Job displacement may be inevitable as more immigrants come to this State but the Government's only concern seems to be to "keep the cheap labour coming" Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte told the Parnell Summer School in Avondale, Co Wicklow yesterday.
He said reports had been "hurriedly commissioned" to show that there was little evidence of displacement but that was not the reality.
"Ask the tourism sector. Ask the workers who used to be employed in hotels in Kerry and elsewhere," he said. "If there is no displacement, why did it preoccupy the social partners and Government for the first 14 weeks of the talks for a new social contract?"
"Some displacement in single market conditions may be unavoidable but there is no single market impediment in the way of enforcing a threshold of decency in employment terms," Mr Rabbitte said.
"We have not been enforcing or invigilating workplace standards. We have not been looking beyond the availability of an almost endless supply of well-educated cheap labour," he said.
He said the "satisfied chorus" was "sure don't we have a national minimum wage?" but this was often being treated as a maximum, rather than a minimum wage, he said. "The bigger challenges of integration and assimilation rarely surface. This would not attract Davitt's approval." This year's Parnell Summer School is focusing on the legacy of Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League.
Mr Rabbitte said Ireland had changed greatly since Davitt's time and was now a world of shopping malls and modems, wi-fi hotspots, Polish pubs and Chinese eateries. "All of this has happened so suddenly and to what was a small and unconfident society. I believe that the economic impulse has driven the Irish transformation too much. If that impulse continues to predominate we may, like other countries, suffer unfortunate consequences."
He called on people to remember our national experience as an emigrant people and the wrench of leaving home. "We should have in our collective memory the lessons from that experience and apply them in our remarkable new demographic setting. I am sure that is what Davitt would want us to do."
Meanwhile, Fine Gael's education spokeswoman Olwyn Enright highlighted Davitt's preference for State-aided secular education with separate religious education. She said most schools were still under the patronage of either Catholic or Church of Ireland bishops. It was now time to plan and make provision for the withdrawal of religious orders from involvement in schools.
"This is not about getting at the church," she said. The fall in religious vocations meant that orders such as the Christian Brothers no longer had sufficient numbers to remain involved. It may well be that Michael Davitt's wish may come to pass.
"This, however, is something which we as a State must actually plan and make provision for."
"The Department of Education should now be in discussions as to what decisions will be made in the future, rather than the haphazard planning which is the case at present," Ms Enright said.