Sir, – Migrants are in the news. They have always been in the news in Ireland. Our first migrants came ashore after the ice age, about 10,000 years ago, and Ireland became home to its first inhabitants. A significant settlement of these hunter-gatherers was unearthed in excavations at Mount Sandel, near Coleraine.
A few thousand years later came the first farmers who paddled ashore into Ireland from western Europe, to fell trees, grow crops and raise livestock. They left a memorial of walls and fields at Ceide, Co Mayo. Then the Celts arrived from central Europe. They gave us a new language, gave us learning and mythological stories, which greatly enriched our heritage.
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Then it was the Vikings who arrived from Norway and settled here to add skills in metalwork to our artistic repertoire. Normans and the Anglo-Irish Ascendency joined us in the following centuries and gave us Douglas Hyde, JM Synge and WB Yeats, and a literature that evoked plaudits across the world.
Recently, migrants have come from eastern Europe to add vigour to our house-building programme. Other migrants have come from Asia and Africa to add vital manpower and expertise to our hospitals, healthcare system and to our services industry.
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We live in an evolving Ireland with migrants who will be integrated, as always over our long history, into the mainstream, to add their strengths to our society. – Yours, etc,
SEAN Mc ENTEE,
Dublin 6W.