The seductive charm of Irish culture no longer seems to work in quite the old way. A cead mile failte is not extended to all new arrivals any more. Yet the historical capacity of the Irish to assimilate waves of incomers should never be underestimated. Eight centuries ago, after all, the Normans became more Irish than the Irish themselves. Who is to say that the latest group of arriving Nigerians might not know the same destiny? If there is no zeal like the zeal of the convert, there may be no Irishness quite like that of the recent recruit. The fear of being assimilated too readily to Irish culture haunted those colonisers who came in the armies of the English queen, Elizabeth I. Their official artists painted portraits of men who had gone native and been barbarised by contact with Gaelic culture. In them, hybridity, far from being a desirable state of cultural fusion, was seen as a negation of humanity itself as two discrepant codes cancelled one another out, leaving the victim a prey to evil instinct and uncontrolled lasciviousness. On the other side, Gaelic poets lambasted those overlords who were keen to anglicise themselves, dubbing them half-breeds (a dhream gaoidhealta gallda). Nobody wanted to be a hybrid in those far off, pre-post-modern days: yet somehow quite a lot of writers (and, one assumes, ordinary persons) managed the trick. By the 18th century, macaronic songs and ballads were all the rage in a patently bicultural community, yet the fear on both sides of being wholly absorbed by the other never went away. It surfaced again at the start of the 20th century in the claim by D. P. Moran that the Gael must be the element which absorbed - a claim which simply underlined the fact that by then it was the Gael who was being co-opted massively by the forces of the English language.
When the new Irish state of the 1920s and 1930s appeared intent on defining itself in mainly Catholic and Gaelic terms, Moran's counter-thesis might appear to have staged a late rally: and even today his statement has the power to terrify some critics, who are so fixated on it that they ignore the more progressive elements in his thinking. Routinely, they cite it as further proof of a covert assimilationist tendency in Irish nationalism, whose sirencall to unionists must be resisted. Yet that same siren-call is all but inaudible to Africans and Eastern Europeans. Suddenly, the fear of assimilation seems to have struck the assimilators. Yet the stubborn facts of history remain. Those English who have opted for Ireland have been effortlessly assumed into the national narrative: from the fictional John Broadbent to the factual Jack Charlton, Ireland has gone on bearing out Bernard Shaw's claim that it is one of the last spots on earth still producing the ideal Englishman of history. In recent years, the number of converts has, if anything, increased. When Daniel Day-Lewis pronounced his win at the Oscars a triumph for Ireland, he effectively dismantled the English-when-they-win, Irish-when-they-lose equation. But he chose Irishness, just as much as the Anglo-Normans did before him: in neither case was it forced upon a hapless victim. There has never been any problem in embracing such figures, despite the fact that, in some senses, they were products of the traditional enemy. So why the reported reluctance to embrace Nigerians or Romanians? Many people have been shocked by racist attacks on foreigners (not all of them confined to black visitors), and some have wondered whether this is a new phenomenon. Back in the 1970s, when the late Phil Lynott sang Whiskey in the Jar, there was little evidence of such intolerance; or even in the 1980s when soccer fans sang the praises of Paul McGrath (although the famous "ooh-aah" chant had something slightly iffy about it). Perhaps such figures were sufficiently rare as not to seem threatening: what Joyce's Mr Deasy said of the Jews might have been indicated of the blacks - that Ireland had the distinction of never having persecuted them, because it had the sense never to let any numbers of them in.
Yet even in those decades, change was afoot. I had a young friend who went to England, and when I warned him about the danger of racist attack on the streets of London, he laughed and said: "Nobody there minds my skin colour: it's only when they hear my Dublin accent that the trouble starts". It would be too simple to explain the recent racist outbreaks as a legacy of the colonial system (in which so many Irish served) or even as a copycat version of contemporary yob culture in England. After all, Irish soccer fans have not bothered to emulate the hooliganism of their English counterparts. Nor can it be mainly an after-effect of the encounter between triumphalist Catholic missionaries and African or Asian communities. Many of those Nigerians who have come to Ireland did so in the hope that the people would be as kind and civilised as those missionaries who taught them at schools and cared for them in medical centres: and they have reported themselves as shocked by the blatant difference in behaviour. Liberal intellectuals, who had long viewed Irish racism as a largely North American phenomenon, have also been amazed. While Phil Lynott was being acclaimed in Dublin as the inventor of Celtic Rock, over in Boston the lace-curtain Irish who voted for the Kennedys were also quite capable of refusing to share buses and schools with black neighbours. Nor were these problems of recent vintage. Tensions between the two communities went back to the 1840s, when emancipated black Americans lodged formal complaints that the arrival of the Irish was reducing the value of real estate in their neighbourhoods. A century and a half later, a more inflected version of this complaint surfaced with the claim that those scholars who placed Irish Studies in a postcolonial category were really guilty of gazumping black and Hispanic academics in the search for university posts under affirmative action programmes. Back home in Ireland (and nearby in Britain), relations between Irish and Africans seemed far less tense. Bob Geldof invoked a communal memory of famine in helping to make his own people the largest per capita contributors to Third World relief in Live Aid. In the arts, an emerging talent such as Roddy Doyle could build an entire comic novel around the contention that the Irish were the blacks of Europe: and The Commitments became a film which enjoyed popular success. By 1990, Brian Friel had created in Dancing at Lughnasa, a play which explored analogies between Ugandan culture and the harvest festivals of Donegal. Its central character is a returned priest who himself went native in Africa, losing the capacity to distinguish between the codes of the two cultures. Again, though a play by a complex artist might seem to appeal only within the traditional constituency of liberal intellectuals, Friel's masterwork won huge audiences, not just at home but overseas, and most of all among the American Irish. The backdrop to those debates was, of course, the return of many priests, nuns and development workers from missionary activity. Many brought with them radical new ideas about democratising parish life or applying the principles of liberation theology, learned in Africa or Latin America. Ireland, which had once given a lead to other decolonising peoples, now seemed to be following their example. Nor was this wholly surprising. Missionaries are in the business of transforming consciousness, unlike military governors or colonial administrators, who simply need to know how to give orders and impose rules. Once you make an appeal at the level of the spirit, you are open to a counter-appeal: and that is what happened to many missionaries, such as Friel's Father Jack, or to the returned theologians of liberation.
Anyone who studies Irish art over the past two decades cannot but be impressed by the amount of inspiration derived from other cultures, mostly in the Third World. What is even more remarkable is that in every case the foreign input, though major, has somehow assisted some element of traditional Irish culture to present itself more stunningly to a modern world audience. At one level, there is the marvellous fusion of Latino elements with native forms in Riverdance (which has obvious parallels with Latino influence in theology); at another, there is the Caribbean collaboration of Seamus Heaney with his fellow-Nobellist Derek Walcott (with analogies in the fusions of style achieved in various musical bands); and, even at the level of high theory, the inspiration derived by David Lloyd and other critics from the Subaltern Studies Group in India seems to replicate the uses to which W. B. Yeats put Indian culture early in the 20th century. In the time of Yeats and Joyce, the Irish had little difficulty in identifying with people of colour. Popular magazines, such as Pat in the 1880s and 1890s, were filled with cartoons on the theme, of which Joyce would make much in the Cyclops section of Ulysses. There, the drinkers in Barney Kiernan's pub make common cause with those African slaves recently defended by Roger Casement. The entire tradition of comparative analysis reached a climax in Richard Ned Lebow's book White England and Black Ireland, which suggested that the Paddy and Sambo stereotypes had worked in distressingly similar ways, creating a perceptual prison for the English which left them quite unable to recognise what was actually happening on the ground. Against that rich background, one might reasonably ask where the roots of Irish racism are to be found. There are some commentators who believe that much of what is being expressed is not racism in the strict sense so much as distress signals emitted by local communities, who find the ecology of their street or village massively disturbed by a bureaucratic central government, which suddenly plants refugees in their midst. The Corofin effect has been replicated in more than one rural town; and the government's failure to brief or persuade communities on the positive potential of its policy has been at times lamentable. Journalists have managed to convince themselves that all forms of protest against such policies much be racist in tinge, yet most of the trouble-spots featured in media reports of 1999 have since settled down, when local people began to come to terms with their new neighbours.
If there was some racist element in the initial outcry - and there surely was - it was often broken down once first-hand relationships began. That complex was long ago observed in attitudes to the English, whom the Irish were supposed to dislike in theory, but often came to love as individuals. The accusatory tone of some media reports hindered rather than helped progress, for the old journalistic obsession with trouble and strife may sell papers, but often at the cost of increasing the sense of crisis. In a similar way, it is sometimes hard to fathom whether the jibes and punches thrown at Nigerians in inner-city Dublin's Parnell Street are manifestations of race hatred or of a beleaguered community seeking to defend itself as such. "We fought the culchies when we had to," said one veteran of a night's brawl, "and then we fought the cops. And now we have to fight the darkies." The elision there suggests an advanced paranoia about outside groupings, but whether it is classical racism is a moot point. Yet racism of the most ugly kind undeniably exists in Irish society: and the presence of ever-growing numbers of refugees and migrants from overseas has brought it to the surface, making all foreigners (not just people of colour) arguably more vulnerable than once they were. It is probable that, in other countries of western Europe, anything from 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the community harbours such prejudices against guest-workers - and the same is probably true in Ireland. In order to account for the scale of this phenomenon, it may be useful to return to the fear of hybridity with which I began.
Humans sometimes display a dreadful need to make other people more like them. Irish people may feel this desire more than most. Even our liberal press finds it hard to understand or speak respectfully of those who don't endorse all elements of the liberal agenda. The French are a bit like this, too. Wherever they went as colonisers, they felt ratified rather than mocked when natives perfectly imitated them, to the extent of awarding special prizes to Africans who wrote like Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. Official Irish policy towards asylum-seekers, as spelled out in the 1999 Illegal Immigrants Trafficking Bill, works in a somewhat similar way. Anyone who fails to gain asylum has just 14 days in which to appeal, despite the fact that ordinary citizens of the Irish Republic have up to six months in which to seek reviews of verdicts. This was one of the clauses which the President, Mrs McAleese found questionable enough to refer to the Supreme Court, which went on to vindicate it.
THAT clause has interesting psychological implications. For instance, the extreme speed with which the appeal is to be processed suggests a problem in the official mind with the in-between state of the applicant. Either the applicant becomes Irish straight away or not at all, and there can be no sustained and troubling period of ambiguity. Either he or she is a wonderful addition to our society or a damned nuisance, but nothing in between. A further aspect of the judgment is its ready acceptance that the political rights of nationals and non-nationals are not necessarily the same. The ruling of Judge Ronan Keane states:
The non-national or alien constitutes a discrete category of persons whose entry, presence and expulsion from the State may be the subject of legislative and administrative measures which would not, and in many of its aspects could not, be applied to its citizens. The rights, including fundamental rights, to which non- nationals may be entitled under the Constitution, do not always coincide with the rights protected as regards citizens of the State, the right not to be deported being an obvious and relevant example.
In reporting this judgment, Carol Coulter of The Irish Times remarked that this went against the spirit of some previous adjudications, which tended to give to non-citizens the same rights as citizens once they were before the courts of the state, on the principle that the rights of man are universal. The new distinction seemed to reflect a harmonisation of immigrant law across the European union. Such harmonisation might not be a bad thing in itself, if only to prevent states from deporting immigrants to hard-line regimes for summary despatch, but the effect in this case was to make Ireland as hard-line as everywhere else. Patricia McKenna MEP observed that there is something seriously wrong with our Constitution if it cannot afford all people equal rights of access to the courts, and surely it is our Constitution that should be amended to reflect modern-day reality.
`Strangers in their Own Country: Multiculturalism in Ireland' is an essay by Declan Kiberd which appears in a booklet entitled Multiculturalism: the View from the Two Irelands (£6.95). The other essay in the booklet is by Edna Longley. The booklet is part of the Cross Currents series, edited by Andy Pollak, which is published by Cork University Press in association with the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh