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Immigration Minister Minister Jason Kenney appeared on The Late Late Show last October in Ireland. The appearance is credited with creating a spike in Irish visas to Canada.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney appeared on TV Show last October in Ireland. The appearance is credited with creating a spike in Irish visas to Canada.

In one of the starkest examples yet of Canada’s allure for Irish job-seekers, last week the Canadian embassy in Dublin saw its yearly quota of 6,350 “working holiday” visas snapped up in only two and a half days.
“It’s staggering; we all knew that the demand was going to be very high this year, but I don’t think anybody anticipated this,” said Cathy Murphy, executive director of the Toronto-based Irish Canadian Immigration Centre.
She called the surge in demand a sign of the “desperation of young people to get out.”
Last year, by contrast, it took Canada’s Irish embassy five months to hand out only 5,350 visas.
The visas are offered as part of International Experience Canada (IEC), a program that was originally designed to appeal to under-35 backpackers looking to make their “working holiday dream a reality!”
Last year, by contrast, it took Canada’s Irish embassy five months to hand out only 5,350 visas.
Increasingly, however, the program has been swarmed by lawyers, engineers and architects looking to secure a chance at Canadian permanent residency.
“They’re not coming for a holiday, they’re coming for work,” said Ms. Murphy.
The demand is expected to be just as high next year, even with a record 10,000 visas on offer.
Of course, the 24-month visas are not a guarantee of citizenship.
“It gives them time, if they’re skilled, to get the necessary experience to apply for residency,” said Ms. Murphy.
If they are not skilled — and not in a province with severe labour shortages — they will be sent home when their visas expire.
“Canada just seemed like such a prosperous country. … We just figured it was now or never,” said Grainne Burns, who came to Toronto under the IEC program last August.
Although she says she is not making as much money as she did working at an Irish trade magazine, “we have a far better quality of life.”
“[In Ireland] you’re surrounded by all your friends who have been hit hard, so it is quite depressing over there at the moment … you’re just surrounded by negativity a lot,” she said.
Although Ireland spent much of the 2000s in an economic juggernaut that earned it the nickname the “Celtic Tiger,” the 2008 global economic collapse plunged it into a new age of austerity, plummeting real estate prices and pushing up the unemployment rate to 14.5%.
If they are not skilled — and not in a province with severe labour shortages — they will be sent home when their visas expire.
More than 100,000 Irish have left the country in the past two years, virtually an entire generation of Irish youth decamped.
“I am one of just two of my university friends still in Ireland,” graduate Bridget Fitzsimons wrote to the Irish Times last October. “It is hard to make an argument for Dublin when nobody lives here anymore.”
At the same time, Ireland has received a constant stream of visits from Canadian companies, a construction association and even a delegation led by Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, all looking to Ireland as a source of well-educated, English-speaking workers.
Last October, the country hosted Jason Kenney — the first time a Canadian Immigration Minister visited the Emerald Isle since the 1960s.
“It’s a fun and amazing country; you can go and spend six months on a ski hill … and then go to Montreal and learn French,” Mr. Kenney said on an appearance on the Late Late Show, Ireland’s signature TV talk show.
Members of the audience, meanwhile, told the show’s host about their imminent plans to immigrate to Canada despite strong ties to home.
“We’re leaving two grannies behind … but we don’t see any future for us and our children,” said one woman in wavering voice.
In Canada, new communities of Irish have cropped up in Vancouver and Toronto, where locals may have noticed that Irish pubs are increasingly featuring authentic Irish bartenders.
“It’s not just the Irish accent,” said Mike O’Connor, vice-president of Quinn’s Steakhouse and Irish Bar in Toronto. “We don’t see a lot of people coming over that don’t have some experience in the hospitality business.”
Increasingly, Irish are also settling around resource centres in Saskatchewan, Alberta and even Newfoundland, which is only a four-hour flight from the Irish coast.
However, Ireland’s latest wave of mass immigration has spawned bitterness in some quarters.
On Tuesday the news website IrishCentral.com wrote of the snapped-up Canadian visas as evidence of Ireland’s continuing “brain drain.”
And last month, the Facebook page Irish Abandoners caused a stir across Irish media with its call shaming emigrants for leaving the country “when she needed you most.”
“Take down your Tri Colours, you are not worthy of flying them and are not welcome back so stay where you are because the Irishness is better off without you,” read an introductory post.
Quoted from National Post, “Irish job-seekers snap up yearly quota of Canadian working holiday visas in just two days”, Feb 12, 2013.


                                                                                                                                      
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