Ireland Labour Research Articles

Tipping the Scales for Labour in Ireland? Collective Bargaining and the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act 2015

Abstract Trade union density in Ireland has followed a similar pattern of decline to that of other Anglo-Saxon economies in recent decades. However, two factors make Ireland distinctive within this classification of countries, firstly the system of national social partnership that prevailed from 1987 to 2008, and secondly, the absence of a statutory route to union recognition. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a new piece of legislation, the Industrial Relations Amendment Act 2015, provides unions with a route to securing bargaining rights for workers and extends collective bargaining rights generally. We conclude that the Act represents a missed opportunity to offer mechanisms to secure rights for unions and their members capable of delivering collective bargaining to the non-union sector. We situate the paper within debates concerning the role of labour law in supporting workers rights to collective bargaining.

Defining Trafficking/Denying Justice? Forced Labour in Ireland and the Consequences of Trafficking Discourse

In 2008 Ireland enacted legislation to define and prosecute human trafficking. The overriding emphasis of the Human Trafficking (Criminal Law) Act is on trafficking as a crime against the state, with provisions to protect victims only vaguely articulated in a separate piece of legislation. The Irish approach thus remains far removed from the victim-centred human-rights-based approach advocated by local lobbyists and international reports, which argue for a shift away from pinpointing movement and coercion as integral to trafficking and focusing instead on exploitation as its essence. The rationale for this was that, while people's movement might initially be deemed to be ‘smuggling’, their eventual exploitation could constitute ‘trafficking’. As this paper will show on the basis of current empirical research into trafficking for forced labour in Ireland, we would concur that exploitation should be understood as the essence of trafficking. Few cases ‘tick all the boxes’ of a rigid definition of trafficking, yet the exploitation of migrant workers is rife. Ironically the long-awaited enshrining of the crime of human trafficking in Irish law may have the undesirable consequence of drawing a line between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ exploited, thereby denying justice to many who migrate for work and find their rights and dignity violated in the process.

‘Aristocracies of thought’: social class in the early folklore of Yeats and Hyde

The years 1888–89 saw the production of two influential collections of Irish folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats and Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta by Douglas Hyde. These works broke strongly with the unscientific and patronising tone of the Buchmärchen tradition in Ireland and established a new theory of folklore. In this theory, Yeats and Hyde distanced peasant narrators in an attempt to secure literary and, ultimately, aristocratic origins for their tales. As a result, Hyde and Yeats, despite their Ascendancy upbringings, could view themselves (and not the peasant narrators) as the legitimate inheritors of folklore narratives. The very stories collected, however, challenge this power dynamic. Stories such as ‘Monachar agus Manachar’ directly critique the perceived unjust division of labour and profit in rural Ireland in a way that parallels the act of folklore collection. The tales themselves resist the rhetorical frameworks of their Ascendancy collectors.

EU Enlargement and Ireland's Labour Market

Ireland, along with Sweden and the UK, allowed full access to its labour market to the citizens of the accession countries when the EU enlarged in May 2004. Given the limited number of countries that opened up and the rapid pace of economic growth in Ireland around 2004, a significant inflow was expected. However, the rate of inflow exceeded all expectations. Based on census information, the number of EU10 nationals living in Ireland grew from around 10,000 in 2002 to 120,000 in 2006. Data on inflows suggests that this number could have reached 200,000 by 2008 or 4.5 percent of the population. The EU10 immigrants have very high employment rates and also have levels of education that are comparable to the native labour force in Ireland. However, they appear to earn considerably less than the native labour force and also to be in lower grade occupations. They have impacted positively on the Irish economy in terms of GNP growth. This is because wages grew more slowing in Ireland than would otherwise have been the case as a result of the labour supply increase brought about by this immigration flow.

From Porto to Portadown: Portuguese workers in Northern Ireland's labour market

While North-Western Europe remains the principal destination for Portuguese emigrants, post-millennium flow has seen the United Kingdom (UK) and Northern Ireland (NI), in particular, emerging as a focal point. As part of a changing labour market demand and supply process, several thousand migrants have now been recruited by agencies to work in the region's rurally based food processing industries. This article quantifies the resurgence of Portuguese emigration trails, explores their recent distribution patterns, and evaluates the role of employment intermediaries in facilitating the flow. Using qualitative discursive techniques the experiences of these players are examined before determining their impacts on the local labour market. Results show that benefits have been brought to a number of localised economies suffering from shortages and working patterns based on substitution and segmentation have been fundamentally altered. At the same time, some small towns have struggled to adapt to this influx and concerns have been raised in relation to work-based problems and the pace of developmental change associated with the growing numbers of Portuguese emigrants in Northern Ireland.

Human capital accumulation in an open labour market: Ireland in the 1990s

Large-scale investment in education in Ireland began in 1967 and has led to a dramatic increase in the relative supply of skilled labour over the past four decades. Furthermore the supply of labour in Ireland is traditionally highly elastic through migration, which in the 1990s was predominantly high-skilled. This combination of rising education levels and an open labour market meant that employment and incomes rose rapidly in the 1990s, while Ireland still maintained a strong competitive position in terms of relative labour costs. In this paper we develop a new macro-economic framework to formally analyse these mechanisms. We estimate a small structural model of the Irish labour market, separately identifying high-skilled and low-skilled labour. We find that this model captures key characteristics of the Irish labour market in the 1990s.

Place, People and Interpretation: Issues of Migrant Labour and Tourism Imagery in Ireland

This paper addresses the contribution of tourism's workforce to destination image and branding and considers the role that employees play in visitors' interpretation of their experience of place. The focus of this paper is on the contribution of working people to the image of place and the potential for contradiction in imagery as the people who inhabit and work within a place change over time. At the same time, those consuming the place as visitors may well have expectations that are fixed in traditional and outdated imagery. The location of this paper is Ireland where the traditional marketing of the tourism brand has given core roles to images of people and the friendliness of Irish hospitality, represented by traditional and homogeneous images. Interpretation of Ireland as a destination, in the tourist literature, by tour guides and within the cultural heritage sector generally, has widely perpetuated these traditional and, arguably, clichéd images. Recent growth in the “Celtic tiger” economy has induced unprecedented and large scale migration from countries across the globe to Ireland, particularly into the tourism sector. This paper raises questions with regard to interpretation and branding of a country as a tourist destination in the light of major changes within the demography and ethnicity of its tourism workforce.

240: A national survey of epidural practices for labour in Ireland 2005

240: A national survey of epidural practices for labour in Ireland 2005

The European election in Northern Ireland

Since 1979 Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, has elected its three MEPs on a Province‐wide basis by the single transferable vote form of proportional representation, one of the biggest elections of its kind. Unlike parliamentary elections, European elections in Northern Ireland have been typified by a higher turnout than the rest of the United Kingdom, with a fair balance in the political represention of the unionist and nationalist communities and a very high proportion of voters seeing their first choice candidate being elected to the European Parliament. In this election nearly 49% of Northern Ireland's electors cast a valid vote, a fraction down on 1989, but of those who did 81.9% saw their preferred candidate elected to the European Parliament. This compares with only 48% who helped elect a candidate in Britain and on a much lower turnout. Mr Patsy McGlone, former general secretary of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party explains what happened.

The politics of frustration: Harry Midgley and the failure of labour in Northern Ireland. By Graham Walker. Pp vi, 241. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1985. £22.50.

The politics of frustration: Harry Midgley and the failure of labour in Northern Ireland. By Graham Walker. Pp vi, 241. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1985. £22.50.

The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland

The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland

Graham S. Walker. The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland. Dover, N. H.: Manchester University Press. 1985. Pp. vi, 241. $30.00.

Graham S. Walker. The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland. Dover, N. H.: Manchester University Press. 1985. Pp. vi, 241. $30.00.