Was Joyce's Leopold Bloom a racist? An isolated interpretation of his definition of a nation in Ulysses as "the same people living in the same place" could have been used to justify apartheid, according to South African ambassador to Ireland Melanie Werwoerd.
Thankfully, the development of 21st century South Africa had proved him wrong, the ambassador said in Galway at the weekend.
Addressing a debate on multiculturalism at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, the ambassador acknowledged that Bloom's background was very diverse, and that his remarks could be taken out of context. Fortunately, the architects of apartheid were unaware of the quote in any case, she elaborated.
The decision by South Africa in the early 1990s to celebrate diversity - rather than view it as a problem, as reflected in the "fortress Europe" approach - was both challenging and enriching, the ambassador said.
In her view, this was the only sustainable way to support a new society based on core values which protected human rights. The apartheid regime had been "sustained by fear", she said - fear of a "black threat" with links to either communism or Roman Catholicism.
The current failure of political leadership in Ireland in relation to multicultural issues and immigration could lead to ethnic strife here, director of migration studies at UCC, Piaras MacEinrí, said. Even a "vague and well-meaning tolerance" was not sufficient, and Ireland faced the task of "finding a coherent dialogue on core values", he said.
A policy of non-intervention by the State would lead to dominance of one culture over another, he said, and this was why the State had had to intervene to support and protect the Irish language. Referring to the experience abroad, he said that both Canada and Australia had adopted official policies of multiculturalism, which allowed for respect for diverse cultures within a collective framework of shared values.
Taking issue with Mr MacEinrí, the British writer and broadcaster on multicultural and race issues, Kenan Malik, highlighted negative aspects of state intervention. Over the past 20 years, collective identities based on politics had been replaced by collective identities based on culture, and such cultural struggles were far more divisive, he argued. British government support for multiculturalism in the north English city of Bradford was proof of this, he said. Whereas political issues had driven the Asian youth movement of the 1970s, the main struggles in Bradford by 1985 focused on halal meat, separate schools for girls and Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.
There was a distinction between multiculturalism as an ideology and multiculturalism as a lived experience, Mr Malik argued. He did not agree that humans were so shaped by culture that to undermine it was to undermine identity. Equality arose from the fact that humans were political, with a capacity for culture. "We can either treat people equally or treat cultures equally, but we cannot do both."
The debate's chair, Prof Ivana Bacik of TCD, said there was a "real contradiction" in the way a State policy in favour of multiculturalism allowed for people from outside EU borders to be deported - people who may have put roots down here over a period of years.
