I was watching Laura Perrins interview Cormac Lucey on ‘My Granny is Irish’ when all of a sudden I felt my temperature rising when it was mentioned that migrants were being hired to fill roles which Irish people seemingly don’t want to do.
It was a reminder of a slap in the face the system had delivered to me over a quarter of a century ago.
From the election of Garret Fitzgerald in 1981 until the onset of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland was beset by high levels of unemployment. As a young man from the Ballymun area, I was not unaffected.
Fortunately, I kept myself active and one day in the early 1990s, I cycled from my home to Dunshaughlin to apply for advertised farm labouring work. I was dismissed without any consideration because in the receptionist’s expressed opinion, as a Dub, despite being willing to cycle a great distance on a single speed bicycle, I was obviously unsuitable for the work involved. I was more than disappointed in this refusal to even give me a chance.
As I cycled home listening to my grey, space-ship styled, bicycle mounted radio, I heard a farmer’s rep on Radio 1 demanding more work visas for Baltic states’ farm workers because apparently The Likes of Me were unwilling to do the work!
During the recent 5km or 2km lockdown, migrant workers were flown in to work the harvest within walking distance (a long walk to be fair, but many of us regularly walked into the city centre), of Ballymun. But there was no effort to recruit the available labour in Ballymun. We were toxic to the public health, but migrants flown from across the planet were seemingly safe, where Irish unskilled labour is seen as poisonous.
A generation after my experience, the myth still prevails. My own older teenagers have, in the last few years, applied without response, for numerous positions that required minimal entry level qualifications, only to see those positions filled by immigrant labour. There is a general recognition that the Irish jobs market is slowing, and becoming especially difficult for young workers.
Platforms like reddit – and my teenagers say this is also the experience of large numbers of their peers – are awash with posts from frustrated youngsters who say the endless trudging around shops, cafés and bars with CVs don’t even elicit a response.
The idea that Irish labour is unwilling to these jobs is not, in my opinion, being truly tested.
What appears more likely to me is that the class of Irish workers available for many positions are victims of prejudice and even some form of snobbery. There’s an expectation, which may or not be justified depending on the applicant, that Irish workers may be more assertive in demanding employee rights than the available migrant labour.
A friend in social welfare has told me that such migrant labour is not paid at the levels that Irish labour must be paid, according to law. While it is often insisted that this cannot be the case, the ESRI has complained previously that a “migrant wage gap” exists, and the Workplace Relations Commission hears case after case where, for example, a migrant worked up to 115 hours a week and had to “beg his employer for occasional payments” – or are subject to what the WRC heard was a form of “economic slavery”.
Curiously, as Niamh Uí Bhriain noted in her piece on this increasing phenomenon, the employers engaging in said exploitation of migrant workers are also very often migrants – though this is not always the case. And there are plenty of Irish employers who seem willing to fill job vacancies with candidates who might be prepared to accept lower wages than an Irish person.
Short-changing by charging room and board as well as transport to and from work etc, at profit, to be deducted from wages, are the kind of things that spring to mind. If true, then cost, not unwillingness, is the reason for the exclusion of Irish youth from low-skilled positions.
An illustrative example would be to recall a certain pizza chain who charged delivery drivers for required rental of liveried Honda 50s, petrol, helmets and jackets etc, all to be deducted from earnings. You ended up with employment, but not a lot of money.
Just yesterday, we learned that the WRC had ordered the operator of a Kerry hotel, which houses refugees, “to pay €5,000 compensation for discriminating against an Irish night porter by selecting him for redundancy over Ukrainian workers”. There is some some of hierarchy at play, it seems.
I must contend that the assertion that the Irish are unwilling to do the work is spurious and convenient for open border advocates, and offensive and prejudicial against willing Irish labour.
I have lived through it personally, and now I am witnessing my own older teens having to contend with it.
As an aside, in the late 90s I worked with the homeless, and it was not unusual in those Celtic Tiger times for those I was dealing with to secure employment and eventually pull themselves up. Quite a few residents of the Iveagh Hostel had employment at that time.
I realise this information may be mostly anecdotal. However, it is my personal and very real experience. Unfortunately, after the short interlude of the Celtic Tiger, many of the younger generation are finding themselves excluded from the first rung of the employment ladder by a preference for applicants who are not from our shores.