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A major voice for emigrant issues
By McGreevy
No Irish politician has pursued the issue of justice for Irish emigrants more than the Labour Party chief whip Emmet Stagg.
For the last year he has been touring Britain visiting Irish centres and agencies while highlighting deficiencies in funding that are preventing these organisations from effectively carrying out their work.
He even persuaded Labour Youth to hold a Christmas vigil outside the GPO for Irish emigrants in Britain.
Stagg was expelled from the Dáil in March for effectively calling Bertie Ahern a liar.
He accused Ahern of providing “no money, no money, no money”, as he put it, for Irish emigrants. He was referring to the cuts in the Dion grant in 2003 that have thankfully now been reversed.
In deeply emotive terms he spoke of the Irish state leaving its emigrants abroad, “old, homeless, and alone, to be buried as paupers in cardboard coffins.”
He castigated the Government for not implementing in full the task force report on emigration and for providing a fraction of the £12million to Irish agencies in Britain, as recommended in that report.
Nothing less than the credibility of the whole state was at issue. “When we implement it, only then can we call ourselves a Republic.”
Stagg’s evangelical approach is a personal crusade. In an emotional address to the Dáil last January, which got scant coverage, Stagg outlined how his own family was scarred by emigration.
He was born one of 14 children on a 15 acre farm in Mayo in 1944. 10 emigrated and sent back their remittances.
“I was a beneficiary of their generosity and kindness and of their not forgetting us — the ones at home. We bought clothes, shoes, food and books and paid school fees with the money they sent home. It allowed us to break out of the black hole of poverty,” he said.
A familiar story, indeed, but one wonders where the Labour Party have been for the last 50 years?
The last time there was substantial forced emigration from Ireland, it happened on their watch. That was the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of 1982-1987. In that time more than 150,000 young Irish people left the country. It constituted the greatest failure of that unlamented Government.
The Labour Minister for Finance, Ruairi Quinn, set up the Dion grants in 1994, but, as the Irish Government never tire of telling us, it constituted a mere £530,000 when the Rainbow Coalition left office in 1997. It is now more than 10 times that amount.
In fairness to Stagg, he has admitted as much in that Dáil debate and in a letter to The Irish Times recently.
In a reply to a letter from a Fianna Fáil TD accusing him of political amnesia, Stagg wrote: “He is absolutely right…I fully accepted, and still do, my full share of responsibility for that historic neglect.”
Such refreshing candour is rare in a politician and should be accepted for what it is. Indeed, there is a general mea culpa on the part of Irish politicians on this issue. “No Member of the House can claim to have done enough for our emigrants and nobody is contending that we have,” Brian Cowen, the then Foreign Minister, said during the same debate.
The historic neglect, as Emmet Stagg alluded to, was one of the great official hypocrisies of the Irish state, along with the Irish language, the dream of self-sufficiency and the illusion of a united Ireland while the sectarian Catholic state that was created was inimical to that very idea.
An immature and insecure state could not bring itself to recognise its own failure. Thankfully, things have changed. It’s no coincidence that, at a time of unprecedented prosperity, the Irish state is finally facing up the responsibility it has to its citizens who live abroad.
It is thanks to this newspaper and to the work of people like Sally Mulready that the issue of emigrant remittances remains a powerful point of advocacy.
That campaign was started, not to enhance the Dion grant, but to secure free travel in Ireland for Irish pensioners living in Britain.
It has been ongoing since 1999 and gone through many setbacks, but it looks like the present Minister for Social Welfare and Family Affairs, Seamus Brennan, has taken the message to heart.
His department will report back in March about the feasibility of such a scheme, which must include all EU citizens over 65. Otherwise, it would be illegal under EU law.
Irish pensioners in Britain deserve as much, but, as we know, what people deserve is not always what they get.
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