2020 VISION: Kate Holmquist looks at what needs to be done to integrate rather than alienate a generation of new Irish, in the first of a three-part series.
To be Irish in 2006 is to be living through an unprecedented social experiment. Our tight-knit island society has welcomed some 750,000 newcomers from 211 countries since 2000. With 9 per cent of the workforce and 10 per cent of the population foreign-born, according to the Central Statistics Office, we have reached levels of immigration that other European countries took decades to attain.
Few have dared attempt to forecast what, as a result, our society will be like in 2020.
"There is no plan," says Prof Ronaldo Munck, sociologist at Dublin City University. "In about five years Ireland has gone from being a sleepy, parochial, secure and homogenous society to one with immigration on the scale of France and Germany - yet it took them 30 to 40 years to reach that level and they're still having difficulties. The speed of our transformation is worrying because people have had no time to reflect on what all this means. There's an underlying feeling that while the country has become rich - and that's great - we still believe this is our place now and we'd rather more immigrants didn't come in."
The fact there is no coherent plan to prevent the potentially negative effects of immigration is a point made again and again by academics, unions, employers and immigrants. "No significant effort is being made to integrate minorities," says Prof Ferdinand von Prondzynski, president of Dublin City University. "There is official inaction and no sense of urgency around planning housing, for example, to ensure minorities don't end up in ghettos. It's really important to our future that we get this right. We should be holding workshops and bringing in expert committees to look at a range of issues."
He believes that far more than 10 per cent of the population is foreign-born, and that there are half a million immigrants here from eastern Europe alone.
"There's no vision," says Dr Jean-Pierre Eyanga Ekumeloko, of Integrating Ireland, an umbrella organisation for immigrant support groups. "They [ the Government] don't know what they want Ireland to be in 20 or 30 years' time, and because of that, the immigration policy is always bad. Employment is rising, but unemployment is also rising and many people are being left behind. Refugees can't access third-level education and their professional qualifications aren't recognised. Their children, who will be teenagers in 2020, will be feeling increasingly resentful at being excluded. If Ireland does not handle this situation now, Ireland will be handled."
The most glaring oversight is that the State has no way of saying for certain how many immigrants are here, where they are from or what they are doing here, a point made in a report compiled for the National Economic and Social Council by the inter-governmental International Organisation for Migration (IOM). At least four departments gather statistics, but they do not share or collate them, partly because their computer systems are incompatible, according to the IOM. In the five years since 2000, the Department of Social Welfare has issued PPS numbers to approximately 400,000 migrant workers from 25 EU countries and an additional 350,000 to people born outside the EU. It has also also issued PPS numbers to 140,000 "others" whose nationalities are unknown.
Last year alone, PPS numbers were issued to 150,000 immigrants from within the EU and approximately 35,000 from outside it. The number of PPS holders gives an indication of trends, but cannot pinpoint exact numbers of different nationalities living in Ireland at any given time as it doesn't take account of PPS-holders family members who might be living here, or PPS-holders who might have left. So while there are close to 100,000 Poles with PPS numbers, Evelina Sakduikyte from Lithuania, an organiser with Siptu and publisher of a Lithuanian newspaper here, estimates there are 200,000 Poles living here, as well as some 100,000 Lithuanians.
The discrepancies between official figures and estimates by people working with immigrants are dramatic. Officially, 25,000 non-EU students are in the country, but the Irish Congress of Trade Unions estimates that China alone accounts for 60,000-85,000 students here.
There is "significant illegal employment", according to the IOM report, but only three prosecutions have been brought against employers using illegal workers. Racism against migrant workers is ignored, despite Ireland's extensive equality and employment legislation, the report states. And the low wages paid to some migrant workers could undercut Irish workers, with serious consequences.
The "widespread" abuse of student visas by Chinese people who are really in the country to work is also raised in the IOM report, which warns that this practice will ultimately have a significant effect on the economy.
THE REPORT DRAWS a picture of barely disguised, employment-driven chaos and if there's a best-case scenario, we may have reached it: the economy is booming, employment is at an all-time high and everybody seems to be getting along just fine, thank-you (although discrimination cases have increased fourfold - but perhaps that's to be expected during the adjustment phase).
The National Task Force Against Racism has produced a document with more than 200 recommendations, but as Dr Ekumeloko points out, measures aimed at getting us to treat each other nicely are not the same as a long-term integration plan to manage the social and economic repercussions of our overnight transformation.
Prof Munck agrees. "Racism isn't about skin colour any more," he says. Munck successfully took a case to the Equality Authority, after he was turned down for the post of professor of sociology at NUI Maynooth on the grounds that he was born in Argentina and that therefore his experience would not apply, even though he'd lived in Ireland for 30 years. Discrimination on the grounds of race can be an elusive target, the equality officer pointed out, awarding Munck damages of €10,000.
Tensions are beginning to emerge. Immigrants who have lived in Ireland for a decade or more say racism is getting worse - from the visiting south American professor who was spat on outside Trinity College Dublin, to the Chinese student beaten up in a random attack. When there were fewer immigrants, they were welcomed and no one could do enough for them.
"Nine years ago, when I arrived, everyone wanted to help; now people are more standoffish and colder," says Carmela Di Stefano, an Italian-Venezuelan. "Life is easier if you have an Irish accent. I feel annoyed because I feel part of Irish society."
For "the new Irish" to integrate, there has to be a sense of what they are integrating into, yet the culture of this State is in crisis, according to Munck.
"What are our essential values?" he asks. "To speak Irish and drink Guinness? And who is more Irish, the Nigerian immigrant who lives here or the third-generation Irish-American whose grandparents emigrated to the US?"
"The Irish are racists in denial," believes Dr Shaheed Satardien, founder of the Inter-Faith Roundtable. "They don't want to be called racist, so they have taken certain people as tokens and put them at the head of NGOs to give the impression that this is integration - and it is not."
Racism, as Munck sees it, is a form of cultural nationalism based on the premise that one's own culture is unique and special. In a multicultural Ireland, where any number of minority groups may see themselves as unique, the scope for racism is vast. Meanwhile, the indigenous Irish will no longer be able to define their culture by certain types of music, language or sport any more than they can define it by bloodlines.
But, just as the Orange majority in the North and the Wasps in the US have maintained their dominance, there are subtle ways for the indigenous Irish to prevent so-called "minorities" from gaining too much influence.
"The elite who run the country remain a white, Irish, male club who are reluctant to allow immigrants into establishment jobs, preferring to see them as 'disposable labour'," Munck suggests.
The current wave of immigrants may remain placid as they focus on economic stability, but their children will have higher expectations and may react with political protest if they find they're not allowed into the club because their parents were not born in the State.
"Anyone who lives on the island of Ireland is Irish," says Lucy Gaffney, chairwoman of the steering committee of the National Taskforce Against Racism. But will the indigenous Irish remain so sanguine? For the worst-case scenario, we only have to look to the UK and France.
"The Paris riots and London bombings of 2005 give us an idea of what we could be facing," says Prof James Wickham, of Trinity College Dublin. "Multiculturalism has become a wholesome, 'apple-pie word'. But handling large numbers of immigrants without racism is in reality a challenge. In the health service, for example, we still have what he calls 'old-fashioned conventional racism', with non-consultant hospital doctors from outside the EU unable to become consultants, while consultant jobs go to Irish-born doctors."
Dr Satardien fears social unrest and even terrorism in a generation's time. "The Irish are experiencing an identity crisis as they transform from a predominantly Catholic society into a secular consumer society. At the same time, Muslim children are being reared in a way that will lead them towards identity crisis in their teens and 20s. This is because Muslims keep one foot in Ireland and one foot in the home village, watching satellite TV from their home countries and speaking in their own languages. So the children are Irish by day and a completely different identity by night. They are torn between two cultures."
Meanwhile, economic exclusion of some indigenous Irish young people could create resentment of foreign-born migrants. Ictu's Sally Anne Kinehan warns: "People who are disenfranchised could lead to a rise in fascism, the Irish national front. We fear that big time. We can see it happening in Europe where immigration has not been handled effectively. In the State, no one is making a coherent policy. Instead, it's about 'give us bodies and it doesn't matter if people are left behind'."