Having My Political Say

This week I have been on The Irish Times website again, this time with an article on emigrant voting. 

You may or may not know that Ireland, unlike most European countries, does not allow emigrants to vote by postal vote. Emigrants are kept on the electoral register for, I believe, 18 months after leaving Ireland and may vote in elections in that period if they return to the country to do so. 

With the rise in emigration, particularly among young Irish people, since the end of the boom as well as the presidential election, general elections and the same-sex marriage referendum, there has been a lot of discussion in recent years on the subject of further extending the vote to emigrants.

I, as am emigrant, obviously have some thoughts on the issue and The Irish Times was kind enough to publish them this week. 

At the time of writing this post there were 96 comments on the article. My views are, apparently, not shared by many. But I'm happy to see such a discussion going on. I've even made it to 4th place on the "Most Discussed" articles on Thursday.

My First Byline!

One of my all time biggest dreams came true today when an article I wrote about life in Germany was published in The Irish Times, one of Ireland's main national papers and the paper I have always read. OK, so it was only in the online edition, but I am still pretty proud of myself. You can find my article here. 

I've written my perspective on how it feels to be an emigrant. The article came about as a result of the huge bout of emigration from Ireland since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008. At that stage I had been out of Ireland for five years. With all the focus on those who had emigrated in the bad times, whether pre or post economic boom, it began to seem to me that anyone who emigrated during the good times was not really considered an emigrant at all. Added to that was the fact that reporting seemed to concentrate on those who emigrated to English-speaking countries. So I wrote about my experience - emigrating when Ireland was at the top of her game, jobs galore, to a country in recession, where I had a good knowledge of the language but it was still far from perfect. 

This month I am in Germany twelve years. Spoiler alert...there's a happy end.