it’s still a big thing too and all like, you know. Everyone doesn’t want to go like, you know. It’s you know, last resort really. 

RITA NILAND: All our young people are going. It’s not only the immigrants that have come over to the country. Some of them are gone home... some of them aren’t. It’s all our young people. All our own are going. 

ALBERICI: At 43 Sean Sherry’s a lot older but the problem’s the same. He’s been unemployed for more than a year. 
At an age when he thought he’d be well established, he’s had to move back in with his mum on the outskirts of Dublin. 
It’s the first time he’s been out of work since he qualified as a chef 25 years ago. Now the only cooking he’s doing is for the family and for his long-term girlfriend Ann and her ten year old daughter, Natasha.

Sean Sherry has been offered a job on a cruise ship based in Australia and he just can’t afford to turn it down.

ANN O’CONNOR: “I don’t think he likes to admit that it’s hard. He puts on a brave face in front of everybody, saying yeah, it’s great, it’s brilliant but lying with him at night, it’s not. The reality hits home with his mum, his family, his friends and everybody”.

ALBERICI: Sean is one of four sons, he’ll be the third to leave the country to find work. 
The Irish have a history of fleeing the country when times are tough. It dates back to the 1840s when the potato famine drove one million people away. There was another wave of emigration in the 80’s, a hunger for work saw 400,000 people leave. They say the numbers this time are worse than that.

A group of foreign visa experts are dispensing advice to people sick of life in Ireland. In the past 12 months, Australian visa requests from Dublin have jumped 60 per cent.

DECLAN CLUNE: “We used to get quite a number of people inquiring about heading out to Australia and other countries on the type of a working holiday visa, but now what we’re seeing is quite a dramatic change from that type of a profile to a more family orientated migration”.

ALBERICI: Not so long ago these monthly information nights might have drawn a couple of hundred. Tonight more than three times that number have shown up.

VISA EXPERT: (addressing crowd) “Unfortunately for the likes of Queensland that got devastated with the floods, they’re going to need 28,000 houses over the next year. We have all the guys here – carpenters, plumbers, block layers – the whole lot that can go out and take these jobs”.

ALBERICI: In this jam-packed room just outside Dublin, Australia really does sound like a lucky country where jobs and opportunities abound.

IRISH WOMAN: “We’ve been interested in going to Australia for the last couple of years because the way the country’s been going. We just want to get out and give the kids a better life”.

IRISH MAN #1: “I’ve been working for the last 25 years and it’s the first time in my life I’m unemployed and to be honest, I don’t see any prospect of employment in the near future”.

ALBERICI: “Do you have a family?”

IRISH MAN #1: “I have two young children, yes – one just three weeks old”.

IRISH MAN #2: “We’ve never been out of work since we left school. Even in the 80s I was never out of work. I had 3 part time jobs, but I was always working and now to not have, to not be able to get an actual part time job – that’s just not.....

ALBERICI: Until three years ago, the Emerald Isle was turning the rest of the world green with envy. Its company tax rates were among the lowest in the world, attracting the likes of Google and other big name foreign firms. This country saw its economy grow at close to 6% a year. There was an abundance of jobs and cranes dominated the skyline.

But in a flash, it was over. Ireland was forced to go cap in hand to the international community for a one hundred billion dollar bail out – all down to its obsession with real estate. 
For most of the past decade, Ireland has been in the grip of a housing boom. Not buying and selling, but building. Construction got so big it employed one in four workers. Estates like this one began springing up everywhere – not only in the cities but in places like this where houses soon outnumbered families. Now the boom’s over, there are three hundred thousand houses empty.

At this development in the capital, the advertising boards promised a luxury lifestyle. Homes that were for sale in 2006 for half a million Euros, five years later can’t attract buyers at even half that price. They’ve been dubbed ghost estates. They’re a haunting reminder of how Irish banks binged and how the government lost all sense of proportion.

DAVID MCWILLIAMS: “We were borrowing loads and loads of other people’s money and putting it into houses and that gave me, as an economist, a big alarm saying wow, this thing is going to end badly”.

ALBERICI: Ten years ago, former Central Bank Economist David McWilliams was the first in Ireland to warn that the Celtic Tiger was about to experience a slow and painful death.

DAVID MCWILLIAMS: “I just said the housing market is going to not only weaken, but it’s going to collapse and when it collapses, the banks will collapse and more to the point when all this happens, a generation will be stuck with huge mortgages in negative equity and that generation is the generation that is now emigrating”. 

ALBERICI: Sean Sherry can only show us his apartment from the outside. It’s rented. He was forced to move out more than a year ago after he lost his job and couldn’t afford the 1000 Euros a month in mortgage repayments.

SEAN SHERRY: “I paid 320 for mine so you know when I was renting mine out recently, again I was told that if I wanted to sell it I’d be lucky to get 190. So I’ve lost quite a lot of money”.

ALBERICI: And with that loss came overwhelming anxiety.

SEAN SHERRY: “I was driving home one day and I just had a panic attack. I just.... what will I do? It was on the motorway and I had to pull in and I was just ... just panicking, what will I do? My God, I can’t get a job”.

ANN O’CONNOR: “He realised there and then that this is what it is – I’m unemployed, I have an apartment I can’t afford, I have car insurance which I can’t afford anymore, tax for the car, everything hit him and the outlook was grim”.

DAVID MCWILLIAMS: “We’ve never had a boom before, so in a way our boom was much more amplified because it was totally new and unfortunately our bust is much more degenerate”.

ALBERICI: “What was particularly unique about the Irish experience?”

DAVID MCWILLIAMS: “We went from being a country with a banking system to a banking system with a country stuck onto it because the banking system became three times bigger than the gross national product of the country which is kind of phenomenal”.

(SHERRY PLAYING GAME OF MONOPOLY)

ALBERICI: Even the trusty old game of Monopoly got caught up in Ireland’s housing hoopla. Paper money’s been replaced by a credit card machine so players can access millions of Euros for prime real estate. 
It’s as if Ireland’s bankers and politicians were playing from the same rulebook – fantasy property plays and funny money for everyone.

SEAN SHERRY: “These are the things what the bankers won’t talk about. They were literally throwing away money. I was getting cheques, you know if you want to refinance your car or buy a new car, here’s a cheque for twenty thousand. You’ve already been approved. I got four or five of those cheques”. 

ALBERICI: It was on for young and old. 

ALAN NILAND: “It was just too easy to get money. 

ALBERICI: “So is part of the reason you’re going, to try to pay those back?”

ALAN NILAND: Try and pay them off, yeah. I want to get rid of them all so if you tell the banks that you’ve no money, you’ve no work they don’t really care less. They just want their money every week or every month or whatever it is”.

RITA NILAND: “You know the man in the street could see something wasn’t right. But no, the banks dished out the money and developers built these houses. It’s awful sad. They’ve destroyed.... the whole fabric of rural society and urban society. The whole fabric is just totally different”.

DAVID MCWILLIAMS: “What you had was a golfocracy here. Not a democracy, a golfocracy. The people who played golf around the country and they all seemed to hang out together on golf courses. The banks, the developers and the government in cahoots took over the country. And what.... by that I mean the government allowed the developers to do anything. It allowed the banks to do anything because they were getting 28% of the cost of the price of every new house in taxation, which allowed them to look brilliant”.

ALBERICI: Bankrupt, bollixed and bewildered – it sums up the sentiment towards Irish politics as the country heads to an election. Those who leave lose their right to vote, but the exodus has become the defining issue in this campaign.

LABOUR LEADER: (in Parliament) “So many people are facing the pain of unemployment, the pain of emigration”.

SINN FEIN LEADER: “Well where are those jobs now? Clearly for so many of our young people, they’re in Australia and elsewhere across the globe”.

ALBERICI: Fianna Fail has been ruling Ireland for thirteen years. A centre left party that became a beacon for the so-called Irich in the boom, but in the bust it’s been piling debt on debt. Last year it spent 25 billion dollars more than it collected in taxes. With unemployment now at 14%, it’s little wonder people are heading for the exits.

(IN PRESS CONFERENCE WITH FINANCE MINISTER, BRIAN LENIHAN)
“Emma Alberici from ABC Australia. It would appear that one of your biggest exports right now is skilled labour. As we move around the country can we see the profile seems to have changed. It’s husbands, it’s wives... children being wrenched away from families where they would perhaps prefer to stay”.

BRIAN LENIHAN: (Finance Minister) “Not all of them are being wrenched from their families. Many of their families are continuing to reside here in Ireland while they work abroad because they’re of an older age if you like. But it is of course regrettable. We had an unsustainable building boom, a construction boom in this country from 2003 to 2008. My party leader has taken full responsibility for this, so have I”.

ALBERICI: Voters will soon decide the cost of that responsibility but it’s people like Sean Sherry who are paying the highest price, leaving behind the life he’s loved and those who’ve become a part of it.

SEAN SHERRY: ‘I’ve met someone. I like her very much. I see a future with Ann. You know what future do we have now when I go away like. She’s got a young child. She wants to keep her daughter here. 

ALBERICI: Ann O’Connor, Sean’s girlfriend of three years and her daughter, Natasha, are staying put. Ann won’t be making the move to Australia even though she was made redundant just last week. 

“Why don’t you go to Australia with him?”

ANN O’CONNOR: “I don’t think I can take Natasha from her nanny. I mean my mum has been great to me and everything and the case is that my mum is like 74 this year. I would go, if I wasn’t a single parent I would be gone in the morning without a care”.

SEAN SHERRY: “It’s very hard. It’s very hard listening to someone you know that really cares for you and wants the best for you but at the same time they know they have to let you go. I’m you know 43 now and you know you just, you don’t get that much opportunity to meet people again and like – that’s the thing”.

COLM O’REGAN: (Comedy Club) “I bought a house at the height of the boom and now it’s worth nothing”.

ALBERICI: The Irish have made laughing at themselves a national sport, even in a crisis.

COLM O’REGAN: (Comedy Club) Wonderful so now I’m in negative equity. For those of you who don’t know what that is, negative equity means that what you owe the bank is far more than what the house is worth and if you don’t know what that feels like, I would say that buying a house at the height of the boom and then going into negative equity, it’s a bit like marrying somebody who’s then very quickly lets themselves go. In that you were never going to leave anyway but for some reason now you feel more trapped”.

ALBERICI: If he had any choice Sean would be staying and building a life with Ann, but he’s in negative equity too, and sees no option but to head for opportunity on the other side of the world.

SEAN SHERRY: “I’m just hoping down the road, maybe in a year, maybe two years there’ll be an opportunity to come back to Ireland or something or I’m just kind of hoping that Ann will come to Australia”.

(Alan Niland packing and saying goodbye to his mum)

ALAN NILAND: I’ve got the Mayo hoody here.... so they’ll know where I’m from.

RITA NILAND: (LOOKING AT BAG OF CLOTHES) Now Alan, this doesn’t seem right... you’re going to Australia, you’re not going away to Galway for the weekend. You know? You’re going to need more than one.... you’re going to need more than one bag.

ALBERICI: Alan Niland is packing for Melbourne. He’s already found a job there working for an Irish electrician. 

RITA NILAND: “It takes an awful lot of courage for somebody to uproot themselves, not to mention a family. There’s an awful lot of young families going. That takes a huge amount of courage. They wouldn’t be going unless they had to, it’s as simple as that. 

ALBERICI: Once Alan Niland leaves, Rita doesn’t know when she’ll see her son again.

ALAN NILAND: (to mother) Are you okay?
(tearful goodbye – Rita sobbing)