On Friday morning, RTÉ’s website carried two stories which each in their own way paints a stark picture of where the Irish state, and Irish society, is at. The first is a report on a case before the Workplace Relations Committee (WRC) and the second is what I think might be best described as a gaslighting report on a gaslighting study published by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
You can hardly have missed the intent of that ESRI report as it has been retailed across the mainstream. The RTÉ story begins with the proclamation that “New research from the ESRI has found that foreign-born residents are more likely to be employed, active in the labour market, and better educated compared to the Irish-born population.”
The ESRI report is their Monitoring Report on Integration 2024 which, like the Harry Potter books, is just the latest in a long series of such ideologically driven reports – shortly we might hope to be turned into a Netflix epic starring Toby Jones as an African Gaeilgeoir with a degree in physics who is forced to work cleaning chimneys and is thus unable to spend sufficient time in his €3000 a month Dickensian hovel surrounded by ungrateful natives screaming racist abuse through his letterbox as he attempts to master the uilleann pipes.
Despite being smarter and busier than the indigenous population, the migrants are poorer, have to pay higher rents and are under-represented in business ownership and politics, the ESRI would have you believe. You would wonder why the soon to be 25% of the population born overseas bother their backsides coming here at all. Oh yes, they are here to pay our old age pensions, save the Irish language and Sean Nós singing, and in other ways advance the cause of old mother Éire better than the recalcitrant natives have managed.
Can you seriously imagine any other self-respecting nation state trumpeting this sort of stuff? Has any other western state relentlessly told – or at the very least implied to – its own people that they are stupid, lazy, racist and over-advantaged in comparison to people who have absolutely no connection to the country other than being employed here? Or claimed that people not a wet week in the country are – in summary of the general tone – “The Best of Us”?
The other story from the WRC tells you much more about what is going on, and why the demographics of the Irish state are 90% driven by the human resources demands of international corporations, and those of particular sections of the domestic economy, many of them linked to if not derivative of Foreign Direct Investment.
FDI is the Golden Calf of the Irish ruling class and all those dependent upon it – as we all are, apparently, if you are familiar with the constant prayer to the corporation revenue haul. Of course, what they do not tell you is that a quarter of the wealth produced in the state (a meaningless concept really but we shall park that for the time being) as measured by Gross Domestic Product is taken out of the economy in transferred company profits.
The other tale to which I refer is from the Workplace Relations Committee. It concerns a Latvian national of Russian ethnicity who claims that she was unfairly made redundant by Tik Tok last year. That company which was founded in China – although the Chinese state does not allow it to operate its social media site there – employs over 38,000 people around the world.
Almost a tenth are apparently based in Ireland. where the company is said to employ “around 3,000.” That was the figure most often cited last year when the company was considering redundancies – which is what landed them and Ms. Viktorija Danilova into the WRC.
Tik Tok had employed 2,000 people at the start of 2022 when it announced that it was going to create another 1,000 jobs here – which it would seem to have done if we compare their workforce now to that before the expansion took place. Great you say. A wonderful illustration of how our beneficial terms for the techie corporations is sustaining “our” economy.
Is it “ours” though? A closer look at the composition of the expanded workforce would suggest that this is a rather simplistic view. Not only that but that Tik Tok is a case study of both the nature of the corporate tech sector here and how it is the main driver behind mass immigration.
Since the announcement that they were taking on another 1,000 people, Tik Tok has been issued work permits for 561 persons who have come here from outside of the EU and EEA area. Bear in mind that – as with Ms. Danilova who brought Tik Tok to the WRC – many of those taken on are EU nationals who do not need to have a work permit.
Which begs the question as to exactly how many Irish people were taken on as part of the 1,000 job expansion and indeed how many Irish people actually work for Tik Tok? We can see that it was less than half, but if we include the unknown number of EU nationals, might it be just one third, a quarter, a tenth?
Or take Google. This company is said to employ around 5,500 people in the Irish state. Between the beginning of 2010 and up to the latest figures for this year, Google has been issued with 4,607 work permits. Which means that if they are all still employed here that more than 80% of Google’s Irish workforce is from outside of the EU and EEA.
At the start of 2023, Google announced that it was planning to make 240 redundancies here. Yet, in the same year it was issued with 325 new work permits for people from outside of Europe. In the two years of the Covid Panic when you risked being pinched if you travelled a few miles from your own house, Google was issued with 650 work permits for people mainly travelling here from Asia. Go figure. As if you didn’t need more proof of who carries the big stick when it comes to how the Irish state conducts its affairs.
One last thing. If the proportion of the Irish population that has third level qualifications is falling, perhaps the ESRI might take time off gaslighting you and do a study on how many of the tens of thousands of young people who are emigrating every year possess such accreditation.
They will not of course. They are too busy like almost every other facet of public life here in persuading you that you are little more than an inconvenience in the onward “progress” towards a deracinated industrial estate and data centre.
Now, shut up and keep quiet. You are not a citizen of a serious sovereign independent state. You are a functionary of an economy, and according to the ESRI a not particularly productive or valuable one.