Dark and cold, and Donald Trump says that he is a stable genius; this is no moment to contemplate politics almost anywhere in a head-on fashion.
Since according to the calendar we’re in a new year and meant to shake things up, let us instead take a sideways approach to the lament about emigration by SDLP leader Colum Eastwood in Friday’s Belfast Telegraph. Eastwood writes of the ‘deep regret’ he feels each Christmas as he leaves a sister and brother to the airport, on their way back to lives in Canada and London respectively.
Because he is a direct sort of guy he volunteers that they have both ‘found happiness and opportunity overseas’ but still regrets they first had to leave home. It was the Tele’s sub-editors, not the SDLP man, who headed his article with ‘brain drain taking our brightest and best.’ But it did not misrepresent him. That his siblings and many others ‘have to leave’ is for him an indictment of politics here, ‘the only place in the western world where the economy isn’t the primary issue.’ Then he dwells for a bit on what he depicts as the south’s comparative boom in growth and opportunity.
But it can surely be seen as healthy, not remotely sad, for the young in particular to try a bigger stage, find their own space. For Eastwood to see lack of opportunity as indistinguishable from political stalemate may be no more than a straight line between two points. Today’s leader of the SDLP has a mountain to climb every day to stay in the same place. He writes, with obvious genuineness, that he dislikes talking about his own family but perhaps regret helps direct his political sermon.
Yet there is more than one way of looking at emigration from tiny, interlinked Derry and the whole of the north, this cramped and crotchety corner of a small island woven tight by family ties and then for bad measure pinned into stubbornly separate tribes.
‘In a family of four,’ says Eastwood, ‘I’m the only one who continues to live in Derry.’ As he says, it is a common story.
Only one other of my own seven siblings still lives in Ireland. The six younger ones left initially at the worst of the Troubles but they stayed away for careers, relationships - and because they liked the wider world. Now three are settled in Cheshire, Yorkshire, Manchester. One lives in New York, a Londoner is trying out California, and one is in Prague after years in Moscow.
How can you not like an international community of aunts, uncles and cousins, with much cheerful contact and mutual support? Following the pattern our two left Belfast to be students in England, then the acting life in Hackney for one, an international organisation in Geneva for the other – to our delight and pride even if tinged with sadness, briefly, at airports so often since.
Now their friends from college and work are spread across the world from New Zealand to Italy. And we have gained a son-in-law from Turkey’s largest minority, the often-persecuted Alevi, ages-old and hitherto unknown to us.
For our children and siblings leaving home is different from past emigration, fathers spending much of the year labouring in England and Scotland, driven by city poverty or from farms too poor to support families. Then, as everyone over middle age knows, some dropped contact with home, went missing. Emigrating often did mean separation forever, people never seeing families again. But alongside homesickness and desperate loneliness, many also found fulfilled lives in England, Scotland, America, Canada, which home would not have given them.
Now with effort on the part of the leavers, and luck, we can have the best of it. There may still be family heartache, but the young can go off into the big world and preserve links; cheaper travel, the internet, Facetime, Skype, mobiles, texts.
Some, for all they complain about hopeless politics, bigotry, narrow minds, are horrified at the very idea that their children might ever leave the place. They think of it as unnatural; isn’t this home? Maybe to want your children to stay is selfish. Is part of being a good parent not letting go with a good grace, enjoying at second-hand the breadth of experience available in another place?
Enjoy your young family, Colum. But maybe be prepared in the years to come for more flights to find ‘happiness and opportunity’ far away from lovely Derry on the banks of the Foyle.
