Donnelly Visa

mariaalice

From watching reeling in the years.

Does anyone know anyone who got a Donnelly visa?

A family member got one but did not take it up as in the end they got a job related to their degree here and had met their further wife.

Although I don't remember it as that bad, the 80s in Ireland, the country comes across as a basket case.

Fr Tod Umptious

I know loads, most were people my own age at the time, early 20s.

Anyone who applied seemed to get one.

Many of those being people who were already illegally over in the US.

Many finished college and then took them up.

Interestingly there has not been such a visa "amnesty" since the end of Morrison in about 1994.

So there are people over illegally for almost 30 years whi have not had the same chance to regularize their status via these large volume green card lotteries, unlike the people in years before.

Donald Trump

Morrison was not a "visa amnesty". It was the correction of a US policy from the 1960's which severely hindered the ability of Irish people to legally emigrate to the US. The basic idea of what had happened is that they decided back then that "we need to give more places to more people from poor countries" and then lumped Ireland in with the rest of Europe - despite us being a basket case for much of that time.

In the 60's a lot of Irish American politicians actually actively wanted to prevent Irish people from coming to America because they didn't want to leave "the ould sod" empty and devoid of it's people.

In the 90's they calculated how many places Ireland missed out on during the intervening years and handed them all out over the space of a few years.

Many Irish illegals may have become regularised through these schemes, but that was not the official thinking or justification behind them

completedit

And then America became a basket case with stagnant wages and nobody cared about moving their long-term.

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058202720/donnelly-visa

The emigration issue always crops up in Reeling in The Years .... every decade the same problem. We seem to be constantly failing at developing sustainable industry and jobs in this country. The only difference I can see nowdays is that we have given up trying to develop any sense of self sustainability and have subcontracted our youth employment to Google, Facebook, Pfizer, etc through imaginative tax deals.

I think it's a lazy way out.... having key multinationals employing thousands to make goods for export when the world is changing to such a degree that we will need self developed protection from the external commercial forces that drive our job and energy provision. I really think we need to be more self sufficient before climate change and political instability elsewhere holds us to ransom because of our import everything policy and our fiscal reliance on a few highly mobile multinationals.

We don't seem to have learnt much from the constant Reeling in The Years repeats and we might be needing more Donnelly type visas in the future.