Gavan Reilly: FG should mind the gap between big picture and little people
I didn’t get a chance to deal with it last time but as it’s a quiet week – and it’s going to remain quiet until the reshuffle, for reasons I’ve already discussed – I wanted to return to something which set a lot of tongues wagging a few weeks ago. Leo Varadkar was with me on radio when I asked him to comment on new opinion polls showing a huge number of young people (two-thirds of those aged 18-24, one-third of those aged 25-34) were considering leaving the country. “The grass sometimes looks greener,” he replied, but isn’t always: housing or the cost of living isn’t necessarily much cheaper in other comparable cities, he contended, as it would be in Dublin. Suffice to say, in the following days – including in the Dáil chamber, via our Virgin Media podcast The Group Chat – the testimonies of young emigrants were aired to contest what Varadkar had said.
I didn’t expect the Tánaiste to reply as he did, and it was frustrating not to have any facts and figures to hand to contest it on the spot. But it was fascinating that, when the real lived experiences of some were put back to him, that there was something of a climbdown. “Everyone's lived experience is different,” he acknowledged – and though people travel abroad for many different reasons, “I would not discount for a second anyone's lived experience.”
If there were any doubts about this being a short-term phenomenon or a rogue poll, yesterday’s (Monday) survey of nursing students also revealed that 65% would plan to leave – and those are people working in a sector which has plenty of jobs to be filled, but not one that pays enough to provide for a stable life.
Varadkar’s gut response to those polls is to point to the most recent CSO data on emigration, which shows just over 29,000 Irish citizens returning to the country in the year up to April, and just under 28,000 leaving. No major sign of any exodus of young Irish, in that case. And fair enough. But firstly, the data is already eight months old and life in Ireland has become significantly more expensive in the meantime. Secondly and more importantly, as Varadkar has now recognised, the macro picture doesn’t always tally with the micro experiences.
Ours is a data-driven world and of course there is a role for that – a failure to pay attention to underlying facts and figures is arguably what sent us down the swanee in 2008-2010. But focusing only on big picture data is dangerous – it masks the anomalies, it overlooks the variables, it ignores the real world experiences of those living it out on the ground.
That’s a lesson that Fine Gael ought to have learned already. After all, Varadkar’s path to Government Buildings the first time around was laid by the failure of ‘Keep the Recovery Going’ – the 2016 election slogan in which Fine Gael portrayed itself as the only vehicle capable of stewarding Ireland’s economic rebound. It failed because the vast majority of the public either blamed Fine Gael for allowing misery along the way, or because they didn’t see any evidence of the recovery in their own lives. Macro pictures were all good, but the micro is where people live. As he returns to the Taoiseach’s office it would be no harm for Varadkar to remember that.
Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist with Meath Chronicle and you can read his column first, every Tuesday in the paper!