A fascinating comment was posted a short while ago as a response to this post. It’s from a reader named Alan, who gives a succinct and pretty scary rundown of what happened in Ireland. [You remember the joke: Q: What's the difference between Iceland and Ireland. A: One letter and six months.]
Some of the similarities between Iceland and Ireland are striking, as is the prospect of what may happen in Iceland if we were to join the EU.
Here is Alan’s comment, excerpted:
By the way, congratulations to the people of Iceland for their stance against the attempted debt transfer.
We in Ireland have had ninety billion of bank debts accrued through the collapsed property market here, with tens of billions more transferred from healthcare, education, etc. to recapitalise theese same institutions, condition-free.
A word of warning on European Union membership; the Irish property bubble – the unsustainable & undesirable truth behind the falsely-trumpeted ‘economic miracle’ here four or five years ago – was created by the immigration of almost one million people largley from the then new EU member states.
Most of these people were placed in jobs at lower rates than their Irish equivalents, and large welfare payments – circa 1,000 euro per month – were given to them to enable them to live here, amongst many other payments.
This money was paid to their Irish landlords, a particularly vile class of individuals, and house prices rose from an average of 200,000 to 500,000 in four or five years. Colossal mortgages -100% of property prices – were given freely by the banks, and the government exempted the landlords from taxes on their rental incomes, but kept the country afloat on duties paid by the property owners on the original purchase price of their ‘investments’.
In a few years the number of properties in the Irish Republic doubled. Our population had been 3.5 million; we were told it had risen to 4.5, but a much larger figure is certain.
When the collapse came, the temporary ‘Goldrush’ jobs of the flimsy Irish Boomtown quickly went too.
The govt. rushed in & guaranteed all the bank debts, with public funds & the promise of further money from the same source.The government of Ireland in no way serves it’s people – it is a Mafia-style organisation serving a small elite of about 5 % of the population – and the banks & property developers, of course.
A ‘National Asset Management Agency’ has been set up, which has as it’s aim to prevent as much as possible further price drops occur in the property sector (which are at present about 50 % of the peak and still falling).
To this end, immigration rates have been maintained at about ten thousand per month for at least the last 12 months ( the collapse came in Summer 2008) in order to encourage would-be landlords into buying some of the 350,000 vacant residential properties currently on the market – a yearly welfare payment of ten thousand euro per annum is immediately available to all adult individuals arriving in the State, along with about two-thousand p/a per child dependent and a further 12,000 in payments towards rent for each year.
All debts owed to the banks from private developers/investors which cannot be salvaged in this manner are to be tranferred to the Irish taxpayer. Estimates vary that between 20 & seventy billion will be transferred.This has all been given the green-light by the European Union, (who have also agreed to restrict competitors with clean records and debt-sheets from accessing the Irish banking market.)
Why ? They fear a further Greece-style factor destabilising the Eurozone.
Officially, one sixth of the population is now unemployed, and rises daily by about two hundred. Weekly job vacancies are only in the dozens, mostly temporary, & poorly-paid.
The government have decreased spending on health, education, etc.(which were in poor enough condition as a result of EU-directed privatisation attempts), and are currently seeking to impose a National wage cut of 15 %, with high earners often excluded through loopholes.
The profits, when they existed, were privatised.
The losses have been nationalised.
I have the deepest respect for the Icelanders who voted against the attempt that was made on them by the Dutch & British guardians of speculators.
I hope the government of Iceland has the decency to protect it’s people and fight the criminality of the European Imperial financiers.
& doesn’t do what the scumbag government of Ireland did to it’s people.
Be very wary of the EU.
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
LOL – ordinary people who put money into Icesave accounts (marketed to them as being just like any other savings account on the UK or NL high street, with the same level and ‘guarantee’ of deposit insurance) have now gone from from being ‘savers’ to ‘depositors’ to ‘investors’ and now ‘speculators’. Whatever, if it assuages your guilt that you didn’t stop (or joined in with) the cheerleading of the Vikings in the boom years.
Err … you do realize that the author of that comment is from Ireland …?
Krugman at the NYTimes compares Ireland’s excesses to America’s ‘exuberance’: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08krugman.html
Proportionally, Ireland’s housing excess appears to be dwarfed by the foreclosures, closing banks, and unemployment in the States. For me it is hard not to see the grass is greener in Ireland, where no one is going to go into medical bankruptcy over a serious illness or going to starve because their unemployment benefits ran out and there’s no safety net left. But instead of comparing and feeling better off or worse off than the other fellow, I wish I could see that we are all in the same boat in trying to recover from the collusion of banks and government. What we all have in common is this debt that we (plural) did not create, yet we are unable to reset the economic meter to read “00.00″ USD or Jubilee! or Freedom! or whatever. Like someone in mid-winter imagining the shimmering birch leaves of Spring I savor the sound of pots and pans and the voices of people rebelling against the unfair debts being imposed upon us all.
God Bless NAMA, Alda goes on the offensive against irish political-business-socioeconomic elites having basically been exhausted by the Icelandic variety.
Alda appears on the Oprah Winfrey show
OW- Alda about this icesave thing whats going on ?
AK- No comment
Thank you for a most interesting article on Ireland.
I see more than a few similarities with the USA, wherein a government neglects prudence in national affairs, the harmonious well-being of the society, the very thing it is tasked with, and reason for its existence.
If some definite advantages in belonging to the EU, and why some nations have struggled as hard to join, also obviously some disadvantages as well. Iceland losing control of its environmentally functional, if perhaps somewhat corrupt, fisheries would be one possible problem. Another, perhaps even more serious, could be immigration.
This is a very real problem in the USA, the difference from the EU being there is little popular will yet to address it, but otherwise travel within these states is as free as within the EU. It is one of the primary reasons that California, with the world’s seventh or eighth largest economy, is on the verge of bankruptcy. A society that cannot or will not control the level of its population, to keep a certain balance, will inevitably suffer a host of related and intractable problems. It can be severe swings in property markets, in school enrollments, in welfare payments, in any number of things which are reacted to but never brought into balance or solved.
Iceland has suffered what comes from boom and bust cycles, and hopefully learned from it. Many in this world, particularly in finance, most certainly have not. It would be wise, to the extent possible, not to let them dictate one’s own affairs.
It is not without problems to hold immigrants accountable for having created those problems. After all, it’s the government elected by the Irish voters, which had made those laws. Even the Lisboa Treaty has been ratified by a majority of Irish voters.
As the example Iceland shows, EU membership is not compulsory to have a similar kind of bubble. So, I don’t see the correlation as striking, although it’s always convenient to blame the EU.
I trust that the Icelandic negotiators will be more careful, when negotiating about fishing industry. I suppose, there won’t be any agreement without opt-out clause.
As far as privatising profits and nationalising losses is concerned, in Germany we have a particularly striking example in connection with the Dublin-based Depfa Bank. Originally a German bank for public financing, they were privatised in the early 1990s and moved their headquarters to Dublin in the late 1990s, taking advantage of lower taxes and lax regulations in Ireland. They involved in high-risk reals estate investments – all to the benefit o the owners and managers – and were already struggling, when the German Bank Hypo Real Estate bought them in October, 2007. Since then, the German tax payers had to cough up at least 10 billions of Euro directly and much more as state guarantee to bail them out.
Ireland had the same ponzi economics as the UK. No real wage growth for a decade, masked by real estate bubble encouraged by the government. On a par with the ponzi scheme run by Albania.
In Ireland, they didn’t have the opportunity to devalue the currency (though don’t think it’s all over yet) , in the UK, Brown has tried to wreck the economy just to keep house prices up (though sterling is collapsing) so that he may do better at the polls. In actual fact, the Irish measures have be close to textbook in terms of ‘get the pain over with’ – apart from – as with the UK – trying to reinflate a real estate bubble. Won’t work in Ireland, won’t work in te UK.
The difference between UK and Ireland, Ireland it is a politically connected set of propert barrons. The UK – many many ordinary voters, who gave up simple equity investing for their
pension to become buy to let landlords.
Things will certainly be getting worse in the UK, the bills can only be put off for so long. Iceland too, at the end of the day, a cold rock in the sea, with 300,000 people – shouldn’t be a plac you associate with rampant speculation.
What is this guy talking about?
There may be many similarities between the situation of Ireland and Iceland, but a housing bubble fed by huge immigration and unsustainable social benefit payments to go with it are hardly among them.
Belt thightening to bring back balance to hubris economies is needed for the simple reason that taxpayers work is the only long term reliable source of income in a country. This holds whether they are inside or outside the EU. IMF-money may soften the blow though and so may contributions from other EU countries. Germany is moaning but cannot afford to let Greece fail. So get your agreement with the creditors in place and look ahead. Iceland sure has a great future.
(To me Alan’s comment seems mainly to be a bad case of xenophobia and EU membership scaremongering.)
As another Irish resident, I think that Alan’s summary of our situation is pretty accurate, though I’m not sure that I agree with his emphasis on immigration as one of the factors. I am also concerned that most countries no longer have control over their own destinies – this seems now to be in the hands of multinationals and bond dealers, so Government policy has to appease them, rather than meet the needs of the people.
I beseech the people of Iceland, all three hundred odd thousand of them, to be very very wary of the EU. You have got your energy sorted, you have sustainable fisheries and a beautiful country. Please keep it that way.
… and then they blame the EU and foreigners. That is at best a very poor analysis at its worst nationalist populism. For Iceland another couple of ten thousand foreigners would be a very healthy addition.
Cheers, M.
Wery sad story indeed, but I don’t see in what the EU is involved. Massive property bubbles happened (and still happen) inside and outside the EU. Corrupt governments in the hand of greedy bankers also. Immigration from the new European Member-States has already happened in Iceland.
So staying outside the EU will not solve a thing for Iceland. On the contrary, if Ireland had not been in the Eurozone, the Irish pound would have plummeted like the Icelandic króna.
Andy, people were very naive with regard to Icesave:
I am reminded by a bit from a classic book ‘Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits’ its an investment classic by Philip A. Fischer (A book that if anyone reading doesn’t own, I would recommend going to Amazon and ordering)
”
1. A conservative investment is one most likely to converve (i.e., maintain) purchasing power at minimum of risk.
2. Conservative investing is understanding what a conservative investment consists and then, in regard to specific investments, following a procedural course of action needed properly to determine whether specific investment vehicles are, in fact, conservative investments.
”
With regard to point 2, Icesave depositors were being foolish. In law they say ignorance isn’t a defence. What people should have realised is that there was a reason Icesave offered depositors a better return than HSBC or Nationwide. These institutions were demonstrably better run. What people in the UK and Holland did was chase extra returns – whilst ignorant of the risks.
Most would have been far better off buying some shares in say Royal Dutch Shell or British Petroleum, than putting it in an Icesave account. In fact – in investing in shares – they would have been far more likely to have been mindful of the risks and balanced that against the dividiend yield returns.
Alda, as you pointed out in your excellent Guardian article – Alan also mistakenly thinks the referendum was against “debt transfer.”
Thanks for the input, everyone.
I see I should have also copied Alan’s comment posted just after the one in the post above, to wit:
Reading back over it, it looks like I was having a rant about immigrants; which wasn’t my intention.
Stable, well-thought out immigration is fine, and the newcomers must be allowed to participate with the existing population on an equal footing (equal wages & standard of living, etc), which wasn’t the case here at home.
Anyway,
Best wishes…
If you want to see the EU in action to save one of its members – by decimating social services and welfare – look no further than Greece. They are actually managing to make the IMF look almost benign.
Alan’s facts are wrong and I disagree with his reading of the events and I don’t think its one that most people here in Ireland would share. Our situation is similar to Iceland’s (as I understand it) but very different in many other ways.
I’m no fan of the Fianna Fail led government which has been in power here since 1997. The government’s polices such as tax allowances for building holiday homes and hotels (which we didn’t need), the lack of proper regulation of the banks, talking up of the housing bubble and basing our public finances on stamp duty from the property bubble are largely responsible for getting us into the very tough situation we’re in today.
But while they misgoverned the country in a serious way it just not correct to say “it is a Mafia-style organisation serving a small elite of about 5 % of the population” the people of Ireland voted the government into power and the country as a whole got involved in collective mania with property speculation.
Alan’s obsession with immigration as the source of the problem is just plain wrong. We did not have anything like one million immigrants into the country over the last 5 years. We did have substantial numbers of people coming in from Poland and other new EU countries especially in the building industry but many of the immigrants were highly educated and were employed in a wide range of jobs – I worked with many Polish, Slovakian and Czech people myself. Some immigrants may have worked in low paid jobs and I’m sure some employers paid immigrants a lower wage but it is illegal to pay a lower rate based on nationality and everyone I worked with was paid the same rate as Irish workers.
Large welfare payments were not given to immigrants while working and living in Ireland immigrants were eligible for the same social welfare payments as Irish people – unemployment payments, child allowance payments etc – no more no less.
Immigration rates have not been maintained at about ten thousand per month, since the economy collapsed people have stopped coming to Ireland as there just aren’t jobs here anymore, indeed many former immigrants have left and gone home or to countries with healthier economies that Ireland’s.
The government has cut spending on everything including health and education. But the national wage cut of 15 %, is just a figment of Alan’s imagination. The government has cut public sector pay by about 12% and Wages in the private sector have dropped and the government have been encouraging everyone to become more cost competitive (while they haven’t been too keen on taking any cuts to their high slaries of over 100,000Euro per year).
Some of what Alan has written is correct the banks have been given massive capital injections and the top management of the banks who were the ones who led the banks into collapse have not been removed.
The low interest rate since we entered the Euro helped fuel the bubble in Ireland and if we had control over our own currency and interest rates it may have been used to cool the market but the sources of the collapse are down to the Irish property bubble, government mismanagement and to a lesser degree on the worldwide financial collapse not the EU. ‘European Imperial financiers’, the bunderburg group, illumaniti etc.
Paul, thanks for your balanced and well-thought-out response.
For anyone who wants to get a handle on the Irish property bubble and its aftermath I recommend looking at the following forum http://www.thepropertypin.com It has some general discussions on the Irish economy and our Irish version of Iceasve – NAMA
While I have sympathy for Ireland current situation, lets not for get that it joined the EU and Euro out of choice and became seriously rich becuase of it. The EU (read Germany) has given tens of billions to Ireland to help build its infrastructure and economy and very successful it was, a few years ago they were boasting about the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Its rather disingenuous to enjoy a massive economic boom and then blame the EU for the the crash when it was Irish politicians who controlled Irish economic policy.
Hmmm I find Alan’s comment a wee bit unbalanced also.
However, Fianna Fáil has gone out of control though and I would blame them for a significant amount of what we’re going through. They are a party that believe their own propaganda and are very removed from real life, demonstrated during the floods over Christmas. I was DISGUSTED watching tv footage of our Taoiseach getting all defensive and acting quite gruffly towards some poor woman who had lost her home and belongings. That was the day I decided that once I finish university, I am OUTTA HERE!!
and unfortunately I will be one of the MANY educated young people who will be leaving…
“Alan’s obsession with immigration” – no Alan isn’t the one with an obsession about immigration. He seemed to have a balanced view on the subject. Many countries seek to balance their immigration, in Singapore the authorities have talked openly about the positives and negatives of significant immigration. The obsessives, seem to be those that think that any talk on the subject hints at racism. It satisfies their political view, even if it is deliberately disingenuous.
As is the: ‘well the referendum was pointless anyway – because it gave me a result I didn’t like’ view.
“If you want to see the EU in action to save one of its members – by decimating social services and welfare – look no further than Greece. They are actually managing to make the IMF look almost benign.”
The EU is doing nothing, it doesn’t have to finance Greece’s budget deficit and it cannot force Greece to cut spending – it can demand, plead but nothing is being forced.And what is it about the hate with the IMF from so many people? – nobody forces a country to go to the IMF its by choice; if you mismanage your economy so much they expect you to sort it out so they can get the money back. The IMF is completely benign, don’t approach them for a loan and fix your economy yourself and they will have no effect whatsoever, but thats not what people want to hear is it?
although i really do not care for the european union or the euro, i had to stop reading this article after the first few paragraphs. blatant lies and xenophobia are bad arguments against the European Union!
(“Most of these people were placed in jobs at lower rates than their Irish equivalents, and large welfare payments – circa 1,000 euro per month – were given to them to enable them to live here, amongst many other payments.” this is simply NOT TRUE! as a european migrant worker, let me tell you that it is IMPOSSIBLE to get unemployment benefits, housing benefits or any other social benefits in your host nation unless you have paid into the system for at least a year. these eastern european migrants do not leave their friends and family to hang around in a bedsit, waiting for their benefits check. they came to the west to work as much hours in the day as possible, to save up money, so they could get a better life back home.)
the author of this article should not forget that 10 years ago, ireland was by far the poorest nation in western europe. it was so poor that it was the only country in the EU that had a negative migration figure, because young people were fleeing the country.
it was because of the unification of europe and the euro and because of european subsidies that ireland developed. that is where the wealth comes from! ireland may have developed a little too fast as it was playing catch-up to the rest of western europe and may have therefore been hit harder by the GLOBAL economic crisis, but it is still better of than it would have been without europe’s support.
and here are the real numbers on migration from those horrible eastern europeans who created your real estate bubble straight from wikipedia for everyone to check;
# Allowing for the incidence of births (245,000) and deaths (114,000), the derived net immigration of people to Ireland between 2002 and 2006 was 186,000.
# The total number of foreign citizens resident in Ireland is 419,733, or around 10% (plus 1,318 people with ‘no nationality’, and 44,279 people whose nationality is not stated).
# The single largest group of immigrants comes from the United Kingdom (112,548) followed by Poland (63,267), Lithuania (24,628), Nigeria (16,300), Latvia (13,319), the United States (12,475), China (11,161), and Germany (10,289).
so not a million and most of them come from the uk! (but maybe that undermines my whole point?!)
Michael Lewis says
“2. Conservative investing is understanding what a conservative investment consists and then, in regard to specific investments, following a procedural course of action needed properly to determine whether specific investment vehicles are, in fact, conservative investments.”
Then also says.
“With regard to point 2, Icesave depositors were being foolish.”
First comment INVESTORS. Investing carries risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment
As you say IceSavers were DEPOSITORS (but link them to investors). A big difference.
“Saving is the conservation of money. Methods of saving include putting money aside in a bank or pension plan.[1] Saving also includes reducing expenditures, such as recurring costs. In terms of personal finance, saving specifies low-risk preservation of money, as in a deposit account, versus investment, wherein risk is higher.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving
Read the lies presented to UK savers by IceSave and the Icelandic Financial Services Association.
http://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2008/04/01/icesave-how-safe-are-your-savings-facts-and-myths/
Iceland will pay UK/NL
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100309-708281.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
Icelanders are celebrating a referendum victory that wasn’t.
There is a lot of talk about how the Irish voted for the EU and how countries choose the IMF – well those facts do not make the IMF or the EU “benign”. People arguing this line of thought and trying to downplay the role of the EU in Ireland’s situation are confirming that the EU caused Ireland’s situation in their own arguments – once Ireland joined the EU, Germany/the EU financed the very specific economic situation that occurred in Ireland leading up to the crisis.
I see a mix of blame going around. It seems that some people want to blame the ruling political party and others want to blame the EU. Others act like all voters share the blame for voting to join the EU, and act as if there is no such thing as significant pressure from outside the country to make these decisions in certain ways – which just isn’t true.
The truth is a mixture of this all. The EU was directly responsible because the financial model it supports in its member countries have been the same model that Iceland followed during its boom years. Growth, growth, growth, privatization of profits and nationalization of losses. That is very much what the EU has promoted in all of its new member states, from Estonia in the north to Greece in the south. And Iceland, being a part of the European Economic Area and having had politicians that believe in that same skewed model of unrestrained growth and privatization ended up in the situation it is in for the same reason as countries within the EU. In short: there are striking similarities and differences between what happened to Iceland and Ireland based on their membership statuses vis-a-vis the EU but the core of their problems were based on the same misguided vision of endless growth. In short: the EU doesn’t matter. What matters the most is that voters empower themselves with knowledge of international finance and vote accordingly because these nationalizations of losses prove that EVERY taxpayer is a financier and a banker and thus ought to know how the system, in all it’s murky complicatedness and corruption, works, in order to make better decisions on who should run the country.
And I do hope that the current government does not fall over all this symbolic referendum crap… not that I’m downplaying the importance of the referendum to the Icelandic psyche, but come on, if the government falls because of something like this it just means that Iceland is giving up on trying to fix itself and will be falling to the wolves.
Terry,
“As you say IceSavers were DEPOSITORS (but link them to investors). A big difference.”
Disagree. No difference. They were simply ignorant investors.
Depositors were investors, they were perhaps ill-informed, uneducated, ignorant investors, but investors nevertheless. As I said, ignorance, generally isn’t a defence in law.
Sorry, but taxpayers throughout the world are bailing out the ignorant. Its very very wrong. I just can’t believe, what I think to be sanctimonious attitude of freeloaders, relying on taxpayer bailouts.
As an aside, perhaps the greatest gift a child can receive is to be told they will inherit no family wealth. That they must learn to be a trader.
Micheal said
“Disagree. No difference. They were simply ignorant investors.”
Disagree as you wish – it will not displace reality.
Michael Lewis
Would most of the taxmoney be handled by banks? So that would make almost everybody an ignorant investor( who bails out other ignorants investors. There is a symmetry to that statement )
Why this anger for the taxmoney being used to bailouts(since all assets in a state can be seized by a government. Regulated by the same government who define the difference between a deposit and an investment. Why be angry over the taxmoney and not over the deposits ? )
The depositors trusted the bank to handle the money as a deposit(as that is regulated in England and Holland) as I understand it.
“As an aside, perhaps the greatest gift a child can receive is to be told they will inherit no family wealth. That they must learn to be a trader.” (Is that a comment to Iceland about that children on Iceland is gone inherit the greatest gift ( no family wealth)? )
As far as I remember, there is a legal difference between an investor and a depositor in a bank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depositor
The account holder in a deposit account (i.e. Icesave) retains the right to their money back on demand. The bank has borrowed from its depositor and has contractually obliged itself to repay the customer. To offset this deposit liability, the bank now owns the actual, physical funds deposited, and shows those funds as an asset of the bank.
These contractual obligations do not apply if you are investing in shares etc. You buy a number of shares, and you can sell them for whatever they are worth according to the market.
There is a thread about this distinction somewhere on Icenews, I think.
I would also point out that the Icesave interests rate were not extraordinarily high compared to other accounts at different banks or building societies in the UK.
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2008/02/26/icesave-cuts-interest-rate-on-savings-account/
I’m afraid that the “greedy investors trying to make a lot of money” theory just doesn’t really have much to back it up. Most of the depositors just wanted the best rate they could for their hard earned cash; they assumed that because Icesave was operating under EEA directives, it had the same level of risk as British financial institutions and a similar financial compensation scheme in place.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
And I forgot to say
“Éire Ádh mór, is mian linn go maith leat.”
I hope that this machine translation comes out all right!
Interesting to see the responses.
And to re-iterate – no-one is ‘blaming the immigrants’, but rather the deliberate manipulation of push-pull factors that ends up with human beings treated like cattle to be herded across continents to serve the self-interests of the property/banking cartels.
I do not know enough of the details of the Icelandic situation to draw analogies, and had outlined my reading of recent Irish history as a reposte to those who think that the EU is a benign institution with the best interests of the citizens of it’s member states at heart – I’d read about Icelanders who were becomming more pro-EU as a result of their economic situation and thought that a demonstration of the type of measures the EU supports in order to save it’s skin might add some balance.
As for the querying of Irish immigration figures above, well; There tends to be quite a lot of contradiction (for instance, the simulataneous statements of the presence of either 60,000 or 300,000 Polish citizens in Ireland by the Irish & Polish govt.s respectively a few yeaqrs back.)
I stand by my figures, but in defence of them can only qoute from the Irish Independent of last December:
”New figures show that more than 154,000 foreign nationals were given PPS numbers last year to help them gain access to social welfare benefits, public services and information in Ireland.
This was a drop of more than 60,000 (28pc) on the 2007 figure and almost 72,000 fewer than the peak allocation in 2006.
But fewer than half of last year’s arrivals had employment during the year, according to the latest data from the Central Statistics Office.
Poland accounted for the biggest drop in PPS number allocations last year — plunging by more than 37,000 compared to the figure for 2007.
There were also sharp drops for Lithuania and Slovakia while in contrast, Brazil’s allocation continues to increase — rising by more than 800 to 5,627 last year.
The vast majority of the 425,600 foreign nationals who were given numbers between 2002-2008 had some employment last year.
They were working in five broad economic sectors — real estate, renting and business (94,900), hotels and restaurants (76,800), wholesale and retail trade (75,300), manufacturing (49,500) and construction (37,400).
The figures reveal that of the 118,000 foreign nationals, aged 15 and over, who were assigned numbers in 2004, only 48pc had any employment or engagement with the social welfare system last year.
From 2002-2008, nearly 968,000 foreign nationals, aged 15 and over, were assigned numbers, but by last year less than half were in employment.”
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/immigrants-leaving-in-thousands-applications-for-pps-numbers-by-foreign-nationals-plunge-1988300.html
The official line is that now there is a net fall in population, but the article quoted backs up my claim that immigration figures averaged at over 10 thousand per month last year, and that Irelan received almost a million immigrants (most likely over that, as the figures do not treat of arrivals pre-2002)
Re: Andrew (the other one)
“And I forgot to say
“Éire Ádh mór, is mian linn go maith leat.”
I hope that this machine translation comes out all right!”
It came out right!!
Go raibh míle maith agat!!
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