Senior trade union leaders called for a reappraisal of the country's true manpower position last night in the wake of the Tanaiste's announcement of a new labour market immigration policy for non-EU workers.
SIPTU vice-president, Mr Des Geraghty, called for a skills analysis of the existing pool of asylum-seekers and said that such immigrants should be allowed to work, if they could. He had firm doubts, however, over the policy of seeking workers from outside the EU to fill existing vacancies in the Irish labour market on a grand scale.
"Ours is broadly the same message as the ESRI - the problems stemming from housing shortages and inflationary pressures can only be exacerbated by an influx of foreign employees, when by and large we have the means at our disposal here at home to tackle the problem."
Aspects of the Irish labour market must be addressed, said Mr Geraghty, for example the long-term unemployed. "There are still parts of the country where there are huge pockets of unemployment . . . There was plenty of scope for unemployed people to re-train," he said.
"There are large numbers of workers around the country who could be re-trained to meet most of the existing demand, including large numbers of nurses who had reared their families, for instance, and people prevented from working because of inadequate childcare facilities."
Persons with disabilities comprised another group that could be targeted for training.
The Tanaiste's new immigration policy also received a mixed reaction from the Irish Nurses' Organisation, the largest of the nursing unions.
"We'll be meeting the Minister for Health on Thursday," said INO general secretary, Mr Liam Doran, "to find out the details."
The concern of the union, he said, would be to seek assurances that existing standards of nursing were maintained "in terms of addressing the manpower issue".
Neither the Department of Finance nor the Hospitals Service Employers' Agency was able to address the problem caused by the barriers to re-entry to nursing, Mr Doran insisted.