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The documents about economic migration secured by a reader under a Freedom of Information request chart the radical liberalisation of work permits that escalated during the Covid Panic when the state was officially under strict travel restrictions.
You couldn’t hit the European sunspots but thousands of people could catch a flight here to take jobs paying little more than the minimum wage.
The theme that can be charted through the official documents between 2021 and May this year suggests that the Irish state is framing policy according to rapidly shifting trends over which it neither has nor, one gets the sense, wishes to have control.
This might make sense if the state was adopting a similar laissez faire approach to all things to do with the economy but as we also know from the Covid Panic they had no compunction about imposing restrictions on small indigenous companies and their employees, almost 700,000 of whom were forced for a time onto social welfare.
You can get a sense of the lack of any coherent policy in relation to work migration from a ‘working paper’ prepared in April 2025 for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (DETE.)
One sentence jumps out to me as putting the cart before the horse. It claims, apropos the huge jump in inward migration, that “This uptick in immigration has also become the main driver of labour force growth”.
Surely the reverse is true?
The demand by mostly overseas companies based here for labour has been the main driver of immigration. And thus, the main driver of unprecedented population growth: 90% of that growth is composed of persons who have come here and will come here from overseas.
The working paper evinces puzzlement at one other salient fact, namely the continued high level of emigration among the younger age cohort of Irish born people: “While inward migration has been robust, there has also been a pick-up in outward flows from Ireland particularly amongst Irish nationals, with higher tendencies among females and younger age cohorts. This has occurred during a time of strong economic growth which is unusual. Whether this is a cyclical or cultural phenomenon or something more substantive merits further attention.”
Having pondered briefly that proposition from Wittgenstein, the authors move swiftly on to celebrate the “post-pandemic recovery in the economy,” which of course “would have stalled were it not for inward migration.”
All of which is superficially true but is a healthy economy one that between April 2021 and April 2025 that said Slán/Farewell/Arrivederci/Adieu to 127,800 of its own native-born youth, many of them with the skills required in the jobs being filled by persons from overseas?
This is especially the case for the American tech companies who seem to rely almost exclusively now on recruitment from abroad.
Some might argue that the reasons for such large-scale and seemingly anomalous high levels of emigration among the young are less “cultural” than directly linked to one factor that the working paper itself later refers to, namely the “rising costs of accommodation.”
Housing is tangentially referred to as an issue and officials of the Department were present at meetings of the Inter Departmental Economic Migration Policy Unit. Yet where it is referred to as a possible constraint, the proposed solution is to import more construction workers.
That then required adding to the list of construction-related occupations deemed to be essential and therefore eligible to be filled by persons from outside the EU through the granting of work permits.
Which in effect means that the Irish state is tacitly admitting that “Yes, work migration is greatly adding to the demand for housing,” but that the solution is: “Import more construction workers to build houses for the people who have created that added demand.” You can see where that is going..
Along with the cost of housing there are those other factors militating against young people even being able to access accommodation, never mind pay for it. Not to mention what might appear to be a bias against the recruitment of Irish people in certain sectors such as tech, which as we have seen before recruits the bulk of its workforce from outside the state.
If there are “cultural” factors at work perhaps they are less Joycean angst at having to live in a “deeply conservative society” – a myth our liberals are reluctant to abandon even after all their “cultural victories” – and perhaps more to a feeling among the young that they are “surplus to requirements” in such a happy booming economy that makes little secret of they fact that they are not really needed. So, fuck off to Oz people.
Despite the working paper’s admonition that the causes of all the above “merit further attention,” there has never been any indication that the Irish state apparatus has devoted any of its energies to interrogating the implications of a chronic and growing dependence on overseas Capital.
Nor is there any political party in Leinster House that devotes time to such matters – other than Aontú’s suggestion during the election that steps might be taken to encourage young skilled and educated Irish people to return home to work.
The Establishment from ‘right’ to ‘left’ all appear accepting of the 26 County State’s place in the global corporate firmament. The demand for overseas labour is the driving force for all of the key factors that are utterly changing the nature of Irish society.
The documents released to our reader under FOI show how very quickly the list of ‘essential’ occupations has expanded since 2021 – from Health Care Assistants who have no medical expertise to people who work in takeaways. As chefs one assumes.
The conclusion of the Department’s Review was published in May and it further adds to the list of occupations that can be filled through work permits. They are to include printers, fish filleters, pub managers, painters, and a list of others.
The list of those who made public submissions is also telling. I can’t see any there who might have been arguing for other than a further liberalisation of the work permit system. The two big beasts of the trade union sector, SIPTU and the ICTU, had previously argued for the right of people on permits to change employers after nine months – a change which the state and the employers were happy to approve.
Of course, the trade unions’ support for one of the foundations of neoliberalism – “free movement of Capital and Labour” – is garnished with gobbledygook about the rights of a ‘new Irish workforce’ which has contributed to the inexorable fall in union membership.
In early 2020, almost 27% of the workforce were trade union members. That figure had fallen to 23.5% at the end of 2025. Around 60% of the workforce in the 1980s were in a union. A large proportion of members are now in the protected public service sector. An estimated 7% of ICT workers are unionised. Turkeys voting for Christmas here.
Also on the list of public submissions we have some of the big hitters from tech: Apple, Amazon, Meta, but also a creche, the dental association, the Irish Farmers Association, the property section of the main boss’s organisation IBEC, a pizza joint, and nursing homes.
All of which begs the question as for whose benefit all of this is for? Is the Irish state to remain based on anything approaching an organic and cohesive community? Or are we little more than a floating industrial and financial centre where all the demographic trends point to one inexorable tipping point where people born in the Irish state are nothing more than another and dwindling ethnic group?
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