Opinion: Government staring down the barrel if economic bubble bursts

THERE will be a lot of rhetoric over the coming days about how ‘well’ Ireland is doing – how we are at maximum employment, how we are planning for a bright future, how major infrastructural projects will deliver ‘sustainable’ growth for the future.

There will also be a murmur about how the government is tackling homelessness, increasing new house builds, providing increased budgets for health and education. There will even be talk about how, with government supports, the population will be able to stave off the adverse effects of creeping inflation.

Isn’t it great to live in a utopian bubble? Some of what will be spouted out of the mouths of ‘intelligent’ people will be true, as will some of the criticism from the opposition benches. All I can say is, I hope it stays fine for all of us because when the bubble bursts, there will be an unbelievable fallout.

Don’t fly off the handle at this one, but have you ever seen as many foreigners working in all sorts of jobs in this country, walking the streets of every city, town and village, quietly going about their daily business?

I’m not passing any kind of judgement, I’m merely stating a fact. If things continue as they are, Ireland is on track to issue a record number of employment permits this year to workers from outside the European economic area.

The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment has approved an average of 3,329 work permits every month so far this year – meaning the total number issued will probably reach around 40,000. Over the past six years, a rough estimate of work permits issued comes in at close to 250,000. That is a lot of people queueing for employment assistance. God forbid the economy tanks and that doesn’t take into account anyone coming from within the EU who do not require a work permit and those who have turned up without any papers, passports or a shred of evidence to back up whatever story they want to spin to claim asylum.

Some argue that these immigrant labourers are doing jobs Irish people no longer want to do. Figures suggest there may be some truth in that, but as anyone who has ever taken note of any figures will tell you, it is easy to justify any argument with statistics, or as they like to say, ‘facts and figures’.

For the record, about one in four of all the permits issued so far this year went to staff in the health and social sectors, sectors we all know have experienced chronic shortages of labour. Next came IT and then hospitality.

I don’t want to sound alarmist or anything and I am certainly not trying to poke any fires, but, as I said, when there is a downturn – and there will be one at some stage ‒ how is the government, any government, expected to be able to come up with the wherewithal to pay social welfare to everyone?

When the lights were turned out the last time, 2012 to be precise, and that was after three years of misery, the numbers in receipt of social welfare went from practically nothing to 356,000 or 15.9% of the workforce. It was dreadful. There wasn’t a bob in the country.

And if you think that was bad, matters were even worse during the 1980s. Those of us old enough remember such a thing as the Self Aid concert held on 17 May 1986.

This was a massive 14-hour benefit concert in the RDS to highlight and raise funds for Ireland’s chronic unemployment crisis. The busiest parts of the country were the ports and airports as thousands of our youngest and brightest were forced to leave the country in search of work.

Today, the average unemployment rate is just below five per cent, which, according to economists, is ‘good’ as we are still meeting the demands of the labour force. Back in the 1980s, that rate was in the high teens. It peaked nationally in December 1985 at 17.3%, but I can remember reporting on the long queues on Kennedy Avenue as people quietly took their place to ‘sign on’ when Carlow was officially declared an unemployment blackspot with an unemployment rate of 19%.

When people get hungry, they get desperate and lash out at those who they perceive to be the problem. Usually in the wrong direction, might I add. Here is the difficulty I have – statistics show that two years ago, this is not me making up these figures, but rather getting them from the Central Statistics Office, Irish workers earned an average €762 a week, whereas workers from one particular country – and I am not going to say from where – outside the European economic area earned an average of €876 a week in 2024.

While overall employment growth cooled in the second quarter of the year, according to the CSO labour force survey, most of the growth is still coming from non-Irish nationals. Data shows that during the first quarter, employment of non-nationals grew by 7.6 per cent compared to 0.6 of those of Irish nationality.

We all saw what happened along the Garvaghy Road and the stand-off between the Portadown District Orange Order and the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition last week. Worse still, many of us remember the riots which took place along that stretch of road in the 1990s.

God forbid we have riots of a different kind in this part of the country should there be a downturn in the economy and people start the blame game, as they will, to justify their actions.