The sharing economy - Opening doors, opportunities
Any summer school administrator struggling to find a theme for the coming season might consider the proposition that egg money did as much as anything else to help Irish emigrants colonise, in the most benign way, so much of the world.
The #MeToo generation, already struggling to understand the Ireland of just 40 years ago, may need an explanation — egg money was hard-earned by many a farmer’s wife, or single sister, who sold the eggs her hens laid.
Traditionally, though not always, that income was her own, to do with as she wished. It funded many a winter coat, sent many a child to school or across the Atlantic.
It helped at marriages or funerals; it even bought farms. It was usually a ring-fenced resource of last recourse, earned on the periphery of the family farm.
In so many ways, it was an Airbnb of its time. It extended the earning capacity of resources already to hand.
It seems cheering, then, that some of the descendants of those whose ancestors’ emigration might have been, in the long ago, funded by egg money, might be counted among the 1.2m guests travelling in Ireland via Airbnb last year.
This lovely example of the sharing economy generated €115m for local households, but the overall income was estimated at over €500m.
This is precisely the kind of self-help initiative Government should encourage, because, as the egg ladies of long ago knew only too well, from little acorns great oaks grow.
