The potential benefits of full employment have been diminished by our open economy which leads to employers preferring to hire workers from eastern Europe than from the margins of Irish society, the annual conference of the Irish Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) heard yesterday.
Mike Allen, secretary of the Labour Party and former INOU general secretary, was addressing delegates at the 20th anniversary conference.
He said mass immigration was the biggest challenge facing the organisation and one on which it should be leading the debate.
"The full employment we envisaged in our INOU pamphlets 20 years ago was one in a relatively closed labour market, where employers' demand for labour pulled disadvantaged workers in from the margins."
It had been envisaged that employers who would have rejected "the 50-year-old man from the inner city" or "the lone parent" would help such people overcome the barriers that made employment difficult because they needed the workers.
While the economy had grown, growth had occurred in ways that had benefited those at the bottom only a little, Mr Allen said.
The INOU is "avowedly non-racist" and has worked to build a society that welcomed and celebrated new workers, he added.
"We need to lead the debate on this issue. We need to provide a leadership and to state that our quarrel is not with workers coming in - but our quarrel is with our own State and the institutions which have been set up to assist the disadvantaged but have failed to do so.
"Our quarrel is with the poor education given to children in disadvantaged areas, still; is with the fact that they go to school hungry, still; that Fás see their responsibility to the unemployed as a drag on their brand, still; that it is considered inevitable that large numbers of Irish people will remain unemployed and impoverished over their entire lives as a result, still."
He said these issues were not the fault of immigrants but of Irish society.
Bríd O'Brien, senior policy officer with the INOU, said endemic discrimination in the workplace had to be tackled if unemployment and long-term unemployment in some sectors was to be addressed.
Though unemployment nationally is about 4.5 per cent, she said in some disadvantaged areas it was 10 per cent. "
She gave an example of a man in his late 40s who had been working in IT and had left employment to go back to college to gain some qualifications.
"He thought he was doing the right thing but then found he could not get work while his classmates were having no problems," Ms O'Brien said. Lack of childcare was a barrier that kept many women under-employed in low-paid work, she added.
