One of the more extraordinary stories of the week was the release of documents from the cross-departmental group on immigration. It wasn't that it forecast the State would need to attract nearly 340,000 people from abroad to fill three-quarters of the jobs to be created under the National Development Plan between 2000 and 2006. It wasn't even that 112,000 of those would be needed to compensate for the 180,000 or so Irish people leaving our buoyant economy for foreign shores.

No, it was the notion that we should consider whether developing the economy and creating these jobs was a good idea if there were no people at home to fill them. In other words, do we want to encourage Johnny Foreigner? For a State that has made a virtue of supplying emigrant labour to burgeoning economies around the world it seems vaguely disconcerting that we should seriously consider undermining our own growth rate so that it would be sufficient to meet only the employment needs of indigenous labour.

To be fair, the Government has not pursued such a policy but that such a mindset exists in a group dealing with immigration is hardly comforting.