Lenihan: 'Important to avoid mistakes on immigration'

Minister for Integration Conor Lenihan has said that Ireland must not make the same mistakes other countries have with regard to immigration.

Speaking today on RTE Radio, Minister Lenihan said: “We have come through intense period of economic growth and inward migration. In the next few years we have to get it right and not make the same kind of mistakes they made in France, Holland, Germany, Britain.”

The minister has been predicting that levels of immigrants will have settled down to a more manageable level.

He said: “There has been evidence that many eastern Europeans are moving to London because of the big building boom around the Olympics.”

There has also been a doubling in recent weeks of non-Irish people signing on the dole.

However, the Minister said that immigrants have to be in Ireland for more than two years to qualify for social welfare.

He also said that “a backlash against immigrants” was a factor in the vote against the Lisbon Treaty.

“It was definitely a feature on the ground during the campaign. The official surveys would bear that out.

“There has been an awful lot of dislocation in Ireland. I think a lot of people feel dislocated. The sheer numbers of people coming in. And obviously myths are propounding about migrants as well, which are not fair and true.”

He said that there is “no evidence of employers taking Polish or eastern European workers and taking Irish people out of jobs.”

Minister Lenihan stressed the importance of the availability of English language classes for immigrants.

“One of big challenges is getting active labour market immigrants to take up English language courses.

“They are extremely busy and working. So what we have got to do is look around issues of making it mandatory, maybe taking into consideration that employers give people the time off so that they can actually acquire the English language.”

Language acquisition and housing allocation are the two very important factors for managing immigration, he said.