Madam, - Your Editorial headed "Looking out for the jobless" (August 11th) came just days after the revelation that 23,000 people from new EU member-states have sought employment here since EU enlargement.
Although that number of arrivals within three months is surely a matter of some significance, your Editorial ignores it. I can think of no reason other than ideological discomfort why your newspaper would not wish to comment on these numbers and what they may portend.
When the issue of EU immigration arose during the debate on the second Nice referendum in 2002, The Irish Times joined politicans such as Dick Roche and Prionsias de Rossa in rubbishing the very notion that a significant number of new EU citizens would wish to come here.
At that time some perfectly reasonable and logical predictions were dismissed in an Irish Times Editorial as "xenophobic propaganda" (August 22nd, 2002). The number peddled by Messrs Roche and de Rossa was for 2,000 Eastern European immigrants a year and your newspaper was happy to go along with this.
The latest figures suggest that estimate could be wide of the mark by a factor of 50! Nobody will deny that our economy is now benefiting from the contributions of Estonian electricians and Polish plumbers.
However, there is a limit to the number of immigrant workers which can be absorbed without creating real difficulties for Irish people whose rights within our own labour market are now no different to the rights of citizens of 24 other countries.
Nearly all pre-2004 EU states invoked a provision that allowed them to protect their domestic labour markets for up to seven years. Our own Government's failure to do likewise was an error of judgment. Just how big an error remains to be seen. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR O'BRIEN, Mount Anville Park, Dublin 14.