Fewer jobs and fewer Irish in West Australia

THE magic has gone from West Australia as far as many of the young Irish people who flocked there for the last few years are concerned.
Unemployment figures in the state have now reached over 200,000 and Perth, the destination for thousands of young Irish only a few years ago, is now seeing a mass exodus of them with youth unemployment in parts of that city reaching an all-time high of over 16 per cent.
Those startling figures were published recently in The West Australian newspaper in a story which also stated that one in six young people, among 15 to 24-year-olds, in parts of Perth is out of work.
What a contrast that is to the early years of this decade when frequently 500 young Irish people per week would arrive in Perth for work, many of them in the mines in the north of the country, at a time when they were fleeing unemployment in Ireland.

Read the full feature in this week's edition of The Tuam Herald