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The reaction to Aontú’s proposal to provide grants and other incentives for returning Irish immigrants is interesting. Yesterday, Maria Maynes reported on the substance of their proposals here.
Their plan to bring workers home, launched as part of the Election Manifesto, is called ‘Operation Shamrock’ and pledges to entice construction workers home with a €5,000 incentive to cover immediate travel home and accommodation, along with a €10,000 tax credit.
Elsewhere in the manifesto, Aontú includes healthcare workers in the Operation Shamrock package. Readers may recall that the Irish state offered something similar during the Covid Panic when they requested people working in the health sector abroad to return for patriotic reasons with the promise of providing them with jobs and accommodation.
That, by all accounts, elicited a significant response but the state failed to follow up on it – with the consequence that the health sector has continued to be among the main users of work permits to employ people from outside of the EU and EEA.
Reaction among Gript readers was generally favourable with some commenting that Aontú have secured their vote on the basis of their setting out a coherent programme. It may not be as radical as some might wish but as one reader noted in response to the setting out of the details: “This is how you win votes.”
How not to win votes, is to not have any policies at all. Which seems to be the preferred approach of some. Or to replace policies with slogans. Not to mention devoting considerable time to attacking others on the “same side” or worse, deciding to put up candidates in areas you had none in the local elections simply because a rival on “our side” did well there and maybe even elected someone or came close.
Outside of Aontú the only formation who appear to have gone to the bother of seeking to minimise the suicidal cannibalisation of the anti-establishment vote and to present something beyond a slogan is the National Alliance.
The Aontú proposal highlights the need to have a positive solution to the migration crisis other than to claim that “Ireland is full” or to demand more deportations. Immigration is mostly driven by economic factors – including in the high level of opportunistic asylum seeking that is actually economic migration – so a solution requires an economic alternative to the factors which are driving this.
The main part of this has to be how to keep Irish people here and how to entice those who have left to come home.
As the CSO Population and Migration Estimates covering the year to April 2024 showed, 35,700 young Irish people are estimated to have left between May 2023 and April 2024. Almost 5,000 more than the number of Irish people who returned.
The population increased by 98,700 between May 2023 and April 2024. There was a natural increase – measured by the number of births over deaths – of just 19,400. Which meant that 80% of the increase in the population over the year to the end of April was made up of immigrants of non-Irish nationality. Many of the new births here are also to immigrants.
The pattern of net emigration on a large scale has been the dominant trend through most of the history of the Irish state. At one time it was associated with economic stagnation, now it coexists with economic growth on a consistent and unprecedented scale.
333,500 Irish people returned from abroad between 2010 and 2023, but this was far outweighed by the 460,100 who emigrated. That means that there was a net outward migration of Irish people of 124,600. The age profile of most of those who leave this provides the main reason for the sharp decline of the birth rate to well below replacement level.
According to the CSO itself, 185,000 more Irish people left during the 1980s than returned. There was also a net outward migration of 23,000 between 1990 and 1994. The cumulative figure for the period between 1980 and 2023 shows that there has been a net outward migration of Irish people of more than 200,000.
Between 2010 and 2023 a total of 980,000 people were estimated by the CSO to have emigrated. Of that figure 473,400 were Irish nationals. That accounted for 48.3% of the total number of people who left the state.
This has taken place during a period of unprecedented population growth and job creation. According to the Central Bank there were 37,000 new jobs created here by the ICT companies between 2020 and 2022. During that same period according to DETE those companies were issued with 20,976 permits for the employment of persons from outside of the EU/EEA.
We have previously examined statistics on work permits and employment that show both the increasing dominance of the overseas corporations and their heavy reliance on recruitment from overseas.
In 2023, there were 172,000 people employed in the Information Technology sector. According to the Central Bank there were 37,000 new ICT jobs created between 2020 and 2022. Work permits data show that since 2020 31,214 permits have been issued for persons from outside of the EU and EEA to come to work for companies manufacturing computers, electronics and optics, and in information and communications.
That would account for the vast bulk of all the new ICT jobs created assuming that those with the permits do not mostly leave after a year which seems unlikely. It is also supported by Census data on the increased numbers of people from overseas. There is no separate figure for persons coming here from other EU states who do not require a permit to work.
The Irish Central Bank estimated the number of jobs in the ICT sector in 2022 at 164,000. That accounted for 6% of total employment, 12% of income tax and 21.3% of corporation tax. It is an obvious benefit to the economy as measured by such basic metrics as GDP.
Most commentators, however, seem incapable of looking beyond the tax revenue and GDP to consider the overall benefits or otherwise not just to the economy but to the society in its entirety. Such as the fact that Google and the other large ICT corporations are significant beneficiaries of the 25% of GDP created in the Irish state that is exported as profits.
Aontú’s Operation Shamrock hints at where a serious debate needs to be had regarding the ongoing and future radical transformation of Irish society. Is that to be almost exclusively shaped by the needs of an economy and financial sector largely driven by the needs of external actors?
Or is there an alternative? One that might begin with the bringing home of Irish people from abroad to build houses for Irish people who wish to remain and to work in Ireland. Such questions perhaps need to be more central to this election campaign than they are.
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