'BRITAIN NEEDS THE IRISH!'

THIS WEEK
SPOTLIGHT ON BIRMINGHAM
By HUGH KAY
THE music hall image of " Irish
Paddy " has got to go. It has little relevance to the Irish in Britain today. Enquiries into the implications of the government's Immigration Bill reveal that this country not only ought to find room for Paddy. The plain fact is that it cannot do without him.
The Home Secretary has discussed with the Irish government the extent to which Irish immigration will be restricted if the Bill is passed. He has no doubt been asking himself what the loss to Britain will be if the flow is substantially blocked.
A fair indication of the answer comes from a visit to Birmingham, where there are probably something like 200,000 immigrant Irish.
A living
Did you ever speak well of a tinker, at all? Or a gypsy? They do in Brum, where the tinkers make first class workers — delighted to find for the first time in their lives that hard work no longer scrapes a bare living, but easily earns a good one.
Or meet the gypsies, who quickly become small traders— geniuses at the rag and bone business, honest and cheerful, knocking up £40 or £50 a week,
But the general view of the Irishman as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water takes a bit of a knock when you dig a little deeper. Talk to the men on building sites. or thc unskilled workers in a factory. You will find numbers of Irishmen among them with qualifications equivalent to G.C.E. standard, or the level of fourth year apprenticeship. You may even find the odd B.Sc.
Money
They come to Britain for the money, and in Birmingham a labourer can make £25 to £30 a week.
In one engineering company in Birmingham there are 11,000 employees, Of these, 1,300 are Irish. As many as 900 of them have reached G.C.E. or fourth year apprenticeship standards. Some 70 per cent. of the 900 took jobs well below their qualifications; some 45 per cent. of them have now moved up.
Their diffidence comes from the fear that everyone still sees them as lovable, feckless Irish Paddy. But quality cannot be wholly submerged. The city has 210 Irish-born doctors (apart from hospital staffs