North and South work hard at bringing them all back home

There are a lot of Irish accents on Wall Street, where young people from Northern Ireland and the Republic are making good money in financial services. At adjacent building sites, the accents are also Irish. And Irish people run half the bars in Manhattan. All came here looking for a better life. If they glance across the Hudson River they can see Ellis Island, a constant reminder of the millions of Irish immigrants who came before them to help build the US.

Now both parts of Ireland want their emigrants back. With the Republic's unemployment level down to 3.5 per cent and that in Northern Ireland under 6 per cent, teams from North and South are coming to New York to tell them that the better life can be found back home.

The Jobs Ireland (www.jobs ireland.com) campaign, created by the Government in response to the growing labour shortage in the Republic, will hold its first jobs fair in New York on March 18th-19th. Mr Gregory Craig of FAS is in town to set it up.

What makes this event doubly unique is that he is accompanied by Ms Celia Chambers of Northern Ireland's "Back To Your Future" campaign (www.backtoyourfuture.co.uk), launched in November by the NI Training and Employment Agency to attract skilled workers who left during the Troubles.

"It is an all-Ireland show and the signal that will send over here, presenting Ireland as an island, will be enormous," said Mr Craig, who recounted how an incredulous passenger on the flight to New York asked him was he "trying to reverse the Famine". There was another irony, he said. "Both of us spent most of our careers trying to find jobs for people, now we are trying to find people for jobs."

Their sector targets are somewhat different. The 50,000 unfilled jobs in the Republic (30,000 in Dublin alone) are "across the board", said Mr Craig, whose own six sisters and four brothers all emigrated, bar one, and all came back, except for one. There are vacancies for 9,000 in information technology but "we are not going to compete with the IT sector or Wall Street", he said. Jobs Ireland is concentrating instead on wooing people - not just of Irish ethnic origin - in New York's construction, hotel and catering, and health care businesses, many of them undocumented.

The North's "Back To Your Future" effort is directed at skilled information technology workers with three to five years' experience, said Ms Chambers. Four out of 10 young people who trained in IT left Northern Ireland to work elsewhere, she said. Today they are needed by the fast-growing IT and electronic sectors North of the Border.

Jobs Ireland has had a huge impact in countries like South Africa, where 35,000 callers registered interest. Its Newfoundland venture resulted in 1,600 work permits. But New York may be a tougher sell. For many Irish, life is good here. New York is exciting. The Republic has rain, traffic jams, modest wages and, sometimes, be grudgery.

Ms Darina Molloy, who returned home last year after six years in the US, wrote in the Irish Voice last week of the resentment she felt from co-workers who had never lived in the US, and of fellow expatriates complaining that Irish wages were "still in the dark ages". Jobs Ireland will bring employers to New York with resettlement packages worth up to $30,000 (€33,000) to help persuade them to return, said Mr Craig.

Many who fled Northern Ireland because of the Troubles might also feel uneasy about going back. "This is very much testing the water," explained Ms Chambers, who said her campaign would be making the case that Northern Ireland has a better infrastructure, good housing and schools, and no traffic delays. "Belfast is buzzing," she said. "It has a lot to offer."

Another problem encountered abroad by Jobs Ireland is resentment at poaching skilled workers. Last week the infrastructure sub-committee of the Cabinet, chaired by the Taoiseach, asked Jobs Ireland to arrange briefing sessions for non-EU contractors to encourage more tenders for the £45 billion (€57 billion) reconstruction programme. "Countries ask what we are giving in return," said Mr Craig. "Now Jobs Ireland can provide an answer."