Anyone who went along to Dublin Castle last night looking for echoes of CJ, would have looked in vain. Among the exotic food, faces and dress of people from faraway places there was, alas, no representative from the Cayman Islands.
And when a young refugee said gently: "Ireland is my safe country," one sensed, somehow, that this would not have been CJ's response to a question about the Irish and their welcoming ways. "The Cayman Islands is my safe country" hardly has the same ring. It was a night for the non-Irish residents among us to parade with pride their food and culture in the Castle's Coach House, to demonstrate that foreign students, residents and refugees aren't all huddled around a single-bar gas fire, force-fed on fat bacon and cabbage, and living in dread of the next racist lout.
Instead, many of them turned out in their national dress and piled the tables high with food from several dozen countries - places as diverse as the US and Iran, Vietnam and Romania, Mexico and Algeria. Organised by The Cities Anti-Racism Project, the idea is to remind us of the sheer diversity of the nationalities who have settled here. It's worth remembering that around 170 different non-European nationalities are registered in Ireland and that we host refugees from around 60 of those. Their backgrounds and stories are as diverse as the food. A table laid with minced lamb, swordfish and chicken cooked in mustard and paprika is presided over by 31-year-old Angela Kayowa, a refugee from Zaire. She is a gentle, smiling woman in colourful dress, with a good command of English and a story to chill the heart. Her husband is dead - killed by Kabila's men - and her two children, aged 10 and 4, are missing. "I am alone," she says quietly, "but Ireland gave me peace." A bright, young couple with a beautiful, eight-month-old child, are smiling beside the Algeria table. Up to a couple of years ago, Khedidja Tadjine was a news editor with a daily paper back home, and hung in there even while friends and colleagues were being murdered with impunity. Five of her friends were dead before her husband Boualem finally persuaded her to leave. "She was so thin, and she was not sleeping. No journalist we know could sleep - only with the help of drugs." Like Angela, they smile and there is no bitterness as they tell their stories but their eyes tell of a loss beyond words. The loss isn't only emotional. Neither Khedidja nor Boualem has worked since they arrived in Ireland. Boualem can teach French and Arabic and holds a degree in psychology but FAS told him only yesterday that openings in these areas are rare. Still, they mix and smile, and talk with regret about the change
in the atmosphere over recent months. "Ireland felt safe and warm when we came here," says Boualem, "but something has changed. We hear these things in the past few months." Meanwhile, over at Vietnam are Phong and Thuy, second generation Vietnamese, who talk of the sadness of the original "boat people" who arrived in the late 1970s and - in spite of promises made at the time - are still begging the authorities to allow family members to join them. Over in the USA, which boasts an astonishing array of dishes (including blue corn chips which look like the usual corn chips gone a bit mouldy), there is the ebullient Joanna Gallagher, a cloistered nun for 17 years in Chicago, who left and married a Brother and wound up somehow, teaching in St Patrick's Institution in Mountjoy. And then there's student, Rikke Laursen from somewhere south of Oslo, with a table full of salmon and dill and - vitally - mustard sauce, and the strangest combination of an accent ever heard in Western Europe - a mix of Norway, Dublin and Lurgan (of which her boyfriend is a native). And from Nigeria, there's 22-year-old Jim Nelson, in Dublin to study international business management at the American college. So, Jim, why did you choose Ireland? "I thought it would be quiet and it would be a country where they talk about God." Not much evidence of that around Dublin Castle this week, Jim. But no, he's happy anyway.
