POLAND:Nearly half of the estimated 200,000 Poles living in Ireland today say they do not intend to return home, according to a new survey.
Some 49 per cent of those questioned by a polling agency for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper said that they wanted to stay in Ireland for at least the next five to 10 years. The poll of 1,389 people shows similar results for Britain, with 55 per cent of Poles questioned saying they were staying put. "Poles feel more comfortable in the British Isles and more and more children are being born," Prof Krystyna Iglicka-Okolska, from the Research Centre on European Migrations, told the newspaper.
She estimates that about 1.5 million people have left Poland in recent years. Official figures show 600,000 Poles in Britain and 200,000 in Ireland.
Adam Czamecki, deputy head of the ARC Rynek agency, which conducted the poll, said the results suggested that increasing numbers of Poles were settling down in their new homes. "They feel they are earning well and are buying apartments with their earnings and bringing over their families," he said. "They master the language and get promoted."
Some 20 per cent of those surveyed said that they worked in the construction industry, 15 per cent worked in the food industry and another 11 per cent in the hotel sector. The average net monthly salary ranged from €1,500 to €2,200.
Mr Czamecki said that the average emigrant was someone around 30 years old who had tried and failed to get on in Poland or who was unhappy with their earnings. Respondents cited higher salaries as the most common reason to put off the move back home.
"I'm staying for now," said Anna (28), a Polish university graduate living in Dublin, in the survey. "I have a plot in the mountains back home and I want to build a guest house there, but first I need to earn some money."
The polling agency pointed out the difficulty of getting concrete answers about future behaviour but suggested that anyone who stayed more than 10 years in a country was likely to stay.
"I'm a little bit surprised by the expectations for returning - the planes are full both ways," said Dr Michal Garapich, an emigrant and researcher at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism at the University of Surrey.
Members of the Polish community in Ireland said that the survey results largely reflected the reality on the ground. Radek Pilat (30), who works in an engineering firm in Cork, said Poles who had been here for several years were considering settling down. "I've been here for three or four years now and I'm looking at buying a house next year," he said. "It depends on the work you have, though. A lot of builders are going back home, for example, because there is more work there now."
Poland's deputy ambassador to Ireland, Dr Jacek Rosa, said attitudes were likely to change when economic conditions improved in Poland.
"I think many of the people who say they will stay here may change their mind when they see there are better opportunities in Poland in the coming years," he said. "The same thing happened with Irish migrant workers in the UK. They may never have thought Ireland would become so economically developed. We hope that this happens in Poland also."
Many emigrants left Poland when unemployment topped 20 per cent.
Yesterday, the labour ministry in Warsaw announced that the jobless rate had dropped to 12.4 per cent in June and suggested that a drop to 10 per cent was likely by the end of the year.