BEYOND LEAVING iii

 Beyond Leaving will be at exhibition in the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar, Dublin,
from November to early March 2017. It is the biggest Irish platform to date for my work. The installation will feature some 25 new large scale photographic works, video, and artifact generated over the  period of net emigration from 2009 to 2016. Thanks to all who pledged support to the  Fund: it , campaign, although it is now finished you can see the details here click here to have a look



On the 24th of August 2016 the Central Statistics Office of Ireland ( CSO )made a very important announcement. It was this. To the year ending in April 2016 there was a return to net inward migration for Ireland for the first time since 2009.

The tone of this announcement is reflected in the global Irish Newsletter from the office of the Junior Minister with responsibility for the Diaspora in which the headline events are the Fleadh Cheoil, The Rose of Tralee, and the All Ireland Hurling and Camogie finals. Granted there is articles about the Irish Australian Support and Resource Bureau, Melbourne, Australia, and the upcoming United Nations Migration Conference, but the emphasis here is on the other and not the self.  And although the issues around Irish migration have proven to be thorny over the years, the discussion about world migration is far bigger than any conversation we could have about the current Irish experience. So this months newsletter amounts to one thing, deflection.
Although there is still the small mater  of the 76,200 people who left here in that year there was in fact the small number of 3,100 more people entering the country than those who have left.
This signals the end of a cycle.
We can now quantify the movements of this period. In fact the CSO has done this for us and I suppose having things  tied up neatly with a bow is what the we as consumers of the media and presented fact demand! I will only present one figure from the chart below and the rest can be extracted by your own gaze. The light blue of the period of net emigration adds up to half a million people.

Looking beneath the surface of the Irish experiences at this point is  an essential part of building an understanding of  of this period of net emigration. Following on from my personal project On Leaving, I have been working on a further research project with some of the recently departed and some of those who have chosen to return home. The work has been conducted as part of  IADT Dun Laoghaire practice led research project and I am grateful for the guidance and counsel of both Dr. Mark Curran and  Dr. Justin Carville as I move towards exhibition of these work.
The video clip above is a short extract of some conversations had with some of my collaborators.
 Thank you for reading this post and I would be delighted to receive your comments and of course your support  for the fundit campaign at http://fundit.ie/project/beyond-leaving