1980's high Irish emigration : why did 68% go to UK ?

dd972

Although it's a fact that the overwhelming majority of 80's UK Irish emigrants headed for the London area as that's where the work was, I do detect an air of Londoncentricism as well in the comments as well, the North - South divide in England is all relative, there are wealthy leafy parts of Cheshire and Yorkshire and large cities like Sheffield and Leeds also have middle class areas with good schools.

If the attendant work and money situation suited I'd rather live in Wilmslow than some no mark Zone 5 London suburb any day.

Andrew_Doran

Deleted User wrote: »

Do you know how long it takes to commute from Barnsley to Euston!

I have a fairly good idea.

I know a man who commuted from home in Newry to a bedsit in Watford for a few years. It's not that he wanted to, he had a small family to keep and the bills needed paying. When times are hard you need to go to where the work is, there's no use complaining that it's not coming to you. I was one of the Irish in London, same reason as most at the time, I needed a job and I was unemployable in Ireland.

true

Andrew_Doran wrote: »

When times are hard you need to go to where the work is, there's no use complaining that it's not coming to you.

Great point. When times are hard you also need to be a bit flexible and be willing to do other types of work if thats what it takes to put bread on the table. If you worked in a traditional industry ( shipbuilding, making clothes, mining ) and the west is flooded with cheap imports from Korea, China , Morocco, Timbuctoo, wherever....you try to compete by working harder and working smarter, but if you cannot compete, no use whinging the government will not continue to subsidise your particular industry. The farmers are subsidised as it is : not everyone can be subsidised. You have to work at something else, instead of sitting at home all day whinging. The world did not owe the miners in England a living. They were in decline anyway. When labour came to power, they done nothing to restore the miners. That shows Mrs. T was right.

Geology wins every time, the coal seams were depleted and the only coal they could produce was expensive coal, regardless of the skills & work practices of the miners, Mrs T was right to pull the plug, but she did it in the wrong way, little was done to help the miners who lost their jobs.

true

Deleted User wrote: »

Geology wins every time, the coal seams were depleted and the only coal they could produce was expensive coal, regardless of the skills & work practices of the miners, Mrs T was right to pull the plug, but she did it in the wrong way, little was done to help the miners who lost their jobs.

New industries / investment like the massive new Nissan car plant at Sunderland and the new Toyota plant at Derby helped a bit, but she could only do so much in transforming Britain. She ensured inflation was brought under control, strikes were bought under control , productivity was under contriol...look at the Britain she took over in '79, with the IMF there, the country on its knees, dead people unburied because people went on strike rather than bury them etc. All western countries wish they could create more jobs in certain regions of their countries, but unfortunately its cheaper to manufacture most items in s.e. asia these days. If you look around you house you'll see most things are made there, even if under western brand names.

LordSutch

Seaneh wrote: »

Irish people didn't flock to "Maggie's Britain" they flocked to London. A city that was almost completely insulated from the economic realities of the rest of "Maggie's Britain" thanks to The City of London being one of the biggest financial centres in the world. The Irish who moved there in the 80's either worked in the service or construction industries which supported the City of London's financial sector workers. Taking up jobs in Hotels, Bars, shops, restaurants, buildings sites and so forth.

If they had of moved to anywhere north of Milton Keynes or west of Reading, they would have encountered the reality of the rest of Britain with the high unemployment, misery and hopelessness that the vast majority of Britain was living with which only got worse the further north you went.

Even in this recession, London (like NY and Milan and other major centres) is mostly insulated from the rest of Britain's (and Europe's) problems because of the city.

I'd wager that if you checked the where those Irish who went to the UK ended up, the overwhelming majority would have been in London. I strongly doubt many of them were in Bradford or Sheffield or Manchester or Birmingham or Liverpool or any of the other major cities, those places were just as ****ed as Ireland was, more so in some of them.

Yeah, I think that's roughly what I was alluding to in Post# 31 > http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=84091734&postcount=31

jmayo

true wrote: »

New industries / investment like the massive new Nissan car plant at Sunderland and the new Toyota plant at Derby helped a bit, but she could only do so much in transforming Britain. She ensured inflation was brought under control, strikes were bought under control , productivity was under contriol...look at the Britain she took over in '79, with the IMF there, the country on its knees, dead people unburied because people went on strike rather than bury them etc. All western countries wish they could create more jobs in certain regions of their countries, but unfortunately its cheaper to manufacture most items in s.e. asia these days. If you look around you house you'll see most things are made there, even if under western brand names.

Then how come the likes of Belgium, France and most importantly Germany were able to hang on to their manufacturing.
Not alone did Germany keep it's plants, it's companies stayed in German ownership and thrived.
In comparison to 40 odd years ago how many major multinational manufacturing companies are now British owned ?

Britain was getting rid of it's manufacturing in the 80s, not in the late 90s, 2000s when China had arrived, not even post the wall of the Berlin wall when companies were setting up in Eastern Europe.

And a fair amount of people believe you can't just have this financial/service based economy, you need a balance of industry.

mike65

jmayo wrote: »

Then how come the likes of Belgium, France and most importantly Germany were able to hang on to their manufacturing.
Not alone did Germany keep it's plants, it's companies stayed in German ownership and thrived.
In comparison to 40 odd years ago how many major multinational manufacturing companies are now British owned ?

Britain was getting rid of it's manufacturing in the 80s, not in the late 90s, 2000s when China had arrived, not even post the wall of the Berlin wall when companies were setting up in Eastern Europe.

And a fair amount of people believe you can't just have this financial/service based economy, you need a balance of industry.

Manufacturing % of GDP 42% in 1979, 28% in 2010