It was reported in the Irish Examiner last week that several local businesses in Roscrea are employing people who are located in the IPAS accommodation centre at Ross Abbey close to the town. Persons who have applied for International Protection can work after six months regardless of what stage their applications are at.
The article mentions three local businesses which are employing men from the centre. Two of them, Ashebourne Meats and Rosderra Meats have already employed hundreds of people who have been granted work permits.
Statistics for 2024 from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment show that to the end of February, Ashebourne Meats had been issued with 7 permits for people from outside of the EU and the EEA area, and that Rosderra Meats had been issued with 11 new permits. No permits were issued to the other company mentioned in the Examiner’s report, Stapelton’s Bakers, this year or in any other year.
Ashebourne have been issued with a total of 36 work permits since the beginning of 2019, and Rosderra have been issued with 743 permits over the same period. In 2022, the two companies accounted for almost 75% of the total of work permits issued to companies based in County Tipperary, although both companies also employ people at other locations.
In 2023, Ashebourne Meats were issued with no permits compared to 21 in 2022, and Rosderra were issued with 97, a sharp drop in numbers from 376 in 2022.
Whilst we don’t have overall employment numbers for these companies, and it’s possible that the level of new hires has declined over that period, it is striking that the decline in work permits being issued to these companies seems to coincide with a substantial growth in the population of asylum seekers. There’s a question that must be asked then: is it easier to hire asylum seekers than it is to go through the normal procedure of having people apply for a position from their own country prior to travelling to Ireland?
Gript contacted both Ashebourne Meats and Rosderra Meats to inquire if they were in fact employing persons in Roscrea who were in IPAS accommodation, and why they were doing so given that the companies were already taking in significant numbers of persons employed under the DETE scheme for people applying from outside of the EU and EEA.
Neither company had responded prior to publication.
Gript also contacted SIPTU which represents workers in the meat processing sector. In 2019 the union opposed the extension of the work permit system as it applied to meat factories and claimed that the reason the companies were seeking to recruit workers from outside of the EU and the EEA was that pay and conditions within the sector were poor.
We asked SIPTU to comment on the report that people living in IPAS accommodation were being employed by meat processors, and whether “SIPTU still believes, as it indicated in 2019, that this is driven by the relatively low wages and poor conditions in the meat factories, and whether this has gotten worse in the meantime.”
We had received no response from SIPTU prior to our publication deadline.
There is clearly strong pressure from employers and politicians for the work permits system to be further liberalised.
Minister of State for Business, Employment and Retail. Neale Richmond, announced a major extension of the permits scheme before Christmas. That included an increase in the quotas for meat processing. He has also gone on record as favouring a reduction of the qualification period for people in International Protection to two months and hoping to allow greater easing of the family reunification scheme for people who have been issued with work permits.
Richmond curiously seems to believe that the numbers coming here, and he clearly wishes them to increase, will have no negative impact on housing supply. He also in a Dáil debate last Wednesday rejected “this notion that loads of people are coming here because we cannot find labour due to everyone emigrating.”
Everyone is not leaving, but certainly tens of thousands of young educated, and in many instances already employed younger people, are leaving. Is that a healthy situation?
Government ministers and others constantly refer to how successful the economy is, and the statistics on face value inform us that it is. Other statistics suggest that this is not necessarily leading to people or communities feeling that their overall situation is improving. We need go no further than the housing market for evidence of that.
There are also wider, perhaps existential questions. Ought the priority of those given the responsibility for administering the state be economic growth as a metric above all else? How many truly healthy societies, especially ones with relatively small populations, are prepared to accommodate unprecedented demographic and social change, much of it driven by economic factors above any other consideration?
There is also the question as to why so many young people – apart altogether from the housing and other issues influencing their individual decisions to emigrate – are clearly lacking a deep connection to this society.
The ersatz concept of what Ireland is supposed to be is somehow less attractive to many of us than we are led to believe perhaps?