Funny how much trouble a strip of material can create, writes Breda O'Brien
Of course, it is not just any strip of material. It is a dastaar, a turban worn as an article of faith by devout Sikhs. The Garda Commissioner has decided that a Sikh cannot wear a turban in the Garda Reserve. Some people have applauded, because they believe that a garda in uniform should not be wearing any religious symbol. Others see the decision as a lamentable desire to impose a secular monoculture.
The Minister for Integration, Conor Lenihan, said: "If we are to take integration seriously, people who come here must understand our way of doing things." If the Minister understands our way of doing things he should be giving tutorials, because most of us find living in this grand little country bewildering at the best of times. To take just one example, when surveyed, we have some of the highest rates of personal happiness around, but also some of the highest rates of young male suicides, and of alcohol abuse.
Perhaps the Irish way of doing things is to be able to happily ignore irreconcilable realities. Our policy on immigrants is going in several incompatible directions at once. We want a more inclusive police force, but a Sikh cannot wear his turban in the reserve. Allegedly, dastaar-wearing will lead straight to what used to be known as ban gardaí legging it in burkas after burglars, and you couldn't have that.
In similar vein, the Government publishes a worthwhile document called Integration - A Two Way Process, but the Minister with responsibility for integration decides only to emphasise one half of the process - the others understanding us.
Migrants were a novelty for a while, particularly in middle-class areas where they were a wonderful source of domestic labour. Now, the reality is beginning to sink in that just as many of our own emigrants to Boston or Birmingham longed for home but never made it back, many migrants to Ireland will settle here, too.
Another perfect example of our capacity to hold two competing realities in our minds without suffering dizziness is our ability to lobby for our own illegal emigrants in the US, but to come out in hives at the mere suggestion of an amnesty for undocumented workers in Ireland.
Just as some Irish went out to the US on a J1 student visa and ended up staying 10 years, so some people have come to Ireland as students and ended up undocumented. Others come in with legitimate work permits, but find that the conditions they are expected to endure are dire. In other cases, they may become redundant unexpectedly. People who leave their workplace for these or other reasons become undocumented, because the work permit is tied to a specific job.
Minister Micheál Martin has said that he wants to establish how many undocumented workers there are out there. It could be a worthwhile exercise, if the aim is to help those in distress to re-enter the system.
If, however, it is an exercise aimed at summarily removing from the country those who have become undocumented through no fault of their own, it will be just more evidence that Ireland does not really see migrant workers as anything other than units of labour.
At the moment, those who have fallen out of the system often end up contacting non-governmental organisations. Usually, the NGO will lobby on behalf of the person, and quite often, will succeed in obtaining temporary permission to remain. However, this is a slow and torturous process, involving two government departments, and there is no transparency about the criteria for acceptance or rejection. In the meantime, the person is in limbo, and is not entitled to social welfare, even when they have paid taxes and made personal contributions.
As a tentative first step towards treating people as human beings and not just labour units, it should be possible to legislate for a temporary bridging visa for six months. It would just regularise what is happening on an ad hoc basis anyway. A clear criteria could be set down, and the time taken could be greatly reduced.
Given that the vast majority of undocumented workers entered the State legally, presumably we considered them suitable to work here in the first place, so getting them back into the system means that they once again become tax-paying citizens, and not denizens of the black economy. For the workers, it would signal an end to the distress and uncertainty of being undocumented.
The ideal place to legislate for such a temporary visa would seem to be the forthcoming Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill. As yet more evidence of the ability to co-exist with contradiction, that Bill currently has a provision for summary deportation, but not for a bridging visa.
Not that it is easy to solve the conundrum of how to genuinely integrate people into our society. We have seen two models fail, that of multiculturalism in Britain and assimilation in France. Multiculturalism fails to emphasise the need for a common set of values, and implies that any cultural practice is deserving of respect. Assimilation pretends that difference does not exist, and that all that matters is the dominant culture.
In this country, where an Irish person who has lived in an area for 30 years can still be termed a blow-in who does not understand our way of doing things, there is a steep learning curve ahead. That said, thus far racism towards newcomers has not been the problem that it is in other countries. (A cynic might say that is because we reserve our worst attitudes for our own Travellers.) Yet all will not be plain sailing.
There is a dominant culture in this country that presumes, among other things, that religion should be a bit like stamp-collecting, a harmless hobby to be pursued in private. The natives who object to this standpoint are relatively easily shut up, but it causes some confusion in the mind of the card-carrying liberal when the person who disagrees is a solemn and dignified Sikh.
A turbaned garda will not threaten our way of life but a failure to genuinely attempt to understand the diverse cultures that now co-exist in Ireland certainly will.