Reality has a way of biting back against complacency. While people in the Republic were shaking their heads in disgust at loyalists trying to stop children going to school in Ardoyne, parents in Co Galway were boycotting Ballinruane National School because some Traveller children wanted to be educated there. While the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, was piously pledging to the UN Conference on Racism in Durban that Ireland would ensure that "racism and racist tendencies do not gain a foothold" here, research presented to the same conference showed that racism already has not just a foothold but a stranglehold.
The week began with an astonishing example of smugness in the face of racism, courtesy of the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI). It issued a ruling upholding a complaint against Amnesty International's campaign calling on senior politicians to take a lead in combating racism. The campaign included full-page newspaper ads with pictures of the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste and the Minister for Justice and the headline, "Some say they're involved in racism. Others say they're doing nothing about it." The text called for the Government to take the initiative in tackling racism.
This kind of advertising has nothing to do with the ASAI, a self-regulating group representing commercial advertisers. The ASAI's own code specifically states that it does not apply to ads on political issues or matters "of public interest or concern". It chose to ignore its own code on the ludicrous basis that the Amnesty ads contained one sentence asking for contributions towards the campaign and could therefore be defined as "commercial".
The ASAI's ruling is headed "Product: Fundraising". The grounds for condemning the ad were that Amnesty should have sought written permission from the politicians before using their photographs and that "the advertisement was likely to bring advertising into disrepute to the ultimate detriment of consumer confidence in the content of commercial advertising generally". In other words, politicians should not be criticised without their consent and consumers might be less inclined to believe that drinking Coke makes you sexy if they are.
The wilful blindness required to treat a passionate plea for leadership on racism as a standard commercial product is, in its own way, rather eloquent. It suggests a deep distaste for the whole subject, a feeling that it is really rather vulgar to raise it in this way.
The Amnesty campaign itself is, in any case, an attempt to fill the vacuum left by the Government's extraordinary lack of urgency in mounting its long-promised public awareness campaign on racism. When Mr O'Donoghue told the Durban conference that the Government was funding an anti-racism awareness campaign, Irish delegates must have felt a sense of dej a vu.
The history of this campaign goes back to November 1998, when Mr O'Donoghue established an Interdepartmental Working Group on the integration of ethnic minorities. The group recommended, among other things, that the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) should be involved in co-ordinating "public awareness initiatives and in disseminating information on anti-racism issues and respect for cultural diversity generally".
It took until January 2000, however, for the Cabinet to give the go-ahead for this campaign. The following month, Mr O'Donoghue announced that he had asked the NCCRI to "undertake an evaluation of how public opinion can be better informed with a view to promoting a tolerant inclusive society". This evaluation will be completed "within a short timeframe" and proposals arising from it would be brought back to the Government before summer 2000.
By last November Mr O'Donoghue announced: "The Government has recently agreed to my proposals for a framework for a comprehensive public awareness campaign" and that a budget of £1.5 million had been allocated. The following month he was saying that the campaign was "due to be launched in the new year". The new year came and went, however. So did the spring and the summer. The latest word is that the campaign will begin this autumn. By then the process will have taken three years.
The attitude that underlies this lack of urgency is precisely that which was expressed by the Minister at Durban: racism in Ireland is something that might happen in the future, if we're not careful. Yet as far back as November 1998, another Minister, Liz O'Donnell, was openly acknowledging that while many Irish people supported and welcomed newcomers into society, there was strong evidence of "latent and some more overt racism". She said it wasn't enough for the Government to deplore this worrying development - it had to work actively to counter it.
Travellers and black Irish people could have verified a long time ago that ethnic intolerance is not a new phenomenon in the Republic. Now hard evidence has emerged in the form of a survey of members of ethnic minorities commissioned by Amnesty. Seventy-nine per cent said they had experienced racism or discrimination. More than 80 per cent disagreed with the statement: "Racism is not a serious problem in Ireland today."
So far, of course, we have had an Irish solution to an Irish problem. We have no racially motivated crime here because we have no legal definition of a racially motivated crime and the Garda is only beginning to collect statistics on racist incidents. Which means we can watch the results of vicious bigotry in north Belfast from a safe, smug distance.
fotoole@irish-times.ie
