Vol. 71/No. 34      September 17, 2007

According to the Dublin government’s 2006 census, the workforce south of the border increased by 280,600—or 17 percent—between 2002 and 2006. Immigrants accounted for half that increase and now constitute one in eight of the 2 million employed in the country. According to BBC, immigrants number around 10 percent of the Irish population.

The statistics also show a sharp rise over the last quarter century in the percentage of women who are part of the workforce—from 30 percent in 1981 to 53 percent in 2006. Over the same period women describing their role as “looking after home/family” fell from 55 to 22 percent.

Underpinning these developments has been the pace of capitalist development in the once predominantly agricultural country. The census states that farming now accounts for less than 5 percent of employment, compared to 50 percent in 1926.

“Foreign Population soaring in Mayo towns” was a recent front-page headline in the Western People, a newspaper in the western rural county of Mayo. Thirty-six percent of the population of Ballyhaunis, a town there, was born abroad, it reports. Many of these immigrants work in a local meat plant. Immigrants also comprise a large percentage of the workforce at another meat plant in Mayo County, in the town of Ballinrobe.

A large number of the new workers in Ireland come from Eastern European countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2005, especially Poland and Lithuania. These country’s citizens have the right to work in Ireland.

Other nationalities have been drawn in too. According to BBC, Gort, a town in the western county of Galway, is one-third Brazilian. Many of these workers are undocumented, and a number have been deported. Those originally from China, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa are also part of the expanding working class in Ireland.

Dublin’s evening newspaper now publishes a weekly Polish-language supplement. That city’s main department store employs someone full-time to communicate with Chinese-speaking workers and shoppers. In June, a former asylum seeker from Nigeria, Rotimi Adebari, 43, became the country’s first Black mayor, in the town of Portlaoise.

The pattern is similar across the border in British-controlled northern Ireland. According to Ulster Television, the number of immigrants working in northern Ireland doubled in 2006. The majority of these immigrants are from Poland, as well as Portugal and East Timor. These workers are recruited to work in meat and other food industries, agriculture, and engineering. Some 8,000 Chinese live in Northern Ireland. Hong Kong-born Anna Lo, 56, was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in March. She is the first person of Chinese descent to be elected to a parliament in the United Kingdom.  
 
Conditions of immigrant workers
In a “Quarterly Labour Market Commentary” published in March, Dublin’s Training and Employment Authority admitted that immigrant workers “have been earning considerably less than their Irish counterparts.” In common with capitalists around the world, Dublin’s rulers have used immigration to fuel their profit drive.

Part of this is maintaining a second-class status for the new arrivals. In June 2004, the Dublin government organized a referendum on a constitutional amendment restricting the right to citizenship. Since 1998, anyone born on the island of Ireland has had this right. The referendum passed. Citizenship is now restricted to those born in Ireland with at least one Irish parent or one who has lived in the country for three of the previous four years.

In August 2006 Dublin announced an “Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill.” The bill is now being discussed in parliament. The bill makes provisions for summary arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants and would require all immigrants from countries not in the EU to carry identity cards with details of residence permits on a biometric strip.

Last year Michael McDowell, minister of justice at the time, accused asylum seekers of coming to Ireland with “spurious stories.” The leader of the Labour Party in Ireland, Patrick Rabitte, called for a “work permit regime” for workers immigrating from EU countries. “There are 40 million or so Poles, so it is an issue we have to look at,” he said.

Racist attacks have accompanied the government’s anti-immigrant measures. Late last year Zimbabwean Mapfumo Chadamoyo was beaten by a gang in Dublin. According to a survey published in the May 30 Irish Times, 35 percent of recent immigrants in general and 53 percent of African immigrants reported some form of harassment. In the north also there has been a rise in racist attacks.

The Immigration Control Platform, a group which campaigns solely to restrict immigration, ran three candidates in elections for the Dublin parliament last May. In the town of Swinford in Mayo County, a group called “Parents Action” calls on people to demand they be served by Irish-born staff at private functions in hotels and restaurants, “out of solidarity with Irish children.”

In late July, 57 people of the Roma nationality living in a camp at Ballymun near Dublin, were rounded up by the Irish police and deported to Romania.
 
 
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