Deal Or No Deal

So you want to work in Ireland, do you? You'll need a permit. No one can just turn up on the shores of the Emerald Isle and find employment without the proper paperwork. You want that permit, don't you? What's in it for the Irish, so?

Tony Killeen, the Minister of State in the bureaucracy that regulates employment, has cooked up a very clever bit of business. It seems that he was in New York and discovered that Americans have a powerful interest in relocating to Ireland. A sizeable chunk of the population claims Irish ancestry, and apparently there's a few of the descendants who'd like to go back to the aul' sod. Twenty years ago, it would have been laughed at, but with the Celtic Tiger still purring, there's plenty of work for technologically savvy, educated people.

Speaking of twenty years on, there was a time when the Irish flocked to America, year after year, in search of honest work and a decent life. Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Europe for a long time. There's well over 10,000 of them today, living in the US as illegals, keeping a low profile and praying that Congress will pass some sort of amnesty bill. They're afraid to go home to visit, afraid that they'll not be let back in and so lose all that they've built up. Mr. Killeen would like to help the Irish in America so that they might travel back for the funerals and weddings that they now avoid.

Here's the deal. Last year, about 4,000 Americans went to Ireland for work, but only 1,700 Irish made the reverse trip. Quite the net gain, Mr. Killeen has noticed, and there's a way to equalize the work permits. Now, he's not after some kind of preferential treatment for the former denizens of the Shamrock Shore, not a bit of it. All he's proposing is a cozy little bilateral agreement between governments, a way to help the undocumented in America and ease the way for Americans to become documented workers in Ireland.

Sounds simple enough. Even a quota system would be acceptable to the Minister, wherein Ireland grants X-amount of green cards and the US would hand out, oh, say, five times as many. The undocumented Irish could be covered in no time. Americans could have an easier time emigrating and finding work, and isn't that a lovely arrangement for all?

As long as the Yanks don't find out that Ireland is not the best place in which to fall ill. The national health care system is so overburdened that patients often wait for days on a hospital gurney in the hallway, with no beds available in the wards. Not a very comfortable way to be sick, would you say? Then there's the whole 'rip-off Ireland' business, which you'd want to take into consideration when you find out how much you'll get paid at your Irish job. Costs for everything are higher than in most other places, making Dublin a more expensive city to live in than Boston. Education for the little ones? The Catholic Church still runs the schools, so if you're keen on a parochial education, you'll be thrilled to bits.

The Garda Siochana just pulled ten million euro worth of heroin off the streets, and there's an improvement right there. Now, if they could just pull the binge-drinking teens off the streets before they beat one another to death....you don't have teen-agers to worry about, do you?

I have a feeling that Congress would be happy to grant amnesty to the illegal Irish immigrants, but it's equal rights for all and it's not as simple as declaring the Irish welcome and all the Arabs in Michigan are still a bit dodgy. Crafting an agreement between two sovereign nations could very well be the answer, a solution that leaps over a small roadblock and erases one very small part of the undocumented worker problem.