May 31, 1998

Leaving America for Ireland, the New Promised Land

By MIKE ALLEN

ONKERS, N.Y. -- Between retrieving thrown juice cups and cleaning up crushed cookies, the moms in the mother-toddler program at the Irish Community Center here talk about home. But unlike generations of homesick Irish women before them, many of them aren't just talking. They're going.

With the Irish economy thriving and now an agreement for peace in the long-bloody North -- resoundingly ratified in a referendum last weekend -- the motherland's pull on its exiles in America seems more powerful than ever. Many young Irish adults are breaking with earlier generations of Irish immigrants who settled in the United States for good: The Irish government reports that over the last two years, 13,000 more Irish moved back to Ireland from America than went the other way.

Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

A reverse migration from the U.S. back to Ireland has affected busineesses like Dublin Construction Inc., which loses an employee a week.

That reversal breaks with previous decades of Irish immigration to the United States, one of the oldest, largest, most sustained and most culturally influential migration flows of American history -- reaching nearly a million in the 1850s after the Irish potato famine, but dwindling lately to just a few thousand a year.

For a few years now, the Irish have been celebrating the surprising return of their countrymen from England and Australia as well as America, a trend that the peace agreement seems sure to accelerate. Now the Irish in America, who once saw little choice but to come here, are confronted with a happy dilemma: choosing between this land of opportunity and a land more familiar to them that has been newly vested with promise.

To economists, Ireland is now "the Celtic tiger." Thanks largely to American and other foreign investments in high-tech manufacturing plants for computers, pharmaceuticals and other products, newly created jobs have brought unemployment in Ireland down to 9 percent from nearly 16 percent in 1993. Investors, in turn, are bullish largely because next year Ireland (unlike neighboring Britain) will adopt the European Union's unified currency, the euro. Participation in the euro imposes economic discipline on countries using it and is expected to reduce the cost of doing business within the European Union.

Jerry J. Sexton, a labor-market specialist for the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, said most of those returning from the States are in their mid-20s to mid-30s, and typically have some education or skills.

Across the Atlantic, his assessment is affirmed in interviews with Irish immigrants. James Dalton, an Irishman who owns Dublin Construction Inc. in Queens, N.Y., said he typically employs 20 of his countrymen as carpenters or laborers -- and typically one leaves for home every week. After spending the day refitting a pub in mahogany, two of his 20-year-old carpenters -- both out of Ireland just two months -- ordered a round of Guinness and confided their dream: saving enough money to start a construction business back home.

In many of the Irish bars that dot New York, similar stories are being told, some that sound much like the fantastic tales that envious dreamers in the Old World once told about America. Seamus Gillespie, a 44-year-old asbestos remover who was sharing a pint and a cigarette with a co-worker and his fiancee at another bar in Woodside, leaned in to give the news about the Irish economy. "They're not building houses," he said. "They're building mansions!"

Historians of American immigration say revolving-door migrations like this one are nothing new, despite popular myths about America as the promised land. But they note that the Irish exodus is unusual in that it seems to involve whole households (as opposed to men without families), making the departure of the Irish more noticeable.

Dr. Kerby Miller, a history professor at the University of Missouri who specializes in Irish immigration, calls the turnabout simply astonishing for a people long motivated by starvation and political and religious repression to forsake their homeland. In the past, he said, "Irish immigrants longed to return, at least sentimentally, but they realized it was impractical or impossible."

Among the factors motivating the new Irish returnees, Irish immigration counselors say, are frustrations and delays in winning American citizenship, given the United States' current anti-immigrant political climate. Lately, though, the peace agreement for the British province of Northern Ireland provides another positive for those already weighing a decision to return.

Arriving at the Irish Community Center in Yonkers to pick up his wife and young son, Andrew Convery, a taxi driver from the Bronx, said the prospects for peace are a big factor in their decision to return. A Catholic from Northern Ireland, he came here six years ago in search of the American dream, and met his future wife, Kerry, a Catholic from Dublin, when he picked her up as a fare. Now they are moving back so their 1-year-old, Ciaran, can be raised the way they were. But without the bombs. "Before, there wasn't much to go back to," Convery said.

The Irish exodus raises as yet unanswerable questions about the subtler cultural effects on two countries that have long drawn on the richness of the other. Lately in the United States, Irish culture, once shunned by the upper crust, has enjoyed a broad revival. "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of growing up poor in Limerick (interestingly enough, after his family returned from America), has been on The New York Times Best-Seller List for 89 weeks. And in recent years, "Lord of the Dance," the choreographed extravaganza created by Michael Flatley, an Irish-American, has made Irish folk-dancing almost hip.

The Irish cultural vibrancy here could be diluted by Ireland's new drawing power, says Dr. Timothy J. Meagher, the director of the Center for Irish Studies at Catholic University in Washington. "Now these people are going back," he said. "If you lose the immigrant base, it threatens the culture."

The flow of Irish from the United States can be expected to increase as the Irish government and business groups rev up the welcome wagon. Ireland's Department of Social Welfare, which earlier published "Thinking of Going to London?" and "Thinking of Going to the United States?" last year switched gears and put out "Thinking of Returning to Ireland?" -- a guide to housing, pensions and workers' rights.