latvia

ronbyrne2005

i feel jealous of the latvians,they can come here and work for a few years without any qualifications/skills and return home and buy a home with cash/no mortgage or a business,imagine if we could go to a foreign country and earn enough to be able to pay off our house in a few years!

sunday times
IT COULD be Ireland in the 1980s: a brain drain of talented young people leaving their families and their country to seek higher pay and a better life abroad.
But this time it is Latvia, as thousands of its people flock to Ireland in search of jobs picking mushrooms. It is estimated that in some rural villages up to one-third of the inhabitants have left for back-breaking work in the republic.



The exodus is the theme of a best-selling book written by one of the mushroom pickers, a mother of four who shared a three-room house near Dublin with 11 other Latvians and picked mushrooms from dawn to dusk.

Laima Muktupavela says the Irish farm-owner told Latvian workers not to wear gloves, and the mushrooms eventually turned their fingers black. She earned about €250 a week, more than four times the minimum wage in Latvia.

Muktupavela’s book about her experiences, The Mushroom Covenant, has captured the Latvian zeitgeist, as well as being a bestseller and winning a literary award. There is a growing fear that Latvia is losing its best young talent to Ireland, leaving gaps in the workforce at home and a shortage of key personnel, such as doctors.

“There is hardly a family left in this country who hasn’t lost a son or daughter or mother or father to the mushroom farms of Ireland,” Muktupavela, 43, told the International Herald Tribune last week.

“During the cold war, we all dreamed of leaving but the risk is that if everyone leaves, then the country will disappear.”

Muktupavela credits her experience in Ireland with making her a more independent person. Now writing her fifth novel, and working on a film about migration, she is considering buying a house near an Irish mushroom farm.

She points out that Latvia’s experience is similar to Ireland’s in previous generations, but believes the new EU member can turn it around as Ireland did. “Twenty years from now it is the Irish who will be flooding into Latvia and not the other way around,” she said.

Jekabs Nakums, a Latvian athlete who represented his country in the Olympics, reopened the debate within Latvia by announcing recently on television that he was leaving to wash cars in Ireland.

In the Latgale region of eastern Lativa, parents who emigrate sometimes leave children behind creating a generation of “mushroom orphans”.

Since Latvia joined the EU in May 2004, its people are free to travel to other member states in search of work. It is estimated that there are between 20,000 to 30,000 Latvians and Lithuanians in Ireland. There are doubts over the exact figure because there are many illegal or unregistered cases.

While Ireland and Britain worry about the influx of workers, Latvia, with a population of just 2.3m, is increasingly concerned about losing so many of its people. Latvian officials have estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people have left since accession in May 2004, a rate of departure that puts Irish emigration in the 1950s and 1980s in the shade.

edanto

Not really that surprising or contentious. What do you think?

mike65

ronbyrne2005, it is against the rulez of da charter to simply post an article without adding your own views.

Mike.

ronbyrne2005

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

i feel jealous of the latvians,they can come here and work for a few years without any qualifications/skills and return home and buy a home with cash/no mortgage or a business,imagine if we could go to a foreign country and earn enough to be able to pay off our house in a few years!

Isnt that what we the Irish did for years in Britain and the U.S.
People came home and bought farms.
Theres inward migration nowadays where the Irish people who have worked abroad because there was nothing here for years in the 80's and early 90's are coming back and getting jobs here.
In the meantime they saved us all a fortune in dole,had they stayed put.

What is it with this incorrect revisionism...

ronbyrne2005

Earthman wrote:

Isnt that what we the Irish did for years in Britain and the U.S.
People came home and bought farms.
Theres inward migration nowadays where the Irish people who have worked abroad because there was nothing here for years in the 80's and early 90's are coming back and getting jobs here.
In the meantime they saved us all a fortune in dole,had they stayed put.

What is it with this incorrect revisionism...

yes the irish did the same but i am a young man and theres no such option for me:( i am talking about opportunities available to young irish people today. a young unskilled irish person on low wage can never hope to afford their own home,a similar latvian can.

LORDOFDOOM

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

a young unskilled irish person on low wage can never hope to afford their own home

They can if they move to latvia.

Ron, why feel jealous when you have the same oppourtunity as they do? In fact you probably have a better oppourtunity than do. You're probably already fluent in English, used to Irish Culture and won't have to leave most of your family & friends behind. I believe in you Ron, with a few years of saving in Ireland,doing jobs most Irish people don't want to, you too could buy a house in Latvia.

billy the squid

i feel jealous of the latvians,they can come here and work for a few years without any qualifications/skills and return home and buy a home with cash/no mortgage or a business,imagine if we could go to a foreign country and earn enough to be able to pay off our house in a few years!

well after living for at least 20 years in this country surely you have enough to save and live like a king in Latvia.

with all these thousands upon thousands of people from latvia queueing up to work for the shipping industry there must be a labour shortage so you wont have any problems finding work there.

meldrew

So you're jealous of leaving your family at home to go and be exploited and looked down on , and live three and four in a room in a cramped flat barely looking after yourself and having absolutely no quality of life .
Jeez what do you think of the Celtic Tiger generation then ?

MrJoeSoap

I work with some Lithuanian girls and they are decent, honest workers, and some of the nicest people you could meet. They come here to earn enough money to go home after a few years and live in relative comfort, why should we begrudge them that? We can quite easily earn our money here (where the going is reasonably good) and move away to a whole range of countries where we might enjoy a high standard of living. Being envious of "Latvians" (there are far more nationalities doing it than merely Latvians) isn't going to get us anywhere.

Zombrex

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

yes the irish did the same but i am a young man and theres no such option for me:( i am talking about opportunities available to young irish people today. a young unskilled irish person on low wage can never hope to afford their own home,a similar latvian can.

Jesus christ, i hope you are being sarcastic :rolleyes:

He can if he moves to Latvia!

Zombrex

MrJoeSoap wrote:

I work with some Lithuanian girls and they are decent, honest workers, and some of the nicest people you could meet.

They are also probably very very hot!! :eek: ...

we have cleaners in work from Ukraine and they are all drop dead stunning ... so people have to shut up about Eastern European people coming and working here!! Its great!

BrianD

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

i feel jealous of the latvians,they can come here and work for a few years without any qualifications/skills and return home and buy a home with cash/no mortgage or a business,imagine if we could go to a foreign country and earn enough to be able to pay off our house in a few years!

Reminds me about the Irish up to not so long ago except the Latvians don't go on about how they built the country they moved to.

The reason why they can afford a house is that their property market works on real market forces and without the bad planning and corruption that we have here.

BTW you'll probably find that most migrant workers are actually over qualified to get jobs here but "fall down" because their english is not good enough. Anti-competitive practices amongst the professional associations means that those who are doctors, lawyers, dentists etc. can not practice their profession here.

MrJoeSoap

Wicknight wrote:

They are also probably very very hot!! :eek: ...

Goes without saying!

gaf1983

BrianD wrote:

Anti-competitive practices amongst the professional associations means that those who are doctors, lawyers, dentists etc. can not practice their profession here.

I'm not sure about doctors and dentists, but foreign lawyers can definately practice here as long as they retrain in the Irish system- a considerable number of Czech and Polish lawyers are already practicing in Ireland. I presume the system is similar with doctors or dentists.

Regarding the OP's jealousy of the Latvians, I presume if we moved to Iceland or Norway and found high-paying low-skilled work there we could do so and therefore save up enough after a good many years to afford a house in Ireland. Thankfully the economy is sufficiently strong that most Irish people now have the choice of whether to move or not - for many economic migrants, they don't have much of a real choice.