Different Voices, a major Irish Times series on immigrants in Ireland, begins today with a look at how mixed 'race' couples and ethnic minorities are treated in multicultural Ireland. Are we integrating new communities or alienating them, asks Nuala Haughey, Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent
Dr Abdullahi Osman El-Tom has noticed a certain chill in the Irish welcome since he moved here for work in 1990. In the intervening decade which saw unprecedented numbers of migrants come to Ireland to find employment or to seek refuge, the Sudan-born anthropologist has found he is no longer a mere curiosity because of his colour.
"The situation has gotten much worse as far as black people are concerned. When I came here, this society was much more welcoming for black people," he says in measured tones, seated at the kitchen table of his home in Templeogue, Dublin.
As an anthropologist, Abdullahi is well placed to analyse this phenomenon. "There is a certain strand of people who I wouldn't say are conservative or racist, but who have this illusion that there is a possibility of maintaining a culture that is 'pure' which, of course in itself, is a myth because there is no culture anywhere which is pure, all cultures are hybrid cultures. People who are afraid of multiculturalism, who feel threatened by other cultures, are becoming more vocal."
Abdullahi (48) and his Kilkenny-born wife, Sheila Power (47), are acutely aware they are privileged to move in circles where diversity is welcomed.
Sheila is the joint owner of a Dublin-based consultancy company which provides cross-cultural programmes and services for non- nationals visiting Ireland to work, train or study. Abdullahi lectures at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, Co Kildare, and speaks fluent Irish.
Protesting that they are just too boring to be worthy subjects for a newspaper article, Sheila says the very ordinariness of their mixed marriage shows how normal interculturalism can be.
"Without having to stage-manage anything, we live very comfortably in a small community which is totally accepting of difference," she says. "If this is the new Ireland, it's an easy place to be. If only it was like this for everybody."
Abdullahi took up his teaching post in Maynooth in the days before this new Ireland emerged. Those were the days before the Celtic Tiger economic boom. Before Romanian asylum-seekers started selling the Big Issues magazine in Drogheda, before Latvians came in large numbers to work in agriculture in north county Dublin and Brazilians took up jobs in midlands meat plants. Those were the days before Chinese language students started enrolling in Dublin schools and before Filipino nurses were recruited in their thousands to staff hospitals.
There are now an estimated 160 nationalities in the Republic, most living in main urban centres, others in discreet pockets in towns and villages.
From 1996 to 2001, more than a quarter of a million persons migrated to the Republic, under half of these returning Irish. This works out at about seven per cent of the 1996 population of 3.6 million, the equivalent of about 4 million people moving to France.
Due to a lack of comprehensive data, it is impossible to state definitively how many non-nationals are currently in the country, including nationals of other EU countries who do not need visas. An intelligent conservative guess puts the figure at about 200,000.
Most of these are legal labour migrants or students on work/study visas. Some have sought permanent refuge from troubled parts of the globe. Some are just passing through, while others will put down roots, marry, have children who will be Irish citizens. Others have come as illegal workers or tourists who have overstayed their visas and found work in the buoyant black economy.
With the demand for labour continuing despite the economic slowdown of recent months, it is clear diversity is here to stay. The new emerging communities have started self-help associations, sporting and cultural groups, churches and specialist shops.
The speed of this cultural transformation in the past five to seven years has brought out the best and the worst in the "indigenous" Irish, from the simple generosity of a resident of Clifden in Co Galway who bought weatherproof clothes for several of the town's asylum-seekers, to the brutal murder of a Chinese student in north Dublin last January.
And while the vast majority of foreigners in the Republic are working or studying legally, a false perception has taken hold - deliberately encouraged by some politicians - that every coloured face belongs to a "bogus" asylum-seeker on the make.
Father Bobby Gilmore, a Columban missionary priest working in the Migrant Information Centre in Dublin, predicts it will be one or two generations before Irish people get over the shock and discomfort of this new wave of immigration.
Father Gilmore worked with Irish migrants in London during the heyday of their exodus to the UK in the 1980s. He knows only too well the tensions and lack of understanding between what he calls "the European economic mindset and the migrant heart".
We Irish never fully understood our own emigration, tending to view our emigrants as no longer our responsibility once they had left these shores, he says.
"There wasn't any analysis or research on emigration until the 1980s or 1990s. We didn't have any consciousness of their plight and how they settled and adjusted and the tensions and problems they experienced. If we didn't understand our own emigration, we have been slow to catch up with the opportunities and problems that immigrants bring."
While acknowledging the positive work of various Government bodies and statutory agencies, Father Gilmore says a single humanitarian rather than security-oriented ministry is needed to deal with immigration and help remove the air of suspicion which lingers around it, particularly in the days of Operation Hyphen I and II. "If it was easy for immigrants to navigate Government offices, we wouldn't be here," he says.
"Now is the time to manage it; 25 per cent of the homeless in London's West End wouldn't be Irish if Irish emigration to Britain was managed better. In 25 years down the line, we don't want to see immigrants sleeping rough here."
The Migrant Information Centre, aimed at labour migrants rather than refugees, is in the slightly rundown basement of the Stella Maris Seaman's Club in Beresford Place, at the bottom of Gardiner Street. It is sparsely and basically furnished, its walls hung with colourful handcrafts from Peru.
A Latvian woman and her new child recently visited it, the mother here illegally and desperate for social support. "I tried to see if there was a net to catch her and give her a dignity of a person. What will be passed on to her child is the oral anguish of a mother going from door to door looking for support," says Father Gilmore.
He compares this woman's experience to that of low-skilled Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean migrants to the UK from the 1950s onwards. Resentment at their treatment was handed down from one ghettoised and poverty-stricken generation to the next. The results of decades of isolation, discrimination and state-sanctioned neglect, were manifest on the streets of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley during the race riots of last summer.
This scale of interethnic tension, which British far right parties have sought to capitalise on, has not materialised in the Republic. But already immigrant ghettos are emerging in deprived areas of Tallaght, Finglas and Clondalkin in Dublin. Tensions between the newcomers and the exisiting local communities are a part of everyday life, far removed from the harmonious relations experienced by Sheila and Abdullahi in their pretty cottage community.
The Kayowa family of Congolese refugees have lived in a local authority house in a grim estate in Killinarden, Tallaght, for three years. On top of the almost daily taunts of "niggers go home", they have been robbed more times than they care to count. Shards of glass from the latest incursion by local youths lie in the front lawn and a piece of cardboard replaces a missing plane of glass. Angel Kayowa, whose husband works in Blanchardstown, is at her wits end. The family has not yet replaced the television, music centre or telephone, stolen for the second time. "This area is no good," she says in broken English. "It's not safe. It would be better to live in Africa. My children say in Africa they would not do this. They don't understand why white people get into the house."
US-born academic and actress Elisa Joy White spent a year doing field research for her PhD thesis in African Diaspora Studies in Dublin in 2000-2001. She experienced the same casual racism as those African immigrants she interviewed, with people yelling at her "blackie," "nigger bitch" or "go back to your f***ing country".
She also found herself becoming the public face of the emergence of Ireland's growing African community when she landed the job of the first black character on the RTÉ soap, Fair City, set in Dublin's northside. She played Venus O'Brien, a record industry femme fatale.
Elisa says she often pondered how Dublin could be so technically progressive yet so socially regressive.
"It seemed that in a short period of time the country had experienced a near violent crashing of the new into the old. So, it wasn't quite 'global' in the way that London, Tokyo and New York are. There was something 'retro' about the city.
"Living in Dublin was like driving around in a time machine with all of the stuff of the 21st century around you; your mobile, laptop, drum-n-bass playing on the MP3. And then, you'd hop out of the time machine for a moment and you'd be living in the American south circa 1955, like a character from Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. People would be staring at you or calling you some name because you were black."
Despite negative experiences, Elisa says she met during her research many "vibrant and committed" members of the anti-racism community, "people who feel Ireland can be a better place if it allows itself to become the multicultured society it is inevitably becoming".
Summayah, an Irish-born convert to Islam, straddles the immigrant and host community world in both her personal and professional life. She changed her name when she became a Muslim 20 years ago and has lived abroad. Summayah is now the women's co-ordinator at the Islamic Cultural Centre, an elegant pale brick complex in the south Dublin suburb of Clonskeagh. Dressed in a headscarf and dark, cloak-like over-dress, Summayah switches effortlessly between English and Arabic as women casually drop into her office.
She says public discussion on interculturalism is long-overdue in an Ireland which has for many decades had minority ethnic communities in its midst.
"My own perception as an Irish person is that the Irish have been closed off to change," she says. "They've always felt the need to protect themselves. The changes should have been noticed many years ago but people only woke up to it when it became very very evident. Hence, with the unknown, comes the fear."
As both a member of the majority white Irish community and the minority Muslim community, Summayah says ethnic minorities should not sit back and wait to be integrated.
Recognising the vital importance of language skills to give newcomers the confidence and ability to interact, she has set about organising English classes for immigrant Muslim women who can be all too easily cut-off from the wider community.
She points to the health services as an area where efforts are being made to cater for diversity.
"I was in hospital recently and a nurse said to me: 'I see you are Muslim, would you like to see a female doctor'. That's something small but to me it is a great stride. It shows respect for you and makes you feel comfortable with who you are."
The authorities have put considerable resources in recent years into processing and accommodating asylum-seekers and labour immigrants. A Garda immigration unit and a racial and intercultural section have been set up. The long-awaited Know Racism public awareness campaign has got under way.
Although immigrant children daily interact with the majority community in at least 250 schools, the general focus of State provision remains on reception rather than integration. Churches, trade unions, local partnerships and other non-governmental groups have plugged gaps in services by offering educational supports as well as legal advice and informal opportunities for the host and immigrant communities to interact. Support groups have been formed in villages and towns throughout the country.
Philip Watt from the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, which advises the Government, says there should be a move away from policies focused solely on security and immigration control towards those promoting inclusion and integration.
He wants to see a forum on cultural diversity involving old and new minority communities and the social partners which would set the agenda for the future. "If that doesn't happen, we are doomed to repeat what other countries experience where communities grow up living parallel lives, such as in the north of England where there is very little interaction between communities," he said
Sheila and Abdullahi are generally positive about the future of "race" relations in Ireland. They anticipate that they will have to support their four-year-old daughter, Nadia, to be comfortable with her identity and difference in a world where Barbie dolls are homogeneously white with long, straight blonde hair. When a friend in her pre-school group asked her recently why she was "brown," she replied candidly: "I was born that way."
Working for a living: the people who get the visas to a new life
From 2000 to mid-July of this year, 76,506 one-year work permits were issued to non-European migrant workers, including 25,969 renewals.
The top three areas of recruitment for these labour migrants are the service industry, catering and agriculture/fisheries. In the six years from 1994 to
1999 inclusive, only 28,217 work permits were
issued.
The work permit market is dominated by Filipinos, Australians, South Africans, Latvians, Ukranians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Romanians, Poles, Malaysians and Americans.
More than 5,000 two-year work visas have been issued since the scheme for high-skilled migrants was introduced in June, 2000. Most visa holders are Filipino nurses and there are also large numbers of IT specialists from South Africa and India.
Almost 44,000 people claimed asylum in the Republic between 1996 and the first six months of this year. Nigerians accounted for almost 30 per cent of all asylum applicants, Romanians 20 per cent and Central and Eastern Europeans 16 per cent.
Source: Dept of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Dept of Justice