Things are tight, but better than if he went back to Poland

Foreign workers must decide either to stay or go home. He was one of the first wave of Polish

He was one of the first wave of Polish migrants who came to Ireland. He arrived 12 years ago with decent skills in the building trade, a good work ethic, unusually good English and a steady girlfriend who joined him here for their Irish adventure.

He landed on his feet, getting work on a building site run by one of the biggest building firms in the country. They paid top rates. There was plenty of overtime and he was the type of flexible jack of all trades who became vital cogs on busy building sites during the boom, when time really was money.

Within a few years he was a site foreman and not afraid to get his hands dirty and put in the long hours when the pressure was on to complete projects on ever tightening deadlines. He and his girlfriend, who was also working, saved hard. Ireland was always going to be a temporary cash cow where they could make enough money to set themselves up back in their native Poland.

They stayed in rented property and soon she was pregnant with the first of two children. Work was still flying and he became one of the head men on any site he was working on. If an alarm went off on one of their sites at night or security guards reported a break-in, the site manager would inevitably ring Jan Josef (not his real name) and they would drive over to the site in the dead of night.

Then the work dried up. He lasted longer than most of his workmates who were let go early last year. He was handy and experienced and, though there was no building going on, he was kept on.

It was minor stuff. He did the little jobs on completed houses that showed up on snag lists as buyers became ever more pernickety in a buyers' market.

He was finally let go last autumn just weeks after his son started school at the local gaelscoil. He and his partner chose the all-Irish national school because it was mixed, so his four-year-old daughter will be able to join her brother in the same school next September.

He rings up his former employer once a week looking for work and he's been told he will be first in line when things pick up. He will not go home yet. His children are settled and when his social welfare payments and other entitlements like rent allowance finally come through he reckons he will still be about €100 a month better off than if he went back to Poland and got a job on a building site.

His wife cleans a few houses on a cash basis and he is picking up bits and pieces of work, painting, household repairs, in the black economy. He is biding his time waiting for the right time either to move home or wait for an upturn here. Things are tight but he is getting by
 

From website of http://www.independent.ie