Ireland will need 50,000 workers from outside the State each year for the next 12 years if current levels of economic growth are to be maintained, the Minister for Social Affairs, Séamus Brennan, said yesterday.
Quoting Central Statistics Office figures, he acknowledged that while "wise heads may question whether we should try to sustain such levels" of economic activity, it was important that workers from abroad were made to feel welcome here, just as the Irish had been when they helped to build other countries.
Mr Brennan was speaking in Dublin at the launch of Returning to Ireland, an information booklet for Irish emigrants intending to come home. It gives details of social welfare entitlements, pensions, taxation, education, accommodation and health provisions in the State.
The booklet was prepared by Emigrant Advice, which is part of Crosscare, Dublin's Catholic archdiocese care agency, and was funded by Mr Brennan's department.
Emigrant Advice co-ordinator Yvonne Fleming said that in 2002, 2003 and 2004, some 61,400 Irish emigrants returned home, an average of more than 20,000 a year. The Returning to Ireland booklet was intended to help them make a "huge adjustment".
The agency's information officer, Paula Lally, said the booklet would be available at 500 locations worldwide, including all Irish embassies and consulates and at citizen information centres, social welfare offices and related agencies in Ireland.
It is also available at www.emigrantadvice.ie.
Mr Brennan said that "many Irish emigrants, those referred to by president Robinson as the 'diaspora', naturally cherish a deep aspiration to return to the land of their birth to work or retire".
To do so they needed to be able to make informed decisions, he said. It was therefore "essential that they have available to them up-to-date information", and "it was important that people realise there are costs as well as benefits involved in deciding to come back to Ireland".