The Irish economy is growing strongly, but there is a risk many households will be left behind despite robust growth. High joblessness especially among the low-educated and skill-biased wage differentials have induced high market income inequality, among the highest in the OECD. Ireland’s comprehensive welfare system provides a broad range of social benefits, which keeps jobless households out of poverty, but this reduces the financial incentives to work, especially for families with children. Structural unemployment is also explained by the lack of skills required to find employment in the Irish labour market, where the presence of multinational enterprises increases the reward for high skills and the penalty for poor skills. With the unemployed pool lacking the right skills and financial incentives, employers tend to resort to foreign workers, a practice facilitated by the well-functioning migration system. Getting more people into work is important to share the benefits of the recovery as widely as possible. This requires building up work capacity, especially by improving jobseekers’ training, and ensuring welfare recipients honour their JobPath commitments in return. More needs to be done to increase incentive to work by reducing welfare and low-income traps. This should be done by shifting the tax burden from labour to indirect taxes in a progressive way that does not harm the lowest income groups.

The Irish labour market is exceptionally open to international migration flows, thus making labour supply highly responsive to changes in cyclical conditions. Immigration also provides the skills that the Irish economy needs.. Prior to the recession, it provided labour for the construction sector. The crisis triggered a sharp reversal in migration flows, with immigration suddenly halting and emigration increasing. A large proportion of emigration is highly qualified, as is a high proportion of immigration. This pattern of brain exchange can contribute to reducing skills skills mismatches, but also raises the challenge of remaining attractive for skilled workers. This chapter examines how the crisis has affected migration, how related policies have evolved and proposes avenues to spread the benefits of migration beyond the scope of multinational enterprises, in particular to Irish SMEs. The proportion of Irish-born population living abroad is very large and the chapter also analyses what role return migration could play, what policies are in place to maintain links with emigrant’s communities abroad and how they can be strengthened. Ireland has recently experienced, for the first time in its history, large-scale immigration. As a result, it currently hosts a large and very heterogeneous immigrant community, with diverging challenges and needs. Getting integration policies right is therefore a complex, but crucial task. The chapter identifies what are the key challenges in this area and proposes some avenues to foster the labour market integration of immigrants. Ireland is also starting to experience challenges associated with the integration of second generation immigrants. To respond to those challenges, the chapter recommends early action in education and social domains.

Emigration : log(EtDD ) = c + b * log(Et-1DD ) + d* ( UNRtDD - UNRtIRL )