Ronan Lyons uses data--I know! Data!--to skewer Mayor Kiely's remarks on foreign nationals in Ireland, while also highlighting a disturbing trend amongst this new population.
Did you know, for example, that an average of 43,000 people from the new EU member states signed on during the third quarter of the year? Sure, this may be nothing, compared to the 350,000+ Irish signing on. And sure, the problem looks to have turned a corner with the numbers signing-on falling every month since April. But I think you will agree from the graph below (the red line is the one we’re worried about, just in case you’re wondering), new-EU signers-on is a problem that is getting out of hand. Just think, in early 2004, there were only a couple of hundred of them signing on!
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It gets worse for Mayor Kiely. Summing up over the past 12 months, their contribution to the Exchequer has been about €1bn, while the Government has had to pay out about €350m. Perhaps, in some alternate universe, if there’d be 50 times as many of them (that’s right, if they’d doubled our population), we would have a problem and even then only a problem about as large as our government finances!
And that’s before taking into account things like the VAT the Goverment gets from their day-to-day expenditure. Or that the presence of 175,000 workers and their families has helped sustain Irish businesses that depend on consumer expenditure. Or any number of other factors.