Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Brendan O'Connor on RTE Radio 1.
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Good morning. You're very welcome to the show. And I have four blushing flowers of panelists here in front of me. So before we meet them, let's have a look at the front pages. The Sunday Times is leading with Fine Gael. TDs are urging Simon Harris for budget largesse.
He's coming under pressure, according to Jennifer Bray, from his backbenchers to unveil further financial supports to tackle the cost of living. The business post is gone large on AI. Their front page is, this is different. Stark grad jobs slump deepens coalition's AI fears.
The number of young workers in the Irish tech sector has plummeted since 2023, apparently as fears over the impact of AI on the country's economy grow within government. And there are lots of pieces inside there about that. The Mail on Sunday is leading with new get tough battle plan for bogus migrants. We can no longer be a soft touch, says one anonymous cabinet minister.
No, look, what it is, is increasing the number of border security staff hitting airlines and ferry companies that fail to comply with obligations to carry out passport checks, increase spot checks on passengers arriving at the airports and withdraw accommodation from asylum seekers who fail to comply with the international protection process.
The Sunday Independent has a poll and their headline is out of that nearly 80% back ending supports for Ukrainians according to that poll we'll come to that and the Mirror has the very sad funeral of Callum Hutchinson.
Callum Hutchinson is 16 and he died last weekend in a car crash and speaking at his funeral in County Tipperary his father Michael said fly high my boy I know you're in the hands of God now. our panel this morning. Niall Boylan is a talk show host and a former independent Ireland candidate in the European Parliament elections. Alison O'Connor is a political commentator with the Sunday Times.
Alan Barrett is a research professor at the ESRI. And Seanna Cohen is executive director of the independent think tank TASC. Good morning, everyone.
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Chapter 2: What are the main headlines from this week's newspapers?
Morning. Alison, this is different according to the front page of the Business Post. AI is coming to get us and we seem to be waking up.
There's a lot of reading in the Sunday papers this morning. If you don't, you know, if you have looking for things to do with your bank holiday Sunday. But if you're in any way worried about AI, I wouldn't really read the business post this morning. It'll knock the stuffing out of you if you're interested in it. Absolutely. This is sort of putting numbers.
We've all been concerned about about this at every level globally. Particular concerns, I think, about AI. If you have or if you're a graduate about to about to leave college and enter the job market.
And basically this story, this lead story is saying that they've obtained figures that show numbers from 15 to 29 year olds, the key new graduate cohort cohort working in tech, that it has declined by more than 11000 from 36000 at the beginning of 2023. So from 36,000 to 25,000 by the end of last year.
And that really is putting, you know, meat on the bones of, I suppose, what we've all been worrying about. I know that when Micheál Martin, when the Taoiseach was in Washington in March, a number of industry leaders in Irish-American industry that he met there, there was talk of that and how, you know, the need to prepare, the need to prepare for that.
But the question is, how do you prepare your population? That really is a very difficult one. And the other thing is they're quoting a source over over new graduates saying that the worry for policymakers was that AI would automate.
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Chapter 3: How is AI impacting the job market in Ireland?
high, higher skilled jobs. I suppose up to this, the concern has been the lower skilled jobs. But I suppose as the AI is developing and going along, obviously the worry is that it'll be able to do more and more. So I suppose it's with everything else that's going on, the wars, the fuel crisis, AI is another one of those things that we need to bring to the front of our minds.
And I suppose it's yet another uncontrollable crisis. Yeah.
And Alan, unpredictable. I know you guys have been doing a lot of work on this in the ESRI. Yeah. But it is kind of unpredictable. And John Byrne Murdoch, you know, that very good young data journalist in the FT, he's basically saying all the time, he's looking at the numbers all the time and he's saying we just don't know.
Because number one, everyone says the amount of computer programmers has not declined, actually. Right. Overall, he made an interesting point recently, which is that everyone thought that ATMs would be the thing that would put bank tellers out of business. But in fact, it was the mobile phone. So we just you can never tell, can you?
No, that's absolutely true. I mean, AI, its impact on the global economy is kind of unusual at the moment because we have to remember there's a phenomenal amount of money being invested in AI at the moment.
So when we hear things like, in spite of a lot of the economic troubles, that the world economy is actually showing a great degree of resilience, one of the reasons it's showing resilience is that you have this phenomenal amount of investment going on there.
So the four hyperscalers who are meta, alpha, grid, Microsoft and Amazon are investing three quarters of a trillion this year in AI.
And a lot of that's in data centres. Exactly. So there's a huge amount going on there. But at the same time, that's the sort of, you know, the positive impetus. The concerning side, as Alison has just been talking about then, is the extent to which there's this potential for job destruction.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the new migrant policies?
Now, Ireland, just to add to the vulnerability of the sense of unease around this. I mean, I've talked to my colleagues in the Institute doing work on it. And we could end up in Ireland with the following situation. I mean, if you think about the sort of the world economy generally. All right. There's always this sort of sense about new technologies. Well, even if they destroy some jobs.
They're going to increase productivity. And so you will create new jobs. OK, now that's almost invariably true. But there's always a sense that in moving from A to B, there can be a lot of people who can be sort of left behind. OK, it's not necessarily the same people getting, you know, just seamlessly transitioning into the industry. the new job.
So that's always a worry and we're obviously vulnerable to that. And then you can have these sort of situations that say, for example, if you have people who are coming onto the labour market at a particular point in time, if they're in a sense victims of that changeover, if you start the labour, you know, your career in a bad situation, it can actually sort of follow you for quite a long time.
So you have those difficulties. But the additional problem in Ireland is the following. We could fall into the trap that we have job destruction in Ireland But the job positives could be elsewhere. OK, so if you think about the Irish economy.
So we're winners in the current status quo.
At the moment, we absolutely are. But just given the nature of the Irish economy, where we have such a strong foreign direct investment base here, where you have activities, some activities being done here and other activities being done elsewhere.
And this was one of the questions I brought to my ESRI colleagues because they were essentially sort of saying, well, that in Ireland in general, you could see a loss of income as a result. And I sort of asked the question, well, why would you have a loss of income? I mean, if this is positive and negative,
And the answer potentially was this idea that we could suffer the job losses without necessarily, certainly in the short term, getting the plus.
I think part of it isn't that what Ireland does is a lot of support roles and those roles are more likely to be impacted by AI. They are people working in multinationals. I think I saw an average earning figure this week for 150,000.
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Chapter 5: What are the public's sentiments regarding government support for Ukrainians?
But we continually in Ireland talk about the fragility of the corporation tax base. OK, but this was pointed out to me sort of quite a while ago, theoretically. And again, it's one of these things that's now coming onto the agenda in a more practical sense. These are also high taxpayers. And so to the extent that that fragility is there.
I mean, I know we think we're complete world beaters at the moment of the Irish public finances are an amazing state. People like me and others continually talk about the vulnerabilities. And this is yet another vulnerability that's coming to the fore.
Yeah, yeah. A moment for me recently was a friend of mine said that her son, who had done an economics degree, there was a thing when back when I was in college, a kind of a milk round at the every under did business degrees were then wooed by all these big companies that went in at a lower level, kind of counting widgets a lot of the time and stuff.
But then they progressed on through it and everything. So she said her son had decided to do something else, right? Something completely different. She said he is now glad he is because a lot of his friends who had places in the big companies set up, they're now being cancelled. And that was fairly stark, I thought.
Niall? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people, I think, in the industry, I know people who work in the tech industry, And they're extremely worried at the moment. I spoke to one there recently, and he was saying there's a lot of layoffs in his particular place where he works that he's concerned, even though he'd be in a very good position.
I think Ireland is probably very financially vulnerable here too, of course, because we rely so much on the tech companies in this country. But I thought Lucinda Creighton's article was really interesting. She said basically one approach should be to focus and develop an expanding labour-intensive work and AI-resistant work and jobs in the future.
Because this is not like back in the 70s when we were concerned about the ATM machines or concerned about the self-checkouts where we thought, oh, well, look, somebody has to make those self-checkouts. Somebody has to design that software. So those jobs will be just replaced with other jobs. The difference with AI is it replaces itself. In other words, it's designing its own software.
So there's nothing to replace it with. So there's no job that's going to be made available. Well, there will be some, but not a huge amount.
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Chapter 6: How do the panelists view the current political landscape?
So I think we have to be really concerned because I think we're very vulnerable in this country because we have so many tech companies in this country. And I think this comes back to focusing on talking to young people about alternate careers. I mean, we're missing so many manual careers.
You can be a millionaire now if you're a plumber or an electrician, but they don't want to get their hands dirty because they've grown up in this technological age, which is going to be replaced by AI, where nobody's going to be needed to design these programs anymore, these apps or whatever it happens to be. It'll be designing itself. Yeah, Seamus, you were looking at this too.
I think there's a political problem that, following on from that, that young people feel like they won't have any opportunities. And then David McWilliams had a really interesting piece, and he said that the revolution's not going to come from the proletariat. It might come from the highly educated, disaffected young people who don't see opportunities.
So to get ahead of it, I think it's right that the government needs to be thinking about what are alternative career paths, but also the domestic economy. There is this longstanding issue of reliance on American companies for the most part and foreign direct investment while neglecting the domestic economy, the domestic tech sector and other industries.
And the government should focus attention on how to raise value added in the domestic economy and how to produce jobs in the domestic economy. as an alternative to just relying upon the tax income and the job creation of multinationals.
Yeah. OK. Interestingly, the big driver of growth in the American economy last year was health, health care. And there's absolutely going to be jobs there into the future beyond all this, isn't there? Now, this is kind of related, but a different one. The Mail on Sunday cover new get tough policy. battle plan for bogus migrants, Alison?
Yeah, this is what was announced. We had the announcement earlier on the week about Ukrainians who came to Ireland in the wake of the war. And I suppose it's really what has struck me about all of this is how we've come full circle in a relatively short space of time, the pendulum literally going from one side to the other,
in terms of the welcome that we gave Ukrainians, the packages that we put in place, the financial packages, the assistance. And I think there is maybe an argument that we got a little bit carried away with ourselves, understandably so maybe, but in terms of the commitments we gave then, which makes the withdrawing of them now, I suppose, all the more stark.
So in the mail, John Lee and Colin McGurk are writing, and they're saying that we can... quoting an anonymous cabinet minister saying we can no longer be seen as a soft touch. And they're going through some of the details of a document of a fairer but firmer system.
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Chapter 7: How are economic pressures affecting voter behavior?
Just because the war is off our radar a bit. Well, it's not off the radar.
It's still happening.
Yeah, but it's off our radar. It is like, I mean, that's a huge part of it. We talked about little else for a while. We're focused more on the Middle East now. The bombs are still raining down. They're raining down in places in the west of Ukraine. People say there's no safe place for a child in Ukraine.
No, I'm not saying we should support people. Of course we should support people, absolutely support people. And we should be helping people as much as we possibly can. Those who are asylum seekers, those who come here, for example, under temporary protection from Ukraine, we should be helping people. But there's a limit to what we can do as a nation. We have our own problems.
We have our own homeless people. We have our own housing crisis. A lot of that, and I agree with me, Al Martin, is compounded by the amount of people that have come to the country. We have to be careful how we deal with things. I know this idea that, you know, you must look after your own first is some sort of racist rhetoric or right wing rhetoric. It's not.
That's the job of the government to look after its own citizens.
If you need to look after your own first, right, you will never end. I've never used that term personally. I know, yeah, but just let me finish the sentence. You will never end up looking after anyone else because our own will never be looked after enough.
We should. I just said we should look after. Can I interject just for a minute? Let Niall finish and then I want to bring Alan in and then you can come back. Well, we reduced it from 800 down to 400 now, I think it is. I think it went down to six to four and then it'll be gone in the next year.
But if a Ukrainian person finds themselves in a situation where they don't have a job and they do have a high unemployment rate in Ireland, which is surprising after four years, by the way, it's between 30 and 40 percent, which is a high unemployment rate. There's a lot of single mothers as well. But that's leaving aside those not available to work, those over the age of 65, et cetera, et cetera.
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Chapter 8: What challenges are Irish graduates facing in the job market?
Agreed. But I think over time, there's an emerging feeling that, you know, the differential treatments or whatever like that are perfectly reasonable over a period of time. But again, over a period of times, there's an expectation that you integrate the same thing. There seems to be general agreement here.
I would say, yes, I can understand the point that Anne is making, that people feel like after four years, you could get your life together. But for a single parent with small children, that might be quite challenging.
But there are Irish single parents with small children.
I got that. But if you look at what the major concerns are for Irish respondents in the poll, if you look at housing and health care, they are very immigrant workforce dependent. And so I think part of the problem is, again, going back to the macro issue, that the government's immigration policy has to be coherent. You have health care facilities or hospice care or, you know, home care.
And we do have a system for people who are needed in those areas to come in and work here, don't we?
People confuse the two of those, I'm not having a go, but people confuse the two of those. When we talk about immigration, you have to talk about people who come here legitimately to a visa system and work through agencies and health care, whatever it happens to be, and are part of our economy and very welcome to be part of our economy. And those who come here uninvited.
And I'm not just talking about Ukrainians, by the way. They were invited, obviously.
Right. But the point is that Ireland needs immigrants. I'm not saying it doesn't. It does need immigrants. Of course it does. So there are two issues here. There's the moral responsibility because there's a conflict in Europe. And Ireland likes to position itself in that kind of framework. And then there is the practical issue. that the economy needs migrants.
So I'm not sure about the message that it sends. It's not just, for me, focusing on Ukrainian migrants has the possibility to slip into migrants in general. And that's the captain of the, you know, the far right is not maybe politically popular here, but it's definitely influencing the rhetoric and the narrative. And that would be my fear.
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