IT drives Ireland’s diversity

For the first time, people living in Ireland were asked on Sunday to specify their ethnicity when filling out census forms. In many nations, that might not seem unusual. But in Ireland, where poor economic conditions for hundreds of years drove scores of Irish away and deterred others from moving to its shores, ethnicity is only recently relevant.

When the high-tech industry injected a much-needed boost to the Irish economy in the 1990s, for the first time in history, people from all over the world began moving to Ireland. The addition of the ethnicity question to the census, designed not to find out where those people come from, but essentially to count them by the color of their skin, highlights both the good and the bad of the economic boom.

The tech companies in Ireland say they’re at least in part responsible for increasing the diversity of Ireland’s population.

“Ireland has caught up with us,” said Anna Pringle, human resources director for Microsoft in Ireland. Microsoft has been operating in Ireland since 1985 and she said that 10 or 15 years ago people would visit the Microsoft Ireland offices and comment on how diverse the workforce was there compared to the general population in Ireland. Today, Microsoft Ireland’s diversity isn’t so unusual because of the growing number of high-tech and other companies that have opened up shop in the country and attracted talented people from around the world.

There are a few reasons why Microsoft and the high-tech industry in Ireland have attracted such a diverse workforce, Pringle said. Of the 2,000 people working for Microsoft Ireland, including contractors, about 20 percent are not Irish and they come from 39 different countries, Pringle said. Some of them were hired for their language skills because Microsoft Ireland is responsible for converting Microsoft’s products into 40 languages. The Ireland office does all of Microsoft’s localization except for German and Japanese, she said.

Google, which only opened offices in Ireland in 2003, has a similar story to tell. When Google announced late last year that it was expanding its Dublin operation, it boasted of having people on staff from 40 different countries, speaking 30 different languages.

People are coming to work in Ireland’s high-tech work force for reasons beyond language skills. “We want the best people and software developers wherever they come from,” Pringle said.

Having such a workforce makes the Microsoft Ireland office an interesting place to be, Pringle said, but she does worry about a potential downside. “What I would be worried about is whether some of our diverse employees would face discrimination outside of Microsoft,” she said. She has heard of isolated incidents from employees from non-Irish backgrounds having difficulty renting apartments.

In fact, such discrimination or at least the potential for it is the reason why the ethnicity line was added to the census this year. The Central Statistics Office, the government agency responsible for conducting the census, was asked to include the question on the census by a couple of groups including the Equality Authority, which is a government agency, and an organization called the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism. “It’s something we have no data on in Ireland,” said Brian King, a spokesman for the Central Statistics Office.

The census has historically and in the most recent form included questions asking where residents come from and their nationality, but the answers to those questions don’t necessarily indicate the person’s ethnicity. “So we came up with this question and the point is that you have the final chance to write in a description of what you classify yourself as,” he said. Respondents can classify themselves as white, black, Asian or fill in their own description.

The Equality Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body that hears and mediates discrimination claims, says that the incidence of race-related discrimination complaints is rising in Ireland. During the first three months of 2006, seven complaints about discrimination in the work place based on race were made to the tribunal, compared to six during the same period last year. While the number and the increase in cases is small, any increase is a concern and groups like Amnesty International in Ireland are calling on a more institutionalized policy against racism throughout the Irish government.

As long as the economy continues to grow in Ireland and companies like Microsoft and Google employ people from all over the world, Ireland’s population will keep changing. The hope is that groups fighting racial discrimination in Ireland will be able to use the new census statistics to continue efforts to prevent racism in a more diverse Ireland.