StarryEyedLad
December 13th, 2007, 03:58 AM
Last Updated: Friday, 7 December 2007, 06:02 GMT
Immigrants trigger Irish rethink
The great and good of Ireland gathered for a conference this week to discuss how to deal with mass immigration - a relatively new phenomenon in a country more used to seeing its own people leave.
The World Tonight's Paul Moss has been in the Republic of Ireland looking at the impact of immigration.
Siobhan O'Donahue was in a hurry.
Trying to nail her down for an interview, you get the impression this is a permanent state of affairs - rushing from one meeting to another, dealing with a succession of increasingly urgent cases.
The director of a drop-in centre that looks after immigrants in Dublin, Siobhan says they are picking up the problems that nobody has sought fit to deal with: schooling, housing, access to healthcare.
She argues that Ireland invited immigrants to come and work, without giving any thought to their wider impact.
"We saw them essentially as units of labour," she says. "We didn't see them as people with social and community needs.
"The planning and infrastructure wasn't put in place."
And there are plenty of people to cater for. This is a country that had few foreign residents right up until the late 1980s.
But then came an economic boom, and a relatively-poor, agricultural nation became instead the "Celtic Tiger".
And to fuel this growth, Ireland decided to allow in workers from the new Eastern European members of the European Union.
The result is that now, more than one in seven people in Ireland was born outside the country.
More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7130698.stm
Immigrants trigger Irish rethink
The great and good of Ireland gathered for a conference this week to discuss how to deal with mass immigration - a relatively new phenomenon in a country more used to seeing its own people leave.
The World Tonight's Paul Moss has been in the Republic of Ireland looking at the impact of immigration.
Siobhan O'Donahue was in a hurry.
Trying to nail her down for an interview, you get the impression this is a permanent state of affairs - rushing from one meeting to another, dealing with a succession of increasingly urgent cases.
The director of a drop-in centre that looks after immigrants in Dublin, Siobhan says they are picking up the problems that nobody has sought fit to deal with: schooling, housing, access to healthcare.
She argues that Ireland invited immigrants to come and work, without giving any thought to their wider impact.
"We saw them essentially as units of labour," she says. "We didn't see them as people with social and community needs.
"The planning and infrastructure wasn't put in place."
And there are plenty of people to cater for. This is a country that had few foreign residents right up until the late 1980s.
But then came an economic boom, and a relatively-poor, agricultural nation became instead the "Celtic Tiger".
And to fuel this growth, Ireland decided to allow in workers from the new Eastern European members of the European Union.
The result is that now, more than one in seven people in Ireland was born outside the country.
More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7130698.stm