Spaces And Exchanges : Irlande

Spaces and exchanges

I am going to talk about the notion of Spaces and exchanges

First of all I would like to give a definition of both this keywords:

-a space is an interval of distance or time between two points, objects or events

-an exchange is reciprocal giving and receiving

Then I would like to present this notion through the impact of Ireland’s economy on migration.

I will present this notion chronologically with documents studied in class.

First, thanks to the triptych entitled “Emmigrant Journey” painted in the 1960s by the Isrish artist Bernard Canavan we can explain Ireland’s past as it remain until the 1990s.

In the first panel people who are visibly poor are about to leave their village, in the second the same men and women are walking along a muddy road in the middle the Irish countryside, carrying their suitcases and in the last panel they have just arrived with a crowd of people in a big city maybe London. These people must be emigrants who have come to there to find a job. The evolution of coloring may convey an idea of sadness and hard times in Ireland whereas in the second and third panel the green and yellow suggests a glimmer of hope and a brighter future.

The text “Britain’s Irish Workers” written by Donall Mac Amhlaigh completes this image. He explains that owing to the Great Depression of the 1930s morale was low and unemployment and hopelessness so great so that people thought a future was impossible in Ireland. Consequently many Irish immigrated to big city like London so as to find a job and escape poverty.

But, towards the end of the 1990s Ireland’s economy was growing rapidly, according to the headlines we understand that thanks to Ireland’s young, educated, English-speaking workforce combined with corporate tax-breaks which attracted foreign investment its economy began to boom.

The Celtic Tiger was born in 1995.

As a result, Irish immigrants who had left because of the crisis gradually began to come back to Ireland when they heard about the economic boom of the nineties. They were happy to come back in their native country. According to a text published in the New York Times in 2001 by Gordon Sander: Ireland had become a melting pot. People had a high purchasing power and a lot of foreigners decided to settle in Ireland. Gordon Sander said Dublin was living on a constant party mode, to quote his words “people are on a high”

Ireland has become a cultural space, an important country in a globalized world, It has become a hut for global exchange.

But Ireland has also became an economic space. By giving advantages to foreign companies which pay low taxes, like Apple, Ireland is more and more integrated with globalization. We can say that boom allowed the Irish to come back home.

But, as it is shown by the two graphs, Ireland wasn’t prepare enough to welcome all those migrants and the crisis came back anew: it was the end of the Celtic Tiger and the Irish are leaving Ireland once again. Indeed there is a correlation between the rate of unemployment and the fall

...