Looking for jobs that the Irish won't take

When the day comes that the Irish are the dominant nationality working in the Londis stores will that mean that our economy has hit rock bottom, asks ANN MARIE HOURIHANE 

IN DUBLIN last Wednesday people queued for jobs which had been advertised at the Londis stores.

The queue snaked from the head offices of the Griffin-Londis group at 12 St Stephen’s Green, almost on the corner of Dawson Street, past Topshop, past Oasis, past Insomnia, past Reiss and then turned into Grafton Street, where it seemed to peter out around the Vodaphone shop.

It was like a rewind of the past 10 years, the 10 years that have made our cities carbon copies of the British high street. There were more than 200 people in that queue. It got a lot of media coverage.

If you had been watching the RTÉ news at nine o’clock that evening in a casual manner – and many of us find this the best way to watch the news these days – you would have seen the queue of job-seekers as they stood patiently in the sunshine. And you would have said “things have come to a pretty pass”.

The queue for jobs is one of the most powerful images of an economic depression. Indeed the footage I saw later in the week had been shot on a mobile phone and posted on YouTube, under the heading “Irish Recession”.

By yesterday it had received 32,047 hits. On YouTube the related video is a report by a French television station entitled Ireland: A Job Lost Every Five Minutes.

Séamus Griffin, managing director of the Griffin-Londis group, had been surprised by the number of people who had turned up to apply for the jobs. “I’d expected quite a few people but not that many,” he said on Friday. There were 12 interviewers waiting for the job applicants.

The interviews took from five in the evening until 10 at night. Some people queued for two hours. The Londis staff provided them with tea and coffee. It was the perfect recession story.

Or maybe not. For one thing there were more than 100 jobs to be filled. Séamus Griffin, who runs a total of 16 Londis stores in Dublin’s city centre and at Sandyford, as well as three Subway sandwich stores, is opening three new Londis branches in the Dublin area, at Adamstown, Stepaside and Lucan.

According to Griffin, less than 2½ per cent of the people in that queue were Irish. “A huge amount from Pakistan,” said Griffin. “A huge amount from Brazil. The Brazilians have a great networking system.”

Some people in the queue were turned down, Griffin says, on the basis that their English was poor, or that they did not have sufficient experience.

The make-up of that jobs queue on Wednesday was a reflection of the people who already work in Londis stores: foreign nationals. They are paid according to the guidelines laid down by the relevant Joint Labour Committee – in other words above the minimum wage of €8.65 per hour. These are the people who took, and continue to take, the jobs that the Irish won’t do.

So, when Griffin placed simple A4 sheets in the windows of his existing Londis stores, looking for workers who were “advanced in English, dynamic, flexible and experienced”, it was not the composition of the resulting queue which surprised him.

Presumably he has grown used to the fact that Irish people will not work in his stores. It was the reaction to the queue that surprised him. “The amount of negativity out there,” he says. “One reporter said to me ‘What would you have done if it was raining?’ I felt like saying to him, ‘Why, would you not have turned up if it was raining?’ ”

Mr Griffin had thought that this was a happy story. His company was providing in excess of 100 jobs in the middle of an economic recession.

Instead he feels that the recruitment drive was represented in a pessimistic way. And there seems to have been little or no coverage of the fact that less than 2.5 per cent of the people in the famous queue were Irish.

Calamity is so attractive, and of course we have no shortage of it in this country. Slovenly government, a rotting health service run on apartheid lines, an education system which betrays our children, – there is no need to rehearse the whole sorry list here, it is Monday after all – but surely we have enough calamity to be going on with.

Sometimes our current difficulties feel less like a recession and more like the fall of the Roman Empire, foundering on its reliance on foreign labour.

We try to portray our experience of recession as The Grapes Of Wrath, when it is really reminiscent of Chicken Little running around wearing half an egg shell, screaming that the sky has fallen on his head.

It’s not really a calamity, it’s just that we couldn’t manage our way out a paper bag, let alone an egg shell. When the day comes that the Irish are the dominant nationality working in the Londis stores will that mean that our economy has hit rock bottom? Or will it mean that it has returned, at last, to normality ?

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