Migration and the reinvention of Ireland:By leaving debate on immigration to take place in pubs and taxis, politicians risk allowing powerful prejudices to take hold, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicin his continuing series
It's just gone 10am and the morning shoppers steer their trolleys into a wind-blown car park where the spaces are already scarce. A middle-aged woman is standing by the supermarket door drawing urgently on a cigarette. She was born in England, she says, but has lived in this part of Dublin for most of her life.
She picks up the question halfway, like a baton, and runs with it. "Immigrants? Too many. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a racist, but there's kids trying to get houses and they can't. And they're taking a lot of work that Irish kids can't get."
The queue for the post office makes an L-shape out the door and along the bare wall to the left. Today the local school is a polling station, so the estate - part council housing, part private - is alive with liberated children. Further down the complex there is an African food shop and a Western Union branch.
Waiting at the bus stop is a mother of two in her early 30s. She has nothing against immigrants, she says, but has a story to tell. "I went for jobs and didn't get them, and my father was in the same boat - he was made redundant because of all these young lads coming to work for nothing. I had to go homeless to get a house. I stayed in a hostel on the South Circular Road for a full year with my two kids. There were no immigrants in that hostel."
Others see it differently. "Fair play to them," says another young mother. "The Irish have had it cushy for a long time. They're only coming over here for a few bob. They need somewhere to live, and they're better than the Travellers, aren't they?"
Then there's the woman in her early 20s who has worked with the Chinese in McDonald's and knows them as fair, honest workers. And there's the married man whose children play with the African kids on the street and thinks they've brought nothing but good to the place.
In this parish, almost half the children at the local school belong to ethnic minorities and the waiting list for next year is as long as the roll-call. Unemployment is higher than the national average, education levels lower. Here, go looking for resentment of immigrants and you need not dig deep. The objections present themselves as variations on two themes: jobs and houses.
It was also concern over jobs that led a group of mothers in Swinford, Co Mayo, to set up Parents Action, a pressure group, last autumn. Co-founder Margaret Finn says her son found it almost impossible to find a job to fund his final year of studies in Galway, reaching his lowest ebb when he was offered work as a kitchen porter for a derisory €2.50 an hour by an employer who knew he'd eventually find takers.
Finn found others had the same problem - their children couldn't find part-time jobs because, they believed, immigrants had them all.
She encourages anyone booking a function to ask hotel and restaurant managers whether they will be served by Irish staff. "Maybe it would be a nice gesture just to say, would I be served by Irish people? I would prefer Irish people. Maybe it sounds a bit racist, but out of solidarity with other Irish children."
Finn says many people agree with her view that "the open-door policy is a disaster for this country", but concedes that Parents Action "didn't get much support, to be honest". No more than 10 people would attend their meetings. They wrote to politicians but they all said there was nothing to be done.
As Finn explains the group's case, however, it is clear that their grievances are at once about less and more than immigration. Less, because their focus is not so much on newcomers but on the employers who exploit them. More, for she returns repeatedly to her sense of general alienation from a system she feels overlooks people like her.
"I'm not well-off," she says, "[ and] my sympathy is with the immigrants to be honest. But it's the poorest people, the most vulnerable, poorest people . . . There's a feeling out there that everyone in this country is doing really well, but an awful lot of people are not and they're depending on those jobs."
Disenchantment is couched in the same sort of language on the estate in Dublin.
Racism undoubtedly exists across social strata in Ireland, but it is too crude an instrument to explain everything.
Many of the problems blamed on immigrants - shortages of school places or pressure on local services, for example - may be about bad planning and have little to do with immigration per se, but in communities where the economic boom remains relatively abstract, resentment can be channelled towards those who are most easily identified with change.
"There is a cohort of our society that has been failed by education, failed by our social policies over generations," says Dr Bryan Fanning of UCD.
"There is a cohort of Irish people who can barely read and write, who did not get any of the benefits of the Celtic Tiger. And because essentially we can have access to this huge pool of high-quality labour from other countries, there's no real need to engage with them, this rump. The danger is they're being left behind."
Gauging attitudes on a subject as fraught as immigration is a notoriously tricky business. In November last year, the steering group of the National Action Plan against Racism published the encouraging results of a survey that appeared to suggest that attitudes had softened in recent years.
Only 13 per cent of respondents said they had witnessed racism or racist behaviour, a significant drop on the figure from a comparable survey done three years earlier. But there were also apparent inconsistencies. While 58 per cent said they did not feel insecure about the presence of so many newcomers, 45 went on to declare themselves "very concerned or somewhat concerned" about the freedom of movement brought about by EU enlargement.
There is also a discrepancy between the dominant group's view and the degree of discrimination felt by immigrants. A week after the action plan's survey, a poll of immigrants' attitudes conducted by the ESRI - and one that excluded refugees, student visa holders and illegal immigrants, at that - found that 35 per cent of recent immigrants said they had been insulted, threatened or harassed in public because of their ethnic or national origin.
For black Africans the figure was higher: 53 per cent of them reported some form of harassment on the street or on public transport.
Recent election results, another useful empirical pointer, show consistently that overtly anti-immigrant politics have met little success in Ireland. The only candidates in last week's election who adopted an explicitly harsh line were the three aligned to the Immigration Control Platform (ICP). As it turned out, Ted Neville (Cork South Central) obtained only 804 first preference votes, while his colleagues Pat Talbot (Dublin Central) and John Donnelly (Dublin North) got 239 and 286 respectively.
While the success of four independent candidates elected because of their stance on health issues in the 2002 election pointed to a feeling that their views were not being adequately represented by the mainstream parties (and gave notice that health would be the issue of the next electoral cycle), nothing similar has happened with immigration.
Fanning believes that although there is little evidence of a very negative attitude to immigration, the anxieties that exist have been handled quite well by the mainstream parties, and that is part of the reason that groups such as the ICP have never garnered much support.
"I think the big thing the political parties did to manage these anxieties was the referendum on citizenship, something I personally would have opposed, but nevertheless 80 per cent of the people who voted in 2004 agreed with it. I think that took a lot of the heat out of the politics of resentment."
The referendum allowed for legislation that would replace the automatic right to Irish citizenship previously enjoyed by all children born on the island of Ireland with a requirement that in order for the child to acquire citizenship, one of its parents must either be an Irish citizen or have lived in Ireland for at least three of the previous four years.
Little is known about the ways in which Irish communities have responded to the arrival of large immigrant contingents, but there is a need to understand why some feel threatened by Ireland's increasing diversity, says Dr Claire Healy, a migration research consultant.
"Where does anti-immigrant sentiment come from? What are people genuinely scared of? How do we divide these fears into rational, objective-based ones and emotional, irrational ones? There is a need to separate objective fears, such as those born of competition for the same resources, and the subjective fears arising from, for example, forms of racism," she argues.
The public conversation (as well as the nature of immigration) has evolved since the 2002 election, when Fianna Fáil TD for Cork North Central Noel O'Flynn complained loudly about "asylum-seeker spongers", but political parties remain reluctant to broach the issue.
With the exception of an intervention by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, the subject was left unspoken during the election debate of recent weeks. Foreign nationals living here weren't asked what they made of it all because they didn't have a vote, and it cannot have been an accident that ethnic minorities were generally absent from campaign rhetoric, leaflets and broadcasts in which change, past or prospective, was a dominant theme.
But politicians' caution brings its own risks. By leaving public discussion to play itself out in the pubs and taxis, powerful myths and prejudices are allowed take hold and these are easier to propagate than to dispel.
So far politicians appear not to have mustered the confidence to talk about immigration in any meaningful way. One reason for this, Fanning believes, is that political parties themselves are among the most monocultural groups in society.
"Every one of us seems to have colleagues who are from other communities, and some are in sectors like health that depend utterly on immigrants to function and work. But nevertheless we have a political caste, if you will, who are pretty much coming from the same sort of place culturally, ethnically and so on.
"Are these people going to be capable of debating in a confident way about their ability to manage a diverse society in the 21st century?"
[ changingplaces@ireland.com ]
Douglas Gageby Fellowship
Ruadhán Mac Cormaicis the winner of the 2007 Douglas Gageby Fellowship. His series runs each Wednesday.
