UPDATE: Following a request from the Irish Times, we have removed the photograph originally used in this post and replaced it with a specially commissioned artist’s rendering of the same image.
“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.
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.”
I Never Thought I’d Leave Ireland For The American Dream (Alison O’Riordan, Irish Central)