The announcement by the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, that she wants to bring 200,000 skilled immigrants to the State to achieve National Development Plan targets is understood to have been largely prompted by fears expressed to the IDA by multinationals about potential labour shortages.
Her initiative has been welcomed by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation. However, the Labour Party spokesman on immigration and asylum-seekers, Mr Brendan Howlin, said it was contrary to everything the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, had been doing to restrict immigration.
He also questioned the skewing of work permits in the past to the developed world. He said a quarter of all successful applications went to US nationals. However, he would withhold judgment on Ms Harney's plans until he saw the details.
In tandem with Ms Harney's initiative, the State training and employment agency, FAS, is planning job fairs in Europe and north America to attract skilled labour. According to the latest figures obtained by FAS there was net inward migration of 45,000 people into the State during 1999 - half of these were returned emigrants. In 1998, net inward migration was 30,000.
FAS hopes to boost the figure to 60,000 this year to meet skill shortages, keeping it on target to meet Ms Harney's immigration targets.
Speaking at an IBEC/IBM breakfast briefing yesterday, Ms Harney said the State needed to "import" 200,000 skilled workers over the next six to seven years to meet labour shortages.
"We will have to go further afield to some of the eastern Europe countries, the new countries that will be joining the EU, to the US, to New Zealand and many other countries where there are young people who want to travel around the world, who have got skills and can certainly help us to sustain the kind of economic growth levels we have experienced."
She anticipated that about half the people needed would be returned Irish emigrants.
A FAS spokesman, Mr Greg Craig, said later that her proposals reflected emerging migration patterns. In order to meet skills shortages, the agency was planning intensive recruiting drives this year. The first will be a jobs fair in Newfoundland, Canada, on April 29th and April 30th.
Several major employers, including the Construction Industry Federation, have signed up for the Irish stand at the Olympia jobs fair in London on May 13th and May 14th.
The highlight of the year will be the World Expo at Hanover, Germany, this summer, which is expected to attract 40 million Germans. Cologne, New York, Boston, Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh are among other cities targeted for job fairs. There is also a fair planned for Estonia.
The www.fasjobs-ireland.com website, set up in September, has had 600,00 hits. Some 25,000 people have registering their CVs with the agency through the site.
The social policy director of IBEC, Mr Brendan Butler, welcomed Ms Harney's initiative. He said employers had been calling for an immigration policy geared to meet a jobs vacancy rate currently running at 6 per cent a year.
However, he warned that the State would have to look at the policy implications of absorbing 200,000 extra people into the economy in terms of housing, transportation, education, social welfare and health services.