"Great news! 400 new jobs announced" - attitude towards more jobs

I’m sure they can skill up if they want 10% increases a year (who gets those by the way?). What a ridiculous thread

Bloody highly qualified immigrants, coming over here, paying tax

Not locals implies an extra housing and resource need, as new people will be coming over and need a place to live, a way of getting to work, etc.

we'd rather create jobs for the boys to waste our tax money on - or offer tax cuts to MNCs

The implication by the OP was that locals are locals, because they already live here. They wont take up any more resources by getting these jobs, whereas "non-locals" would need housed and would add to traffic etc.

The thing is, all the jobs and training initiatives hover around hospitality, STEM and production, which is great and all, but where are the springboard courses in nursing, medicine and healthcare? Trolleys in A+E, bigger pressure on ICU which isn't going away soon and no attempt to guide older than school leavers into that sector. Probably because all the money is getting burned away in Crumlin.

We actually have no shortage of nurses in this country - Ireland has the highest nurses to bed ratio of any healthcare system worldwide. The issue is mismanagement

I would not say that Dublin is anywhere near as bad as San Fran but here are some of the comments I got when I googled the biggest issues facing San Fran. Are any of these familiar?

• Inadequate housing, and no end end sight. Lately, not enough office space either
• Expensive, inefficient city government; dysfunctional politics
• High cost and difficulty of construction, doing business, owning property, etc.
• Crime, petty corruption
• Unwelcoming for: families, middle class and poor people; resulting loss of social diversity

High cost of living, high cost of housing, need for more manufacturing jobs, homelessness, and, of course the ever present danger of earthquakes.

Two sets of unequal paychecks for people who live and work in the city: the 6 figure computer nerds, and the minimum wage workers hired to serve them foods, clean after them, and drive them around. A city can't live on such different extremes in earnings when the economics charge the cost of living on the higher end.

The single biggest challenge for the city of San Francisco is how can we accommodate the huge numbers of people who are either already here and struggling to pay their sky-high housing costs or are projected to arrive over the next 50 years (the city is projected by some to go from its current level of about 800,000 or so to over a million, a 25 per cent increase).

Currently, the city is among the most expensive in the world - the median home is more than a million and a half dollars. One needs to have an income of well over $250,000 to afford the more or less “typical” house.

Jobs have been added to the city and surrounding towns over the past couple of decades in numbers far higher than housing to accommodate the people to fill them. My family arrived in California in the 1970s, and today, I am the only one left. My sister, a high school teacher, finally gave up about four years ago and left.

This puts extreme pressure on all levels of the economy. Who will be the cops? Who will be the teachers? You want to go out to dinner? Who will wait your table or cook your food? Your company wants to try to grow and needs to recruit either young grads or established workers? Your only choice really is to try to poach from those already here, because it’s too damned expensive for anyone other than the most highly paid to move here from anywhere else.

The city of San Francisco sits on a small piece of very hilly land at the top of a narrow peninsula. It is famously only 49 square miles. Some of that land is too hilly to build on, and some is preserved green space. 800,000 people are crammed into the remaining space, with another 200,000 or so to come. There are no more green fields to build on, and even brown fields (like the recently demolished spot where Candlestick Park used to be) are not near the jobs and take years to clean up, to permit, to process through an unbelievably byzantine system. So what is left is to acquire property from people who already own it (at very high prices), demolish the buildings, and build. This is not easily done.

Even if we could build, we then are faced with infrastructure problems. Traffic in the city is already horrendous. The public transit system (Muni) is woefully inadquate. Sewer and power grids are 100 years old and are nearing the end of life. The area is basically a desert where water must by piped in from distant reservoirs.

So, how do we balance the demands of people who want to come here vs. the needs of those already here?

Just look at Irelands population graph since the 90s. We’ll need to keep building more and more high density in green spaces to make housing more affordable now. But what about the future if the population trend continues?

it shouldn’t be a controversial question to ask what population size we want, and then how , where and what housing to provide for everyone.

It's already at that now for the whole island - 5,045000m RoI+ 1,9000000m NI.