From a Globe and Mail article on some of the human consequences of the Irish economic disaster:
After almost 20 years as Europe’s strongest economy, during which hundreds of thousands of Polish, British and North American immigrants flocked to Dublin for work, the Irish are once again a nation of emigrants. Moving abroad, a response to the economic calamities of the past 170 years, has once again become the way out of an impossible situation at home, and is creating a new Irish diaspora.
Statistics show that the shift from an immigrant-receiving population to a largely outgoing one began just as Ireland suffered the continent’s most precipitous economic collapse – a freefall that began with the collapse of a real-estate bubble, which in turn set off bank collapses and government-debt emergencies. The result has been double-digit unemployment.
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