DUBLIN -- For decades a country of mass emigration but now home to an influx of immigrants, Ireland is grappling with an unusual problem: how to persuade the new arrivals driving its economic boom to stay."We've seen our population go from zero percent immigrants to 12-15 percent, dependent on the surveys, in 10 years," Integration Minister Conor Lenihan told Agence France-Presse. Generations of families on the island are still marked by the effects of the Irish Famine of 1845-47. In 1841, there were 6.5 million people in what is now Ireland, compared to just 2.8 million in 1961. Today, though, Ireland is enjoying a population surge. In the decade from 1997, 739,000 foreigners moved here, out of an overall population of 4.3 million. The accession of 10 new countries to the European Union in 2004 gave a major push to this increase and almost doubled the number of people arriving in Ireland from abroad -- from 58,000 in 2004 to nearly 110,000 in 2007. The Poles are now the second biggest immigrant group, after Britons. "If it had happened in other countries, it would have spread panic. In the United Kingdom, France and Germany, it took 30-40 years" to reach this level," Lenihan added. While there have been some calls for restrictions on the numbers of foreigners arriving, they have not been as loud as those in some other countries including Britain. The fear of an "invasion", which some observers said was behind Ireland's referendum rejection of the Nice Treaty on EU enlargement in 2001, has been largely absent from campaigning on the Lisbon Treaty referendum, expected in May or June. One explanation could be that half of the so-called foreigners arriving in Ireland every year are, in fact, people of Irish blood coming back. In addition, many other immigrants such as those from Poland are, like the Irish, white and Catholic. There are only about 30,000 first generation Africans and less than 50,000 Asians on the island. Nobody can say that immigrants are "stealing" work from the Irish, either -- Ireland experienced a surge of economic growth during the 1990s, peaking at 10 percent in 2000. Unemployment was nearly 16 percent in 1993 but was less than four percent in 2001. "More people realize now that we can't provide a whole range of services without migrants: health service, nurses and doctors, construction, catering and hospitality sectors," Lenihan said. But the stream of immigrants is now threatening to dry up. In 2007, the registration of immigrants from the 10 countries which joined the EU in 2004 fell 16 percent compared to 2006. And worse still, the number of people who had arrived from the new EU countries who are now leaving jumped from 800 in 2005 to 7,000 in 2007. It is not just eastern Europeans who are moving, according to a recent study by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. According to that research, half of nurses registered in 2006 came from abroad, principally India and the Philippines. They expect to return to their homelands within a few years, or head for new shores in countries like Canada and Australia, which are laying out the red carpet for such workers. "We're now into a competitive position where we have to retain the migrants because they're better skilled and are subject to competition from other countries -- Canada is now poaching our Filipina nurses we trained," Lenihan said. The result is that emigration is now an issue again -- while only 26,000 people left Ireland in 2004, that figure leaped to 42,000 in 2007. | 
