Brian McCormick, economist with the state jobs agency Fas, told the National Qualifications Recognition Conference that migrant workers from the 10 accession states were paid an average of 365 per week as against the national industrial average in Ireland of 560 per week.

But one in three migrant workers, particularly those from Poland, are working in professional and technical jobs, noted McCormick.

Now migrant workers are demanding that their qualifications be formally recognised in Ireland as they start to push themselves up the jobs chain.

"Demand from migrant workers for recognition of their foreign qualifications has grown by 800% in the last three years" said Claire Byrne of the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland, the state body which validates foreign qualifications and benchmarks them against the corresponding qualifications in Ireland.

Last year, the authority received over 800 applications from migrant workers for recognition of qualifications and this year to date it has already reached that mark, added Carmel Kelly of NQAI.

Of the applications received last year, almost half were from Eastern European countries and those that were once part of the Soviet Union . . . a 50% increase over the number of applications received in 2004.

The number of Africans seeking recognition for their qualifications similarly increased from 7% of the total in 2004 to 12% last year.

In regard to individual countries, Polish people, at 104, constitute the single largest block of migrant workers seeking to have their qualifications approved.

They are followed closely by the UK on 103, Nigeria on 88 and Ukraine and Latvia on 47 and 36, respectively.

Kelly said that the authority contacts the particular educational institution abroad, be it a school, college or university and then benchmarks the qualification against Irish qualifications for employers here.

"In Pakistan, for example, entry requirements for a degree course are far lower than in Ireland and you get a degree after two years, so we would benchmark this here as a higher certificate rather than a degree" said Kelly.