Irish businesses have the most difficulty in recruiting foreign-born workers to senior management and professional positions, a new study has found.

The EU-wide study, the Irish section of which will be launched today by authors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), finds that the goal of the Lisbon agenda to increase the ability of employers to plug skills gaps by recruiting from other EU member states is not being met. Some 47 per cent of Irish companies said it was difficult to recruit senior managers from abroad, compared with the EU-wide average of 22 per cent.

The findings come in spite of Ireland having one of the most open labour markets in Europe. "While Ireland opened up its borders to nationals of EU accession countries in May 2004, companies are telling us that there is still an insufficient pool of labour to meet their skills needs in certain sectors," said PwC director Ann Bolster yesterday.

Some 73 per cent of Irish firms said that foreign workers are an important source when they are looking for appropriate skills for their business.

The key obstacles to recruiting abroad, cited by three-quarters of Irish employers, included language skills, differences in tax systems and healthcare benefits and poor cross-border recognition of professional qualifications.

A further one-third of employers said potential career difficulties for spouses and the absence from family and friends had prevented foreign professionals from taking up offers of employment here.

"Ireland now lags behind many other EU countries in not having a favourable expatriate tax regime following the curtailment of the remittance basis of taxation for foreign workers in the 2006 Finance Act," Mary O'Hara, partner at PwC, said yesterday.

Some 445 employers, 30 of them with Irish operations, were surveyed for the report across 15 countries.