It is appropriate, as we celebrate our national day, that, in the spirit of the "new Ireland", we recall that the man who epitomises this country to the world was not Irish by birth but came to the island first as an involuntary migrant, kidnapped from Roman Britain by Irish raiders. St Patrick was one of the first "new Irish", a man marked by the migration that came to be so much part of our people's experience.
President McAleese reflected movingly this week in an important London speech to the British Council, on our own experience historically of emigration and the obligations it imposes. Remember, she urged her audience, "you need courage to be a migrant; to be a stranger with a heartbreaking loneliness for home and a deep human need to be made feel at home in a new homeland."
As a people we know of the value of emigrants, the huge role they can play in building the communities they join, economically, politically, culturally. Drawing the new Irish "deeply and happily in to every facet of Irish society is one of the most important social issues we face over the next few decades," Mrs McAleese argued. "Of all people on the planet we have no excuse for getting it wrong."
Crucially, that means beginning by trying to understand and then engaging with the myriad new communities in our midst and about which many have only the vaguest sense beyond the crude stereotypes that prejudice conjures up.
"Changing Places: Migration and the Reinvention of Ireland" is the theme of Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, the winner of the second Douglas Gageby Fellowship, which is announced today. He will explore over the next three months both the effects of migration on migrants and on the places they come to. This "Changing Places" series begins in Weekend Review today and will be published every Wednesday.
As Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, chairwoman of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, tells him, there is very limited knowledge of Ireland's immigrants; how long they stay, where they work, or the health, housing and familial problems they face. What brings them to Ireland? What do they leave behind? Will they remain? And each question answered is another one posed. About policy, about racism in our midst, and also about our own sense of self.
Dr Jean-Pierre Eyanga Ekumeloko of Integrating Ireland makes the important point that the incorporation of newcomers from different cultures representing a full tenth of our population - 150 countries have contributed their own to us in the last 10 years - amounts to a redefinition of Irish society.
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Achieving clarity about who we believe we are is not easy. For a start we have conflated in our minds two very different meanings of the notion of "identity". Firstly, the "sense of oneself", of what defines us as individuals, the components of our uniqueness; but then, secondly, the word expresses "sameness" as in "identical". Our identity in the first sense consists of many elements: it may include all of a Kerry dimension, a European one, a passion for Manchester United, a London-Irish birth, a Catholicism, and a sense of belonging to Ireland. In the second sense it implies a oneness with those who share one or several predominant characteristics. Historically this has tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive - Irish, Catholic and nationalist became synonymous in the dominant national consensus.
When we speak, for example, of some emigrant communities like the Boston-Irish as "more Irish than the Irish themselves", what we are reflecting on in reality is that the dominant aspect of their identity, the glue that binds their community in the vast American melting pot, is their sense of oneness with other Irish Catholics in the city. It is a social defence mechanism whose importance to them is not mirrored in Ireland any more.
The exclusive, narrow nature of the traditional definition of Irishness has long been felt by many Protestants, North and South, as the poet John Hewitt expressed:
This is my home and country. Later on
perhaps I'll find this nation is my own.
But things are changing. Prof Declan Kiberd has written of how "If the notion of Ireland seemed to some to have become problematic, that was only because the seamless garment once wrapped like a green flag around Cathleen ni Houlihan had given way to quilt of many colours, all beautiful, all distinct, yet all connected too."
The process in which we have been engaged in recent years, the gradual internalisation in all of us of a new sense of inclusive Irishness, is not just about accepting that one can be black and Irish, or Polish and Irish; it is also about national reconciliation and a new relationship with the "old enemy" so magnificently expressed at the Ireland-England game in Croke Park.
The writer Hugo Hamilton, born of a German mother and an abusive Irish father who prevented his children from speaking English at home in Dún Laoghaire, has written of his sadness at his estrangement as a child from other children who could not accept he could be one of them. His crie de coeur is a manifesto for the "new Irish": ". . . Ireland has more than one story.
We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English . . . We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people."
We are all the speckled people today. Confident, wealthy, forward-looking, internationalist, we can afford to define our identity in terms that celebrate our overlapping multiplicity of allegiances and diversity. The new Ireland is a state of mind as much as a sense of place.