Arriving in Ireland with little knowledge of the local language and culture can prove daunting for the thousands of east Europeans and Chinese who make this country their home every year.
While information on living and working in Ireland is available online, most of it is scattered across a variety of websites and rarely translated into the languages spoken by our new arrivals. Vaveeva set out to address this issue by providing content in Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Hungarian, English, Bulgarian, Romanian and Chinese.
The scale of immigration from the 10 mostly eastern European states that joined the European Union in 2004 became evident when the initial results of the census were released in March. The census found that the combined numbers from the accession countries amounted to more than 100,000 people.
The total number of non-Irish nationals living here has almost doubled to 420,000 over the past four years, the census showed. Britons made up the largest group of foreign residents, followed by Poles (63,276), Lithuanians (24,638), Nigerians (16,300) and Latvians (13,319).
Among accession states, Poles are clearly the dominant migrant group in Ireland. A recent survey of 109 Poles living here, by Warsaw-based agency Kinoulty Research, found that half of Poles questioned would like to live in Ireland as long as possible, while 18 per cent want to stay here permanently. Barely one-third treat their stay in Ireland as temporary.
Kinoulty Research described the Poles it interviewed as "eminently employable", as 57 per cent of them are under 25 and 34 per cent have higher education.
Indeed, many Poles are over-qualified for their Irish jobs. More than half of those polled are employed in manual labour and 20 per cent work in an office.
"The level of education and confidence among people from these countries is very high," Vaveeva chief executive Christine Donaghy said. "They don't mind working in a hotel or picking fruit for a while as it's an adventure for them, which is the same attitude we had when we were leaving Ireland."
