Important sectors of Ireland's economy are becoming highly reliant on immigrant workers. Well over 30,000 work permits have been issued for the services sector in the past three years, for example, while the catering, agriculture and fisheries and domestic labour sectors also show high numbers.
Horrifying cases of exploitation, denial of rights, and racial prejudice, have been brought to public attention. But so has a growing realisation by employers and trade unions that it is in their interests to see a more just and coherent policy on immigrant labour.
Ireland's economy has grown enormously over the last decade in part by drawing on successive streams of spare labour capacity. Unemployed men, women, and returning emigrants, provided the initial supply of workers for a rapidly growing labour market. By the late 1990s it was clear that the phenomenal rates of growth could only be sustained by substantial numbers of immigrant workers. They have come from many countries, but principally from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Philippines, Ukraine, South Africa and the Czech Republic, according to official statistics of working permits. To their number must be added thousands of Chinese and Arab students working part-time in Dublin and other cities. Then there are the thousands of asylum seekers, many from Africa, who have been attracted here in the hope of being allowed to stay and work, many of them also working, albeit illegally.
On any reckoning this adds up to a dramatic social and cultural change. Immigrant workers are for the most part taking up jobs no one else is prepared to do. They are not displacing Irish people but supplementing them as better paid and more skilled jobs become available. Employers and trade unions came together last week to say they have common interests in ensuring equality and working conditions legislation is enforced.
Evidence from the Equality Authority shows a sharp increase in complaints about equal pay, bad conditions and long hours from immigrant workers. If that is allowed persist it will affect all workers and the quality of life in Ireland - lessons that can validly be drawn from experience elsewhere. Mr David Begg, general secretary of the ICTU, warned against the development of racist attitudes similar to those in the UK in the 1960s, as that country absorbed many immigrant workers from the Commonwealth. The Small Firms Association emphasised that Ireland needs to embrace the concept of an ethnic workplace to a far greater extent if it is to take its place among the most advanced competitive economies.
This welcome initiative by employers and trade unions should be followed up by determined Government action to extend the range of rights available to immigrant workers and implement existing ones. They are making a valuable contribution to Irish society and are welcome here.