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NEW IRISH FACES: Father Livinus Oneybuchi emigrated from Nigeria to help fill a shortage of homegrown priests in Dublin
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Ditchdiggers and policemen, stevedores and nurses, missionaries and publicans: since the potato famines of the 1840s, Ireland has exported its people to do the world's hard jobs. The drain of brain and brawn became an enduring reproach to those who ran the country and a lament to its people, who gave their departing friends "American wakes," expecting never to see them again. Even in 1992, the economy was so stagnant that "two-thirds of my friends left," says Derek Hobbs, who graduated that year with an honors business degree from University College, Dublin.
So why are Ginta Juodzbaliene and her husband Linas, two teachers from Lithuania, picking mushrooms and milking cows in the rolling farm country of County Mayo? Simple: their employers, Michael and Jeremy Dee, couldn't find any locals to do the job. Ireland's economy is now so hot — an average of 8% growth for the last six years — that it's now sucking in workers from abroad, placing many in the bottom-rung jobs the Irish used to have to emigrate to get, as well as high-paying ones in the booming tech sector that has made Ireland the world's largest exporter of software.
Buoyed by some 20,000 net new migrants this year, Ireland has a bigger population (3.8 million) than at any time since 1881. Many of the new arrivals are Irish, returning from London and Silicon Valley and Paris to see if they can make lasting careers in a land they never really wanted to leave. Walk through the trendy Temple Bar section of Dublin, where young professionals go to drink and be noticed after work, and you'll see French and Polish and Chinese twentysomethings tending bar and Spaniards handing out Whoppers at Burger King. "I'm still uncomfortable being served by foreigners," chuckles Hobbs, who used to own an Irish bar in Brussels while he built websites for the European Commission and now works for an Internet start-up. "My friends who have come back, we all had those kinds of jobs, and our first reaction is, 'That's a job an Irish person is supposed to be doing!'"
But the young and ambitious of the E.U. are naturally flocking to a country where unemployment is only 4.1% and minimum-wage jobs ($4.67 per hour) are plentiful. The desire to grab hold of the bottom economic rung is what brought Ginta Juodzbaliene and her husband Linas from Lithuania to the farm run by the Dee brothers. They had to give up being teachers and leave their two children with grandparents, but as Ginta says in her halting English, "We know we need more money." At home they make about one-quarter of the Irish minimum wage — when the government can afford to pay them. So they and their friend Olga Grybiene, a nurse, entrusted themselves to a broker who took advantage of an Irish program to import agricultural guest workers.
The women spend eight to 12 hours a day in cool, black, plastic-wrapped huts, finding mushrooms in bags of compost. They have become adept at exceeding the seven 2.7-kilo baskets they must pick per hour to make the minimum wage; Linas helps with the 40 cows and other farmwork. "I don't think he ever milked a cow before, but he's doing fine," says George Dee, Michael and Jeremy's father, who met his own wife when they were both Irish emigrants to Birmingham 40 years ago. The two cultures mix well enough that the visitors are living in Michael Dee's house, and another flat is being prepared to receive three more Lithuanians next year, once the farm shifts to a new cultivation technique expected to double mushroom output. Life could be hell for the guest workers — they have no car, no access to English lessons, no nearby compatriots. But the experiment seems to be working. Over a pot of vegetable and mushroom soup Ginta says, "I will recommend to friends to have job like this, yes."
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