Even though we now have detailed figures of the flow of immigration into our State, as well as information on the scale and pattern of employment of foreign-nationals, the media continue to publish grossly exaggerated figures that seem designed to alarm public opinion on what is a sensitive subject, Garret FitzGerald.
In particular, the data on the number of people registering for work here are still being misused to suggest a scale of employment of eastern Europeans in our state that bears no relationship to reality. The fact is that quite a number of workers from eastern Europe who have registered in this way since May 2004 never actually entered employment here, and the majority of those who have done so have returned home after a relatively brief period of work in Ireland.
For, in the 22 months ending February last, some 190,000 workers from these countries registered for employment here - but at the end of this period only 69,000 - ie 36 per cent - were still at work in Ireland. This means that almost two-thirds of those who registered either never came to work here, or have since returned home - and this percentage of purely temporary immigrants has remained constant throughout this period.
Three of the ten new member states have yielded very few migrants to Ireland. This is the case with Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus - all of which are relatively developed states, the citizens of which have little to gain from moving elsewhere for employment. Our immigrant workers come from the other seven new member states in eastern Europe. Whereas at the outset, during 2004, less than half of this inflow came from Poland, since the beginning of last year that country has been accounting for over 60 per cent of the total. The numbers coming from Slovakia and Hungary have also been increasing, but since the end of last year the inflow from the three Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - has been declining.
We don't at present know to what extent the proportion of immigrants returning home after a period of work here may vary between the different countries from which they come. Thus, the Baltic States have been reported to provide a high proportion of seasonal immigrant labour in the horticultural sector, and immigrant workers from these countries may thus include a higher proportion of temporary workers than is the case with nationals of the four other eastern European states from which we are drawing much of our immigrant labour supply. The CSO data would suggest that the number of Poles currently at work here is unlikely to be much over 40,000- well below some of the estimates of the number of Polish workers in Ireland alleged in our media.
We know that on average every 100 Irish workers support 47 children under 15 years of age and 70 people over that age - ie 117 dependants in all. The CSO has recently started to publish data on the adult dependants of immigrants, and, whilst we don't yet have data on the average number of children in Ireland accompanying immigrant workers, we now know that in the case of Continental Europeans working here, the ratio of adult dependants to workers is very much lower than the figure of 70. For workers from western European countries, the adult dependant ratio is barely half that figure, and for eastern European workers that ratio is only one-quarter of the figure for Irish workers. It is safe to assume that the average child dependency figure for immigrants workers is also much lower than that for Irish workers.
Thus, the net contribution of eastern European workers to our economy must be even greater than that made by our own Irish workers, for in terms of housing and education costs these immigrants impose a very much lower burden on our taxpayers than does our own indigenous workforce.
A total of 184,000, or just over 9 per cent of our work force today, are foreign-nationals. Almost two-fifths of these are from eastern Europe, and the rest are from Britain, western Europe, or overseas. Just under half of the 69,000 immigrant workers from eastern Europe are currently engaged in industrial activity - almost one-quarter in construction, and a similar proportion in manufacturing. But the sector in which the highest proportion of workers are immigrants, including immigrants from eastern Europe, is catering. No less than 31 per cent of our catering workforce are foreign-nationals, and eastern Europeans account for over one-third of the immigrants at work in this sector.
In addition to manufacturing and construction other sectors where over 10 per cent of the workforce are now foreign-nationals include financial and other business services, the health sector, and miscellaneous services - a range of activities which reflects the fact that immigrants are providing both high-skilled services but also other services involving low skills.
In general, immigrants are well-educated; but because about three-quarters of them come from countries in which English is not the main language, some are forced to undertake, at least in the early stages, work that does not engage their skills. It would be very much to our advantage to ensure the provision to such immigrants of English language classes that would enable them to engage in work more appropriate to their educational level and professional capacity.
The benefits to our economy and society of the immigration of workers from eastern Europe have been considerable, and the scale of the inflow to date seems to have matched remarkably well our labour needs. But that has been a matter of luck rather than good judgment: it is now clear that in opening our shores to workers from the new EU member states in May 2004 we underestimated the scale of the flow from eastern Europe that this decision was likely to elicit, but also, happily, the amount of additional labour that we could usefully absorb.
So it does not follow that extending free entry further to workers from Romania and Bulgaria, if those states are admitted to the EU next year, would have equally beneficial results. The Government is, I believe, right to have hesitated about extending free entry to immigrant workers from two further member states at this stage - at least until we see what will be the impact on our immigrant flow of the recent decisions by some other western Europe states to follow the example given two years ago by Ireland, Britain and Sweden.