Merriman Summer School:The State had a window of a few years at best to develop an integration strategy for its immigrants while the economy gradually slows down, "if we're lucky", Piaras Mac Éinrí of UCC told delegates of the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, this week. Éibhir Mulqueenreports

Mr Mac Éinrí said a more fluid and changing notion of identity was needed, rooted in a new form of civic republicanism, to legitimise the migrant presence.

"But the criteria for membership of this society should be based on a recognition of who and where we are now, in 2007, not on tests of anyone's knowledge of ancient history, where they were born or to which parents."

In a joint presentation, Mr Mac Éinrí, lecturer in geography at UCC, and Prof Mary Hickman of London Metropolitan University addressed the school on the subject of "Nothing but the same old story? Emigrants from Ireland, immigrants in Ireland".

Mr Mac Éinrí was critical of Government measures to implement the "practical necessities" of integration, saying that little had been done to provide a uniform curriculum of English for adult learners or to resource the VEC system, "the obvious platform for the delivery of such programmes".

"Insofar as tuition is available at all outside an expensive and largely unregulated private sector, it has been fitful and wholly inadequate," he said.

He said that some Government departments, notably Education, had been slow to recognise the challenge of integration. "The new Minister [of State] for integration will need to put effective co-ordination structures in place."

A second major challenge was to implement programmes at local level and to give relevant actors co-ownership of these.

"New structures may vary from place to place but will need to be genuinely open, transparent, powerful and inclusive."

He added that "a new landscape of other languages and cultures" could pave the way for a new evaluation of Irish as a lesser-spoken language with a unique position in society.

Prof Hickman said the State was in certain respects in the same situation as other European countries in the post-second World War period with regard to its immigrant experience.

She said there was a danger that the type of public discourse prevalent in such countries as Britain, France and Germany at that time of monocultural nations being subjected to transformation would be replicated.

"The way in which Ireland is being envisioned in much public discourse in its moment of becoming a country of immigration actually jeopardises attempts to achieve an integrated, multicultural Ireland," she said.

She said that like most other nation states, Ireland was "a hybrid product, the result of a long history of unequal contestations between a variety of cultures and socio-economic and political forces".

A vision of 21st century multiculturalism was doomed to failure without a full acknowledgment of the State's historical multiculturalism.

Without this recognition, "an implicit assumption about Ireland as a white, monocultural host grappling with large numbers of incomers will persist", she said. Prof Hickman is director of the Institute for the Study of European Transformation at London Metropolitan University and professor of Irish Studies and Sociology.

Mr Mac Éinrí lectures in geography and is a board member of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Integrating Ireland and Nasc, the Irish immigrant centre in Cork.

Seán Ó Laoire, a director of Murray Ó Laoire Architects, addressing the school on the subject of settlement patterns, questioned what the legacy of the past 40 years would be if present planning and development trends continued.

He said change required a radical rethinking of the way planning, time, the environment and society were thought of.

He noted that although pre-famine Ireland had at least twice the population of today it had left a relatively small physical imprint.

"We have fostered low density and mono-class settlement patterns, proposed decentralisation policies that contradict spatial policies, while having an extraordinary dependence on imported energy and dangerously unambitious plans for alternative sources."