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Let us cast our minds back for a moment to March 2021. This was pretty much the height of the Covid Panic in Ireland. The vaccination programme was ramping up and those of us who did not take the jab were pretty much social pariahs as the modern-day reincarnation of Typhoid Mary.
You couldn’t get to see a match even if you had a cert and although there was a gradual re-opening of schools – less than 0.2% (18) of the deaths were of under 24s so the closures were unnecessary in the first place – restrictions on most other things were draconian.
Masks were still mandatory, travel was restricted for ‘non-essential’ reasons to 5km, no social gatherings were permitted, construction was shut down, only essential retail businesses were open, and of course there were strict rules on international travel.
Or so we were told. Yet, as information secured under FOI will show below, things were not that straightforward.
According to the Central Statistics Office there were 61,400 arrivals by air into the state in March 2021. That was dramatically down from more than 630,000 in March 2020. There were, however, exceptions granted.
In March 2021, 1,049 new work permits were issued to people who had to travel to Ireland to work from outside of the EU/EEA. That was only slightly down on the 1,222 permits issued in March 2020 the first real month of the Panic and before the curtain had come fully down.
What is even more striking is that both figures for the two years of the Covid Panic were close to the 1,156 permits issued for the Covid-free month of March, 2019.
In fact, there were slightly more work permits issued in 2020 than there had been in 2019. What does that tell us? Well, it suggests that while you and I in many cases were not legally permitted to visit our parents or grandparents, there was virtually no hiatus in the relentless importation of workers from both other EU states (who do not require permits) and from outside of Europe.
So, while Granny was banged up outside the “exclusion zone” until further orders, 313 people flew from the other side of the world, in many cases, to work for Google; 228 risked supposed certain death to save Ernst and Young; 228 came to shore up the essential services of Facebook, which included heroically combatting ‘misinformation;’ and 551 came to ensure that your Amazon parcel beat the blockade.
I do not recall any one of the pearl-clutching Covid hysterics, who spent 18 months in our face, fretting over the danger that work migration presented as they holed up dependent on their wine and tofu deliveries from people who presumably were either preternaturally immune to a plague that kept the tofu eaters indoors, or whose lives were perhaps less important than someone else’s bottle of Prosecco.
The health sector was the main beneficiary of permits in 2021 with 5,793 issues compared to 4,615 for the techies. We were told then, and are still being gaslighted on this, that the hospitals and nursing homes (where a large proportion of the Covid-blamed deaths took place) would have collapsed had it not been for health workers from overseas.
Yet I seem to recall the ‘On Call for Ireland’ rallying cry from the State for Irish émigré health professionals to return home. That sparked wide interest but while 73,000 people had responded by August 2020, just 209 had been given positions.
An academic study found that “the pandemic intensified and reinforced, rather than radically altered, the dynamics of doctor emigration from Ireland.” Some of the health workers who returned said that they felt unwanted and that they were “put on hold” rather than being assigned to the famous “frontline.” Yet, thousands of non-Irish workers were recruited by the State and private health sector from abroad.
Meanwhile, in 2021, 642 work permits were issued to Chinese people where the Panic began in still mysterious circumstances, and 1,098 to persons from Brazil which had one of the highest rates of infection and death on the entire planet.
Make sense of that if you will. I genuinely am curious.
What brings me to this is a veritable treasure trove of information secured by a reader under the Freedom of Information Act. I shall have more to come, but in this context one that jumps out are the minutes of a meeting held on March 8, 2021.
The meeting was under the auspices of the Inter-Departmental Economic Migration Policy Unit and was attended by leading officials of the Departments of Employment, Social Protection Justice, Children, Transport, and others including the Skills and Labour Market Research Unit.
Ironically for lads and ladies discussing the liberalisation of work permits to allow greater numbers to travel here for work the meeting was held ‘via Webex.’ Can’t be too careful now.
It had been called to discuss “the ongoing impact of Covid-19 on the labour market.” The specific focus of concern was the health sector and “the difficulties the sector is
having in recruitment for a number of roles, exacerbated by Covid-19; definitive evidence of increasing competition for skilled candidates in these roles and unprecedented recruitment shortage across the EU; future recruitment plans for the sector of in the region of 16,000.”
Yet, despite the huge response from the Irish medical professional diaspora, it was not that which merited discussion but rather a “Draft proposal to consider recommending removing the healthcare assistant occupation from the IOL (Ineligible Occupations List), with remuneration set at €27,500 and requirement regarding QQI Level 5 qualification.”
And where were these Health Care Assistants whose tasks are non-medical destined for? Not for the hospitals on the ‘frontline’ where the Battle of Covid was being fought. A 2020 survey found that just 14.1% of HCAs were in public hospitals. 34.5% were providing home care and another 29% were in private nursing homes – the latter being where more than 1,500 elderly people died during the Panic.
In 2024, a Department of Employment study found that 38% of HCAs were employed in private nursing homes. Which places a rather different perspective on the motivations for loosening the criteria for the issuing of permits in 2020.
The matters of concern to the Inter Departmental committee were “issues around introducing a salary rate in a sector and the impact on pay, an attempt to strike a balance between high enough to support permit holders and positively impact the sector and not too low as to drive down wages, with intention that consequence is that it could enhance the private sector rate of pay.”
The most recent figures show that the entry level hourly wage for a private nursing home HCA has barely if at all moved from the €27,500 that was proposed six years ago.
The Committee also agreed to add Dietician to the Critical Skills Occupations List indicating that there was a shortage of dieticians. They also decided to take Social Workers, Physiotherapists, Speech and Language Therapists and Occupational Therapists off the IOL.
The key takeaway is that during a period when the indigenous economy more or less shut down, with many small businesses forced to close and hundreds of thousands made dependent on a social welfare payment, that officials of the Irish state were not only facilitating the recruitment of workers from overseas but were discussing ways to make that easier.
More on this to come.
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