The stabbing last summer of a British tourist and the slow build of racist incidents on Dublin streets were wake-up calls to many about the level of racism in Irish society. Suddenly, people without any previous interest in the issue were jolted out of complacency.
Out of that concern came the establishment of the Le ChΘile project, the brainchild of Moya Doherty, of Tyrone Productions and Riverdance, Robert Ballagh and other Irish artists. It isn't quite the Rock Against Racism movement of Britain circa 1976, but it has as its remit the imaginative use of the arts to educate and challenge racist assumptions.
But what role can the arts play in dismantling stereotypes and promoting a vision of the "rainbow nation"? And where do such initiatives fit into the bigger and more vexed question of coming up with cultural policies that reflect the multi-ethnic nation as opposed to the monolithic one?
Building on the fund-raising and campaigning aspects of Le ChΘile, Bernadette Crawford, the co-ordinator of the project, is to establish an arts-based programme. Following a successful art auction held recently by Le ChΘile, a more ambitious venture is being planned.
"Quite a number of the artists are now interested in getting involved at the community level. That's what we're developing in terms of the arts - visual, music, dance, to have a programme that will target teenagers and children. It's about the contact thing; it's about bringing young people together, doing something that is enjoyable. The objective is to look at the issue of respect. If we can instil a value of respect among young people, then you're immediately addressing the whole issue of racism. For me, that's the vision for the arts in addressing racism."
The artist Natascha Fischell, in partnership with Creative Activity for Everyone (CAFE), the community-arts enabling organisation, has recently begun an innovative multimedia project.
Irish Specials is a three-phase collaborative project with a group of Traveller women aged 15-20 examining issues of food and finding an innovative way of circumventing the problem of access to restaurants that many Travellers encounter on a regular basis. Using as a template an idea she pioneered in Bosnia, Fischell has conducted workshops in painting with Traveller women, on the theme of food. Fischell's objective here, as in Bosnia, was "to build social relationships through art".
"Food as subject matter provides common ground. We all, as living beings, must eat to survive. Besides the necessity for survival, food and eating are the source of great pleasure and contentment. They are also central to our sense of self," says Fischell. Through their artwork, and a multimedia collage of video and audio clips, the Traveller women contest fixed notions about food and who has access to it. To Fischell, it's not merely about the production of art, but the whole process from beginning to end, which is partially about getting groups to reconnect with society.
In the anti-racism arena, the use of art as a means both of bringing people together and of combating discrimination throws up complex questions. Ken McCue, services officer of Arts Ltd and director of Ethnovision, believes the arts "have a major role to play in shifting Ireland from a monochrome to a rainbow society, and delivering in its wake a blow to all the nasty 'isms' - sectarianism, anti-Semitism and racism".
He says: "Community organisations on this island have made exclusive use of various art forms to counteract xenophobia and ease integration, but the situation is not helped by the practice carried out by the State apparatus in decanting asylum-seekers and refugees from neighbourhoods into 'holding' centres, thus 'concentrating' the new population whilst their fate is decided upon by the Minister for Justice."
But "multiculturalism", both as a word and a concept, remains highly charged and there is a cacophony of competing discourses vying for ownership of what it is or should be. The person in the street assumes, for the most part, that it's about "salsas and samosas".
New ways of looking at both arts practices across cultures and issues of the State's support of the arts urgently need to be considered and debated if we're not to replicate the messy responses of other societies in supplying arts provision that reflects a multi-ethnic nation and in ensuring that the policies and strategies devised don't simply restructure negative stereotypes and serve them up in another form.
Other countries have held these debates long before us. What their experience shouts loud and clear is that equating eating curry and listening to "world music" with multicultural equality can not only fail to challenge racial stereotypes but also confirm them.
In Australia in the 1980s, after sometimes acrimonious debate, a policy for "the arts for a multicultural Australia" was developed. Among its core tenets were a guarantee of ethnic representation on various arts committees and strategies to monitor levels of funding for ethnic groups. The policy was not without its critics, who have said that the focus has been more on the dispersal and allocation of grants than the more complex issue of how contemporary global change affects the production of art.
Within the rapacious consumerist atmosphere of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the original notions of encouraging cultural pluralism and respect for other cultures can easily get lost. Multiculturalism is increasingly a fuzzy notion that has come to mean anything from world music to using an "exotic" ethnic group to flog a consumer product. The latest buzz-word is interculturalism, with its emphasis on parity and co-operation.
To Sandy Fitzgerald, director of the City Arts Centre, which has been hosting intercultural workshops and events for the past four years, the issue of art challenging stereotypes is part of the larger issue of cultural equality. "There is a dominant culture and everything has been subsumed or suppressed by it. It is white and to a large degree middle-class."
In response to the argument that using art to promote equality somehow diminishes it, Fitzgerald says: "Europeans went out to colonise, and part of the colonial project was the idea that other peoples should be practising culture the way we do. You can't avoid the fact that it's racist the minute you start talking about diminishing art, because you do that by repressing or excluding others. You're saying 'ours' is better."
Constricted by narrow visions of what "culture" consists of, we can also make sweeping assumptions about what constitutes an artist. As Wes Wilkie, director of CAFE, says: "Particularly in west Africa, if you go into a village you won't find a visual artist, a musician, a dancer, a thespian. These pigeon-holes are Western constructs. They don't exist in these cultures. You'll find a storyteller who's also a musician and painter. They're not solely one or the other. Obviously, things have changed over the years and there are now Western academic structures and fine-arts courses and theatre studies, but that doesn't stop people from doing all the other things as well."
For some artists, however, it's the right to practise their art that is at stake. Adis - otherwise known as Iroh Anaele Diala - is a Nigerian artist who has been in Ireland for just a year. As an asylum-seeker, he has no right to work, but he continues to produce mixed-media pieces and sculpture that reflect his precarious foothold in Irish society and which are circumscribed by the fact that he can't afford many basic materials. Using soot, dyes and detergent for his mixed-media pieces and straw for his sculptures, Adis's work is a response to his time in Ireland.
"My thematic focus now in Europe is the immigrant experience, one way or the other. I'm doing these things, in a way, out of anguish, but it's also kind of a resource and source of strength at the same time."
Wilkie points up the onerous and unreal expectations that are placed on artists from ethnic minorities. "The assumption, particularly if you have a profile of any sort, is that you should use it to better your own community. That in itself is implicitly racist, because the assumption is that you belong to a homogenous community. And of course you don't. It's that convenient hoarding of people under labels."
Fitzgerald insists that all the debates around the issue of the arts and multiculturalism need to feed into the bigger picture. "We need a vision of where we are going, both individually and collectively, and this should be led by a cultural policy. Not an economic policy or health policy or whatever, but by a cultural policy which describes the vision of a people. A cultural policy should give every citizen the equal right to imagine the future; it should protect minority cultures and support creativity. It should describe the quality of life it expects for its citizens and it should open up the doors of all cultural institutions to many different experiences and cultures."
If other countries are anything to go by, we're at the beginning of a learning curve that is both steep and bound to be defined by debates that will be intense and at times acrimonious.
Adis's work is on show at the Lemonstreet Gallery, Dublin; the multimedia exhibition Irish Specials is at Tallaght Community Arts Centreuntil August 13th. More information from CAFE: 01-4736600.