Irish Emigration in an Age of Austerity

This research project is a study of contemporary Irish emigration. The project adopted a complex and statistically precise sampling strategy to obtain a sample of households in Ireland, and emigrants abroad, that maximized representativeness. This is a critical difference between it and studies that have gone before, insofar as the statistics reported are built upon a solid statistical foundation and can be generalized to some degree. Furthermore, this report adopted a mixed methods approach which allowed statistics to be combined with quotations from emigrants to illustrate people’s personal experiences of emigration. The depth of data generated is such that this report is something of a preliminary one, emphasising some of the most important of the key findings. The results that follow are generated from over 900 hundred responses from households scattered across Ireland, 1,500 responses to an online emigrant survey, 500 responses to a jobs fair survey and 55 in-depth interviews with emigrants abroad.