If you watch Irish politics for long enough, you will become very familiar with what I like to call the puppies and ice cream tendency of those who purport to legislate and govern for us. The puppies and ice cream tendency goes something like this: “Everybody knows that puppies are adorable and ice cream is a delight, especially on a warm day. I have therefore instructed my department/am calling on the minister to explore ways to make puppies and ice cream more available and affordable to the general public”.
Since puppies and ice cream poll well with the voters at large, politicians are eager to be associated with them. The cleverest politicians are those who spot the things that are as popular as puppies and ice cream, and associate themselves with those ideas first. Whatever you might think of him, Simon Harris has always been one of our cleverest politicians:
“Ireland needs you to come home,” says Minister Simon Harris as €750,000 to be spent in efforts to bring Irish construction workers back from overseashttps://t.co/8mjpoX34qo
— gript (@griptmedia) February 12, 2024
Bringing home tens of thousands of Irish construction workers employed overseas is at once one of those rare ideas that should be both popular, and good. As I have written tens – nay, hundreds – of times on these pages, the Government’s inability to solve the housing crisis is not money related. The Government boasts near record budgetary surpluses. If it was simply able to spend the country into a housing equilibrium, there is no good reason to imagine that Ministers wouldn’t have done so months ago. The real problem is just lack of supply.
Consider that all at the same time, the Irish Government is committed to building up to 30,000 new homes per year, refitting over a million homes to improve insulation and aid climate change, and spending several billion to rebuild an unknown number of MICA-infested homes in Donegal. There are, in effect, several Government departments bidding against each other for the services of engineers, builders, plumbers, and electricians. Those departments are also bidding against private contractors and people building their own homes, not to mention the likes of yours truly who spent three weeks this winter trying to find a plumber to fix a minor heating issue. The thing holding the Irish construction sector back is not a lack of political will, or a lack of money – it’s a lack of qualified people.
Many such people, of course, left this island after the great housing crash of 2009 and 2010, when the market for their skills collapsed. Thousands of them found new homes and new work in the middle east, Australia, and elsewhere. Now, says Simon Harris, we should bring them home. Yes, Minister, we should.
But here’s where we get back to the puppies and ice cream problem: Saying a thing isn’t really enough, is it? Here’s what the Minister is proposing to do:
Higher Education Minister Simon Harris has been allocated €750,000 to set up a scheme which seeks to attract Irish construction workers abroad home amid an ongoing shortage of workers in the sector.
“We want to send a message to the Irish people who may have left because there weren’t jobs in construction in the past, there weren’t jobs when the economy crashed, that Ireland is a very different place now Ireland needs you to come home, that Ireland needs you to help build homes,”
“If you wish to come home, there are jobs here: well paid, reliable jobs,” he said.
While direct financial incentives will not be made available for Irish abroad the minister’s department is examining what could be done to make jobs in construction more attractive.
In other words, it’s an advertising campaign. The problem is that advertising a job doesn’t automatically make it more attractive.
Consider, for example, that most multinational companies seeking to recruit people outside of Ireland will offer something called a relocation package – that is to say they will cover the often extensive costs of moving you and your family across the world, aid you in finding accommodation, and perhaps help with school fees for your children.
In fact – Ireland already offers relocation expenses for non-Irish people who wish to move here to work in our health service, including expenses for temporary accommodation, moving house, and all the rest of it. We’ll offer this to people who want to come here for the first time, but not for Irish people who we need to return?
What’s more, there is no proposal to make returning home attractive on a tax basis. In Australia, for example, personal income taxes are substantially lower than they are here. In many middle eastern countries with a booming construction sector, there is no income tax at all.
If you’re living and working overseas and have done for many years, the chances are that you may have made a life there, become married, or had children. It will take more than a simple patriotic appeal to attract these people home.
It strikes me that the country has not had much difficulty, politically, with giving generous expenses and supports to Ukrainian people who have moved here for refuge as a result of the war in their country. Indeed Ireland has (perfectly correctly, in my view) spent hundreds of thousands to relocate Ukrainian cats and dogs here, recognising that moving a pet is part of moving a family.
If we need more construction workers, then what would be wrong about offering Irish construction workers the exact same terms that we offered to Ukrainians who wished to come here for refuge? We need construction workers, and we can clearly afford to pay them. If the Minister is serious about the idea, this is something he should consider.
But I fear he is not, and this is just another puppies and ice cream moment from a political class that’s all too fond of saying things, and not nearly fond enough of thinking properly about them.