Poles account for the largest group of foreign nationals working in Ireland but it is Indians who are the best paid. In fact, according to Central Statistics Office (CSO) data, they are paid higher, on average, than the Irish.
The data, relating to last year, comes from a report on the Distribution of Earnings by Nationality, which was published on Friday. It shows that Irish nationals now account for just under 74 per cent of jobs in the State.
As a percentage that is about five percentage points down on the figure for 2018, which is provided in the CSO release, but there are almost 108,500 extra jobs being filled by Irish people over those five years. That is because the workforce as a whole grew by close to 14 per cent over the period to 2.46 million jobs.
People from Poland (3.4 per cent of workers) and India (2.6 per cent) are among nine other nationalities in the top 10 most prevalent in the Irish workforce for whom details were broken out. The others are the UK, Romania, Brazil, Lithuania, Spain, Italy and Ukraine. Notably, five of those countries are in the European Union where workers are guaranteed freedom of movement and another, the UK, was until fairly recently. A further 9.9 per cent of the workforce comes from other countries.
As a whole, Irish nationals are better paid than foreign nationals, with their 73.8 per cent of jobs accounting for 76.6 per cent of weekly earnings. Median weekly earnings by Irish nationals in 2023 was €728.05 while the figure was €641.36 for foreign nationals.
However, that last figure hides some anomalies. Indians are better paid than their Irish counterparts, earning €883.74 a week at the median. The British were also higher paid than the Irish, while Italians were the other country whose nationals earned (just) above the national median at €701.78.
At the other end of the scale, Ukrainians fared worst in the job market, with median weekly earnings of just €450.29. They were followed by Brazilians and Lithuanians, both of whom had median earnings of less than €600 a week.
Two reasons explain the outperformance of Indians compared with their Irish counterparts. First, a quarter of Irish workers – far more than any other country – are aged either 15-24 or over 60, ages at which wages tend to be lower. Indian workers are also more concentrated in high-earning sectors such as information and communications technology and human health and social work.
The snapshot provides a lot of detail on Ireland’s growing demands for workers, where those workers are coming from and what jobs they are likely to end up in once here.
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