2 May, 2008

HAVING read Davie Gardner's latest column (The last one to leave ..., Shetland News, 30 April) I thought I would write to try to bring home to your readership the extent of Shetland’s population drift.

Davie uses words like “haemorrhage” and “population drift” in his article, but I would argue these words are not strong enough and Shetland is witnessing nothing short of an exodus of young people.

This year is the 10th anniversary of my school year’s departure from the Anderson High School. Enough time has passed for most of us to learn our trade or get the qualification we went away for and enough time has passed for us to get mainland experience and come home if that was our plan.

Our year never had a yearbook so I bought all the class photos from our final year. I took them out last time I was home to count how many from my year were still in Shetland. After counting and supplementing the list from memory and Friends Reunited it turned out that only 33 per cent of my school year still lived in Shetland and of the remaining minority in Shetland, most left school in fourth year.

If my year is anything to go by then two thirds of Shetland’s 18 year old population leave every year and have still not returned by the time they're almost 30.

Employment in Shetland today is highly concentrated in no more than a handful of economic activities. Those I still hear about are doing work that, for the time being, doesn't exist in Shetland.

Davie may or may not have a point regarding Mareel, but the point I want to get across in this letter is that Shetland is facing an exodus and not just a small drift of population.

The headline population figure will mask the exodus and continue to look relatively steady until the generation that could find work in the oil boom (Davie and my parent's generation) start to pass away. Then, if nothing changes, it will collapse from one census to the next.

Yours Sincerely

Keith A. Gray
Kildevældsgade 12
Copenhagen Ø
DENMARK
shetlander@btinternet.com