John Waters:There is a shame in confessing it: I had never been to New York until I went last week to speak at a conference on the world crisis of fatherhood at Columbia University. If I hadn't been invited I might have lived and died without going.
I had long yearned to go and yet feared to also. New York was as much part of my imagination growing up as Ben Bulben or Lissadell, a distantly familiar place where more of our family's history had happened than had happened at home. But there was much pain in that history, the pain of exile and loss. Several times I planned to go on pilgrimage there, to search out the addresses I remembered from the boxes of unwearable clothes we used to get from our grandaunt Nora - Park Avenue, Corona, Long Island; to find the grave of my uncle Michael, who served in Korea but died later following a street incident of indeterminate nature. I returned last week without pursuing either.
The shock of New York relates to the intensity of its human adventuring but also, for me, with its familiarity. Some of this has to do with a period in which I watched far too much television, but mainly it is because as a child I imagined New York from the glimpses provided by snaps and postcards sent over from the other side.
I used to think of my aunts and uncles as fearless people who had ventured further than I could dream. Last week, imagining myself retracing their first footsteps, I felt their terror and wonder but also their courage and freedom.
New York is a monument to its immigrant imagination, a city built by people whose worst fears are behind them, an architectural and cultural exercise in the exploration of the humanly almost-impossible. It is vital to grasp that this place was built by those who couldn't make it at home, but who, freed from the tyranny of imposed history, reached beyond themselves to realise a monument to freedom unlike anything else on earth. Is it any wonder that this place has excited the envy and hatred of the ignorant and small-minded who, 2,016 days ago, inflicted a wound on New York that could be felt even by people like me who had never been there?
On returning home, on the way back from the airport, I listened to a discussion on racism in Ireland. The argument went the usual way: we Irish are a bunch of racists; no we're not. For the first time it occurred to me that we are seeing all this the wrong way round. We tend to think of Ireland as "our" country, when in truth it belongs, like New York, to everyone who wants a piece of it.
The Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, perhaps more than any society in the world, is the product of external energies. There is almost nothing here that can be called the outcome of purely indigenous efforts.
For most of the last century Ireland was maintained on the life-support of emigrants' remittances, and is now sustained by the transnational capital born of the freedom and prosperity created by those emigrants in the US who left here as an alternative to starvation.
To jealously guard the "achievement" of the past decade would be to deny the truth of Ireland's success story, to pretend that we had made this miracle all by ourselves.
I don't believe this is a racist society. There are, of course, a lot of stupid people whose sense of inferiority is so great that they have a constant need to identify someone they can be "better than", but that's true of everywhere. It would be tragic if we were to provide this phenomenon with the oxygen of attention and in doing so cause it to acquire an inflated sense of its own significance.
But there is, at a higher level of consciousness, a general sense in this society that immigration is, if not a zero-sum equation, at best a risk which "we" take out of some sense of "openness" and "tolerance". This is an idea we imported from our nearest neighbours, forgetting that Britain, as a former colonising power, bears almost no resemblance to the conditions exhibiting here.
The only alternative to this grudging endurance of immigrants is a kind of gobshite "multiculturalism", which sees immigration as an opportunity for acting out a sense of moral superiority, reflecting another dimension of the need to identify someone to be "better than".
If Ireland is to continue to grow, it needs above all to benefit from the most fearless in its midst, and these, as the miracle of New York tells us, are more likely to be those who have come here with nothing to lose. Instead of thinking about how we might hold what we have, perhaps it is time we started asking how we might liberate from those who come here in hope the same qualities our ancestors found in themselves to build the greatest city in the world.