LEGISLATION TO tackle racist crime and the promotion of the social inclusion of immigrants in Ireland are among proposals in a Roadmap to Integration published yesterday.
The report was published by the Integration Centre, which is supported by Atlantic Philanthropies Ireland Ltd, the One Foundation and the Citizens Information Board.
It was presented to members of the Dáil, Garda representatives and advocates at an event in Dublin. The document lists 36 roadblocks to integration in Ireland, including education, politics and healthcare. It proposes 78 solutions and says all but one – the introduction of intercultural studies into the school curriculum – would cost less than €10 million.
Immigrants to Ireland are more likely to be unemployed, earn less, are at a greater risk for poverty and less likely to own a home according to the 2011 Annual Monitoring Report on Integration published by the Integration Centre and the Economic and Social Research Institute.
The road map provided 10 top goals to be attained by October of 2012. These included dropping terms such as “naturalisation” and “bogus asylum seeker”, the creation of a State-approved Irish orientation course to assist with integration and implementing intercultural studies as Junior and Leaving Cert subjects.
Issues the document describes as “important asks” include the creation of an orientation course for immigrants “to tackle the lack of information on cultural, political, and civic life in Ireland as well as public services”.
Integration was not just about new immigrants, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole told the event. “There’s an official mindset very often which is integration is about how do we deal with these problem people who are complex, who are slippery, who are indefinable, different,” he said.
O’Toole said the report would still be incredibly valuable if the context of immigration were stripped out because it would help to point out where society needs to be improved.
“The fact that we still have a 19th-century one-size-fits-all education system would be a problem for us whether or not there were a large number of migrants in this society,” O’Toole said.