A chara, - At a time when Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain, declares that multiculturalism is a mistaken and socially harmful ideology, Piaras Mac Éinrí (September 19th) continues to extol its virtues.
Given recent happenings on our neighbouring isle, I would have thought he would have taken more time for reflection before disagreeing with Kevin Myers's comments of September 16th.
It is time the Irish people and Government accepted that as we now have a multiracial society we should attempt to put in place a common denominator of values to which all residents, both of native and foreign background, can subscribe.
Allowing a multicultural society to emerge, without having agreement and adherence to established core cultural habits and values, will result in the ghettoisation or segregation of Irish society.
This is not the way to an integrated society where those of foreign origin can feel that they belong. In effect, foreigners must adapt to our Irish way of life and should not be encouraged to flaunt their difference, as with women going about in disguise.
The recent initiative by the Minister for Justice effectively to change the rules for entry for our police force, and to recruit persons to that force who have not become acquainted, through their schooling, with Irish people, their culture and history, is a regrettable development, as it is based on the already discredited ideology of multiculturalism.
The fact that the Minister can speak Irish gives him no entitlements to abuse the status of the language, or of our police force, in this way.
Piaras Mac Éinrí, like Mr McDowell, obviously sees himself as a tolerant liberal, but both men must have regard to the likely outcomes of the policies which they now advocate. Not so long ago, in Britain, other "liberal" voices advanced the cause of multiculturalism as the antidote to the social disconnectedness caused by too rapid and excessive immigration.
The recent writings of Trevor Phillips should serve as a warning to both. - Is mise,
LIAM Ó GÉIBHEANNAIGH,
Áth an Ghainimh,
Co Átha Cliath.
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Madam, - Piaras Mac Éinrí (September 19th) uncritically repeats the myth of friendly Christian/Islamic co-existence in the Caliphate of Cordoba. While unquestionably an improvement over the standards of inter-faith relations which prevailed over much of Christendom at the time, the position of both Christians and Jews in the Islamic world had many features which are distasteful to the modern eye. The image of Andalusia as a Shangri-la for Muslims, Christians and Jews demonstrates a limited view of medieval Islam.
Traditional Islamic law, in Spain as elsewhere, provided for the death penalty for apostates and unbelievers who cursed the prophet or struck a Muslim. Non-Muslims were subjected to heavy and unequal taxation and institutionalised social inequality. Cordoba itself was only one of hundreds of formerly Christian cities overrun and sacked by a triumphalist Islam in the centuries between the death of the Prophet and the siege of Vienna.
Legalised religious tyranny of course existed in the Christian areas of Medieval Europe but has been gradually and painfully removed from Western law and (slowly) condemned by the Christian Churches over the past two centuries.
This process has not occurred across much of the Muslim world. This fossilisation of Islamic legal thought has arguably been one of the key impediments to economic and cultural developments faced by Islamic countries. As a direct result the traditional flow of refugees and "renegades" from the benighted and impoverished West to the more sophisticated and liberal East has been entirely reversed.
The flow of Muslim asylum-seekers and migrants into Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc has been motivated in part by the desire to escape many of the more oppressive aspects of traditional Islamic life while remaining Muslim.
It will be a poor reward if, after making this journey, the new Islamic citizens of Western Europe find that European governments, in the name of multiculturalism, are willing to abandon them to the coercion of a small minority of their co-religionists. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL GIBBONS,
Clifden,
Co Galway.