Madam, - Michael Parsons will have touched many hearts with last Wednesday's Irishman's Diary on the forgotten Irish emigrants in London. Yet it is strange that we may weep for those and yet ignore the suffering on our own doorstep.
Ireland "welcomed" more than 100,000 newcomers last year alone. But is the welcome we offer not in fact a pretty dubious one? Do we celebrate diversity, do we welcome strangers? I think we just about tolerate inward migration where it is necessary to maintain our economic momentum. Integration? Forget it. We treat immigrant employees as virtual "bonded labour" through employer ownership of work permits.
It has been claimed that the proposed new Employment Bill will change this with the introduction of a Green Card-type system. In fact, what is proposed is nothing like Green Cards, which confer a range of rights and entitlements on their holders. We are still dealing with people as guest workers. Continuing to do so means we have not accepted them as immigrants, as people who wish to settle and make a life in Ireland.
The economic miracle of the past 10 years has improved life in Ireland so much, but unfortunately not for everyone. What kind of society have we created with our economic prosperity? The cult of individualism, the preoccupation with, and ostentatious celebration of, personal wealth - this is also what the Celtic Tiger has created. Along the way, we seem to have lost a sense of community and of connectedness. We have perhaps misplaced, if not lost, many of our values and our traditions of looking out for and helping one another. An Taoiseach has rightly spoken recently about this loss of "social capital".
In my view, any society should be judged on how it deals with the most vulnerable groups - the elderly, the very young, the disabled and immigrants. I welcome this emerging debate about social capital and where we are now as a society. I hope we take the opportunity to make sure that what happened to many of our own emigrants never happens here. - Yours, etc,
STEWART KENNY, Anglesea Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.