Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

The ESRI released a report during the week saying 100k were added to the numbers in work

Is there a correlation between migrant numbers and numbers at work, just asking as it gives a picture on whether migration is a non issue? Rather a failure in housing/governance

well if the employment rate isn’t falling then it’s either people taking multiple jobs or immigration. You can look at no of work permits issued but that only shows non EU immigrants. You won’t see EU immigrants (nor non EU immigrants that have a EU passport from parents/grandparents). And then you have asylum seekers who are allowed to work after a certain period. I wouldn’t be surprised if the no of new builds wasn’t sufficient to house the increases we have seen recently.

On the flip side a lot of these immigrants are needed to

• provide essential services (doctors, nurses, builders etc.) to keep the country attempting to function.
• Needed to feed the multinationals expansions

Another side that is not discussed is the increase in tax take (income tax, vat etc) that is generated and instead it is painted as we increased spending on x but in reality spending per head has dropped.

unfortunately due to extreme views on left and right it’s impossible to have a constructive conversation on the topic without being called extreme left or extreme right so most people will form a view (sometimes without considering all the relevant information) but will not express this in public because of fear of being labelled. But yes it is as important in my mind as the ability to build new houses.

Am I making things up or maybe glassdoor is skewed data of top earners as opposed to what jobs are recruited at. Don't be quick to call somebody a liar when you are the one using one source for your data. My view is based on friends and relative working in the USA and my own experience

https://www.indeed.com/career/test-manager/salaries/Boston--MA?from=top_sb

First I have heard of the elimination of test roles. Very important legally for government contracts and those servicing the government. It tends to be a crucial part of SDLC and clients use it to determine if their needs are met. I know people working here and there and the salaries are not that different generally but in certain areas and certain companies pay way more. The title maybe the same but the work is not. There is a huge amount of Indian people coming over here which are probably keeping salaries down here. I have been in a few meetings and been the only Irish native there

Should we change the name of the thread? Perhaps rename the forum too?

Can this not be discussed on some IT thread

Apparently not. Being seen to be "right" about this topic is just that important to them. So much so that they'll go back and forth for days in their quest to prove a stranger wrong.

Such a flat market for purchases.

I wonder where one off home builds is on top of this though. They all get the FTB grant and would be in house completions stat but not in purchases. That should be fairly significant number.

As said we have 100k extra people at work in 12 months, net inward migration is 80k plus 15k ipa

By far the biggest rise in net inward migration is from the issuing of work permits. The 33,000 work permits issued by the Department of Enterprise Trade & Employment so far this year came on top of 70,000 over the previous two years

These 33k issued this year went to India (11k) with the majority of the remainder going to Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa

The highest paid demographic in Ireland is Of Indian descent so clearly they appear to be taking roles that we are struggling to fill

Of the 100k extra jobs the dominant sectors were professional services, It and communication, science and technology. Most of these jobs are from multinational sector. These jobs are well flagged in advance and the State has plenty of time to plan and develop infrastructure to accommodate these extra jobs that deliver significant tax to the state.

2 sectors lost jobs over the same period; agriculture and retail/wholesale predominantly lower paid sectors

Builders have recently expressed concerns on water and electrical infrastructure as well as planning issues holding up there progress in delivering much needed supply to the point that they may have to consider laying off staff. They have even offered to the work themselves. This at best shows that the sector is inefficient reducing output and increasing costs for what they can get built.

Migration is predominately meeting an economic need while the state and it's apparatus is incapable and even blocking the infrastructure needed for the country to thrive

Migration data last 10 mins

Employment data last 10 minutes

Since posting RTE have released this

100k more people in the state is 100k more people in the state, regardless of why they're here. I'm not really sure what your point is.

However, if I understand you correctly, you're making an economic argument for immigration on this scale. You're probably correct that these people are filling jobs necessary for the economy, but this is rather missing something that I think needs to be said. Namely, if the economy has grown to a point where it consistently needs more and more people to be sustained, then it has grown beyond the capacity of its host country (Ireland) to sustain.

Fully agree. Do not understand pushing demand side incentives

Post 1/2

We had housing problems long before mass migration, exacerbated of course by migration. I assume we train enough nurses to cover our needs, yet university hospital Limerick had to bring in 214 staff under work permits this year alone.

That hospital is undertaking ongoing expansion for a decade now. How much notice does it require to get your ducks in a row to prepare for this need, nearby Eli Lily have commenced production with at least 5 years notice. Regeneron, Stryker, analog Devices, Edwards Lifesciences, Northern trust, COOK Medical, all expanding, all giving plenty of notice, all facilities with or heading towards 1k plus employees

When Dell manafacturing left, we were quick to establish that on top of the 2k jobs lost, a further 8k jobs would be lost in support industries. Why is there no urgency to provide the infrastructure needed when the opposite happens

Where is the planning to provide the housing, energy, water infrastructure. The state and it's apparatus blocked a privately funded LNG facility on the Shannon Estuary while down the road they were burning coal to meet electricity needs. The city is surrounded by vast swathes of farmland, 2 golf courses in the city environs. The main streets in the city would be predominantly derelict if it weren't for a plethora of migrant run businesses. Where is the urgency to deliver housing.

Are we proposing to let all this private investment leave because we are incapable or blocking the infrastructure needed for it to thrive. A nation that once bragged of building London and New York

How do we solve this incredible opportunity. Do we vote out those in power or do we presure there voters to convince them to try and meet the needs of the nation while we have the money, land and clearly we can attract the labour required

Not excusing the stupid costs we get here, but one could not expect the costs of a large construction project in a densely populated area to be on a par with one which I presume is in a low density area.

Given approaching approx 30,000 of that 100,000 figure are asylum seekers - who are a huge drain on government finances for many years, and need to be directly housed by the Irish state - they're the very obvious first cut to make to help reduce the immigration pressure on the housing market.

Cutting asylum seeker numbers by 90% (as Denmark has done) would be the equivalent of building an extra 10,000 housing units or so per year. That would make an instant, massive, difference to the housing market. And it wouldn't cost the state a cent - it would actually save us about €1bn a year in government spending. And it could be done almost overnight if we just copied Denmark's policies word for word.

Cutting work visas is likely more economically damaging, but could also be considered - maybe more restrictions on which jobs qualify (only essential services like nurses, or else jobs that pay over a certain high threshhold). But it would probably be possible to shave another 10,000 or 20,000 arrivals off fairly easily that way, too.

I believe Sweden too has reduced immigration greatly:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/19/sweden-negative-net-immigration-figure-record-low-asylum-application-global-displacement

It's a Guardian article, so obviously it's going to be laced with appeals to emotion, but the facts are behind it. Ireland is, however, no where near this. Immigration has only creeped into open discussion in recent months when it became too large an issue to ignore anymore