President Mary McAleese has said she would not be happy with "a great debate about multiculturalism versus integration" in Ireland. She felt it would be "dreadful" if Ireland, "with such a historical experience of cultural imperialism", tried "to impose those shapes on others" here.
What Irish people should do is make immigrants feel welcome, with a "tell me about yourself" attitude, she said. What was desirable was an approach which combined "fáilte and curiosity".
Mrs McAleese was speaking in a brief question and answer session after delivering the keynote address at the Douglas Hyde conference at St Nathy's College, Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon on Saturday night.
She said immigrants here should abide by the State's laws as Irish emigrants did in host countries abroad, but that the culture of immigrants to Ireland should be allowed to flourish as Irish culture had in host countries. The most important thing was "to make people feel welcome and allow them penetrate our culture as they wish", she said. "We don't want to build barriers. That is the opposite of what we want to do."
Asked whether our "small indigenous culture could survive globalisation", she said similar fears had been the leitmotif of debates in the 1960s prior to our joining the European Economic Community - a "feeling we were going to be overwhelmed" - but that if anything, the opposite had happened. The protectionism which had been "the landscape of our thinking" up to the 1960s had "helped consign us to poverty and oblivion", she said.
"Globalisation is not about a stew. Human nature is not like that. If we were to be overwhelmed it would have happened a long time ago . . . besides, the Irish have been globalised a long time. In the US, 50 million people categorise themselves as genetically Irish. I don't think we have any worries in that regard," she said.
In her address, on the theme of Many Streams - One Broad River, she said Ireland had "the chance to do properly and with pride what so many other countries failed to do or did with ill-grace, to make good neighbours of strangers and fully-committed, fully-contributing citizens of all".
She said there was "a feeling in Ireland that we are at the start of something big and, importantly, something good - for ours is a time when the best-fed, best-educated, most liberal and most liberated generation of Irish men and women have come of age and are putting their genius to work on their own soil for the first time".
She added that it is "a generation which respects tradition but is not averse to ringing the changes. It is making fresh, confident, new connections between Irish and Scottish languages and music, commemorating the once-forgotten dead of two world wars . . . It can commemorate the Rising with enormous grace and dignity and within weeks reverently commemorate the Somme."
These are "the first steps of the first generation who did not live their lives as if they were drowning", Mrs McAleese said.
"We have still in front of us the ambition set out in the Proclamation of 1916 to create a country where all the nation's children are treated equally. Yet we were considerably nearer than Hyde was or ever dreamed we could be."
Instead, "today, perhaps more than ever before in our history, the self-esteem and self-confidence of the Irish people is now a powerful driving force in a nation defined increasingly by success and 'can do'". It has embraced "the Anglo along with the Gael . . . the global Irish family abroad and the new Irish - all emigrants from abroad".