IRISH jobseekers feeling the bite of the worsening employment market are starting to fill jobs left vacant by eastern Europeans escaping Ireland’s economic gloom.

Having shunned them for the past decade, Irish students and workers are now taking up low-paid jobs in cleaning, catering, security and supermarkets, employers say.

In the last seven months, McDonald’s, the fast-food chain, has witnessed the first increase in applications from Irish people in 10 years. Aldi, a German discount supermarket chain, is reporting increasing numbers of applications from Irish workers for store assistant positions, while The Real Dirtbusters, a cleaning company, has seen a “huge increase” in Irish job applicants.

Unemployed Irish workers are starting to change their attitude towards jobs that were predominantly the preserve of immigrants during the Celtic tiger years as employment in construction and manufacturing dries up. Some 26,600 people signed on for the dole in the three months to March, the Central Statistics Office reported earlier this month, pushing the unemployment rate up to 5.1%.

“Irish people are taking in the reality that it’s not as easy as it once was to find the job they want,” said Fionnuala Smyth, senior employment officer at Fas, the national training and employment authority.

“We are actively encouraging Irish people, especially in the construction industry, to come down to entry level in another sector, take advantage of the training available and work their way up. If you were working as a bricklayer and lost your job you could move into, say, landscape gardening, starting off by laying paving stones.”

A combination of poorer employment prospects in Ireland and more opportunities in their home countries led to a decline of 26,000 in the number of immigrants coming to Ireland in the year to April from the same period a year earlier, a separate CSO report found.

The number of citizens from the European Union’s newer member states who registered to work or to access public services in the republic fell by 40% in the first half of this year, suggesting a significant easing of inward migration from central and eastern Europe. Just 40,000 people from the EU’s 12 newest members obtained a PPS number in the first six months of the year, compared to 66,500 over the same period last year.

McDonald’s has “experienced a slight fall-off in the numbers of applications from foreign workers in the past seven months,” alongside a simultaneous increase in job applications from Irish people, said Michele Ryan, the chain’s HR director in Ireland.

At the McDonald’s outlet on Kennedy Avenue in Carlow, some 19 Irish employees work alongside staff from countries such as Russia. “I’ve seen five or six new Irish people come to work here lately,” said Denis Quinlan, a 20-year-old Carlow IT student who works part-time in the restaurant.

McDonald’s has been running its Change the Script advertising campaign since February to highlight the benefits Irish people can reap from working with 40 other nationalities in an attempt to change perceptions about working at the chain, Ryan said.

It was McDonald’s that inspired novelist Douglas Coupland to coin the term “McJob” to describe a “low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector” in his 1991 book Generation X. When the company heard in 2003 that the word was included in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the chief executive of McDonald’s asked them to remove it. Last year, the company launched a petition to remove “McJob” from the Oxford English Dictionary on the basis that it slandered the company’s proud workforce.

At Aldi, where store assistants outside Dublin earn €10.85 an hour, “there are definitely more Irish people coming through,” said Naheed Choudhury, a manager at recruitment agency Achievers who screens the supermarket chain’s job candidates.

“There is the perception out there that eastern Europeans work harder and when Irish people look at the job, they realise they will have to up their game if they want it.”

Michael Kavanagh, managing director of The Real Dirtbusters, has seen a 20% increase in Irish people applying for cleaning jobs compared to last year.

“When we advertised jobs before, about one in 100 applicants would be Irish,” he said. “Now we even have Irish fellas coming over from the sites in England looking for jobs here. One guy I just employed said he was willing to work for less than the minimum wage, but we don’t allow that.”

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