“CAN’T wait to celebrate” declare posters at Dublin airport with a picture of revellers enjoying fireworks. The marketing of “The Gathering”, a year-long succession of festivals and feel-good events, is meant to draw the Irish diaspora back to the ancestral island. Some scornfully see this as a mere ploy to squeeze dollars from sentimental foreigners. A stronger criticism is that the Irish clans are scattering once more. Emigration, Ireland’s traditional response to its economic woes, has resumed and is even accelerating.

Ballads have long evoked the sorrow of separation. “Many young men of twenty said goodbye,” sang The Dubliners in the 1960s. By the 1980s the archetypal emigrant was not just the poor labourer but the frustrated graduate. Then the economic boom of the “Celtic Tiger” years seemed to break the curse. Young men and women could get well-paid jobs at home. Ireland attracted back some of the departed, whose skills and networks acquired abroad fuelled the boom. For the first time Ireland drew in many foreign workers, especially from eastern Europe.

That the Irish are once again on the move is taken as one more indictment of the incompetent political and business caste that wrecked the economy. Radio talk-shows tell bittersweet stories of churches installing webcams so that emigrants (and the elderly at home) can follow services. For all the anger, emigration provides an economic and social safety-valve. It has reduced Ireland’s unemployment rate and the burden on the state’s overstretched finances. And emigration may help to explain a puzzle of Irish politics: why the Irish people, for all their history of political revolt against British rule, have been less rebellious against austerity than, say, the Greeks.

Other factors are at play, not least the strong electoral mandate in 2011 for the coalition of Fine Gael and Labour led by the prime minister, Enda Kenny; a deal with trade unions to preserve public-sector pay that was controversial but avoided big strikes; and the fact that Sinn Fein, the natural party of protest, seeks respectability after its connection to Northern Ireland’s troubles. Still, many in Ireland accuse Mr Kenny of being too subservient, in particular to Germany. The former schoolteacher prefers to capitalise on his image as the good pupil of the euro-zone periphery to secure better terms for Ireland’s bail-out. The country, he says, is a “unique and special case”.

This is not to draw a parallel with the euro zone’s other unique case, Greece, but to stand as its antithesis. If the obstreperous Greeks recently got a softening of their bail-out terms (in essence a partial debt write-off) to avert the threat of “Grexit” from the euro, surely the Irish deserve help to secure their exit from the bail-out and return to markets on schedule at the end of the year. At the start of its six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, Ireland says it wants to lead the euro zone out of crisis-management to the era of recovery.

Ireland has a good claim to being a model of adjustment through austerity and structural reform. After suffering a catastrophic banking and property bust, it has met its deficit-cutting targets. It has recovered much of its export competitiveness. Multinational firms that use Ireland as a low-tax base are investing keenly once more. The Irish economy has been growing, albeit slowly, in contrast with the shrinking in the troubled periphery of the euro zone. And Ireland is regaining market confidence, this week selling €2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) worth of bonds at a lower interest rate than its bail-out loans.

Yet success is far from assured. The Irish economy is a strange hybrid: the front legs of its export sector may have recovered tigerlike strength, but the hind legs of the domestic economy are more akin to those of a sickly Mediterranean goat. Both parts are vulnerable. As a big exporter Ireland is exposed both to recession in the rest of Europe and to a global slowdown. At home the burden of its collapsed banking sector is a heavy drag on the economy (Ireland’s public debt shot up from 25% of GDP in 2007 to about 120% this year, and the budget deficit is still 8% of GDP).

There may be more banking losses if the housing market has not bottomed out, as some fear. In March Ireland must make a €3 billion repayment on expensive promissory notes (a form of IOU) issued to try to save the doomed Anglo Irish Bank, the most cavalier of its banks. By cruel coincidence, this is roughly the same amount that the government has had to cut from the 2013 budget. During his EU presidency Mr Kenny must show fellow Europeans that his government can impartially run EU ministerial business. But to his citizens he must demonstrate that he is seizing the opportunity to press Ireland’s case for relief.

From debt to equity?

There are two parts to this. First, Mr Kenny wants an extension in the maturity of the promissory notes. Secondly, he wants the European rescue fund to take over some or all of the government’s stake in two surviving Irish banks as part of the emerging banking union. The IMF is supportive, but the ECB has reservations about making concessions on the promissory notes and Germany says it never promised to take over past liabilities of other countries’ banks. Some in Europe resent Ireland’s free-market ethos, its low-tax strategy and the past recklessness of its banks. The Irish, for their part, resent the fact that they were prevented in late 2010 from imposing losses on senior bondholders of the kind now envisaged in the latest EU proposals for banking union. There is much blame to spread for what went wrong in the past; for every irresponsible borrower there was an irresponsible lender. Yet everybody in the euro zone could do with a confidence boost. If Ireland succeeds, then it is not just the country and its émigrés that will rejoice. All of Europe could celebrate too.

Economist.com/blogs/charlemagne