A first tentative move into politics

The 'new' Irish are beginning to make their presence felt, not just in our streets and workplaces but in civil society, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic in the second part of his series Migration and the reinvention of Ireland

Rotimi Adebari can almost put a date on his reluctant conversion to civic activism. It had been over a year since he started applying for jobs and still his search had yielded nothing but a paper tower of courteous rejections. The months passed and he widened his trawl: beyond Portlaoise, beyond the county, beyond the sales and marketing niche in which 10 years of experience gave him all the ticked boxes he thought he'd need. And still nothing.

Adebari thinks of that year as the worst he has lived: he would sit at home, wracked with guilt that he couldn't provide for his wife and three children.

He questioned himself and the choices he'd made. Had they done the right thing? How would they manage? Above all, he was bored. At one point he offered to wash cars at the local car park, but even that approach was rebuffed. "And I can remember the guy saying to me: 'Rotimi, I have no problem with you, but we've been told to be very cautious with the Nigerians'."

"The straw that broke the camel's back in my job search was when this employer said to me they [ would] prefer a local. I said, 'Hang on, how do you define local?' They said: 'Local as in local.'"

Adebari laughs at the recollection and the innocence it evokes: he thought all they wanted was some proof that he lived in the area. "I was trying to say to them that I saw myself as a local: I had lived here for two years at the time, and I was well integrated into the local community. At the end of the day, I got a letter in the post. 'We're sorry. We'll keep your application on file.'

"So that was the last straw, and that was the moment I sat back and thought, come on, maybe you have to start educating the people out there that this country has changed."

Five years have passed. Today, Adebari is known to most in Portlaoise by his first name alone: Rotimi, the town councillor. He also runs his own consultancy in anti-racism and intercultural training and is the founder of Supporting Unemployed in Laois (Suil), his first of many forays into public life in the town.

He recalls how he scoffed when friends first suggested running for the council, but how slowly, almost grudgingly, he then came round to the idea. "What do I want to leave behind for the generations of immigrants coming behind me?" he thought.

Rotimi Adebari was one of some 20 non-Irish born candidates to contest the 2004 local elections (of whom two were elected) and modest though it was, the figure suggested that the country's recent arrivals were making their first tentative moves into the civic sphere.

Local politics provides only one gauge, for the dynamic can be picked up across the spectrum of community life.

Integrating Ireland, an umbrella group of migrant support and advocacy organisations north and south of the Border, lists over 210 organisations among its affiliates, while in its directory of migrant-led groups, the Immigrant Council lists 47 national and ethnic associations, from the Afghan Community and Cultural Association of Ireland to the Wexford All Cultures Group.

The arrival of a new wave of migrants since the 1990s has had a dramatic effect on Ireland's religious landscape, reversing the long decline of southern Protestantism and more than quadrupling the number of Muslims.

It will also be apparent to anyone who has found themselves passing St Audoen's Church in Dublin when one of its nine weekly Polish masses has just ended, or who remarked on the number of Filipinos wearing ashes in Dublin city last month, that immigration has also revived Catholic congregations in places where religious adherence has been ebbing for years. And among the most innovative changes to the cultural landscape is not the participation of immigrants in established churches but the birth and spread of immigrant (mainly African) religious groups.

According to Abel Ugba, a lecturer at the University of East London who co-founded Metro Éireann while living in Dublin in 2000, these patterns suggest a process of gradual engagement with the civic sphere among immigrant communities who are moving to "the next stage of their settlement pattern". He sees it in politics - the 2004 elections were "an awakening" - but also in churches, media and ethnic and national associations.

The decision to participate, to insist on being heard, can be motivated by different impulses and there is often a connection between a national or ethnic community's status here and the extent of their public activity.

Filipinos have managed to organise themselves to advocate the rights of immigrant nurses, but the Chinese, despite their greater numbers, are less active south of the Border than they are in Northern Ireland, possibly because a great proportion of them are here on student visas and expect their stay to be temporary.

For others the spectrum of choices is narrower, and immersing themselves in the community is a source of relief above all else. According to Sarah Williams at Volunteering Ireland, some 50 per cent of the prospective volunteers she meets are immigrants, most of them asylum seekers who are not allowed take employment in Ireland while their applications are being processed.

Eloho, an asylum seeker from Nigeria who has been in Ireland for almost two years, suggests we meet in a plush, expensive hotel in central Dublin. She came to this hotel once before, she says, when someone invited her to a meeting, but she can still remember the sense of intimidation she felt back then. "I thought I'd be arrested the minute I walked through the door."

Not so today. Eloho is confident and relaxed, sharply dressed and exuding a quiet sense of purpose, the rediscovery of which she attributes to her work as a volunteer.

Like all asylum seekers, Eloho has been living in one of the State's "direct provision" reception centres since she arrived in Ireland two years ago. She is provided with food and lodging and a cash payment of €19.10 a week, but she is not allowed to take up paid employment or third-level education.

Driven out of boredom with the hostel's unchanging routine ("sleep, eat, go back to bed, walk around town. It's extremely depressing"), Eloho - who has a degree in French - spoke to someone from Volunteering Ireland and eventually took a placement with an NGO in the city. The work brought her something that most new immigrants don't experience, she believes: contact with Irish people.

"Some people are so scared to integrate with Irish people. Let's face it: I look at you, you're a white man. In my country I'm not used to hanging out with white men. We just see them on TV," she says, laughing now.

"Then you step into a white country and you're surrounded with white people. It's like you've been thrown into the sea, and you can't swim. So what do you do? You turn and you grab anything that will keep you afloat. You grab something you think you can trust. So when you see Africans around, you feel more comfortable."

Being an immigrant of any type is not easy, Eloho remarks, but being an asylum seeker brings with it a stigma that can be difficult to shake off. "If you [ tell people], 'I'm a doctor, I work in this hospital, and I came in as an immigrant worker', they tend to respect you more. Human beings tend to like you for what you have, not just who you are. People love money. They love affluence. That is how we are. That's how the mind works, and people have to make a conscious effort to train themselves not to reason that way."

But having somewhere to go every morning and feeling that she has accomplished something by the end of each day has changed not only the way she is perceived by those around her, but how she weighs her own self-worth.

"Even out there on the streets, when people say to me, where do you work, and I tell them where I'm working. And the way I look: I try and dress up and look nice for work. To look like you're working, and to feel like you're doing something important, does something for your self-esteem. When you're not doing anything, you feel like a nobody. You feel like nothing."

Despite cases such as those of Eloho and Rotimi Adebari, however, the barriers to civic involvement remain insurmountable to many. Prejudices remain: Adebari tells of how, while on the canvass in 2004, a local man told him that another candidate had been spreading word of how asylum seekers and refugees were given free cars and mobile phones. But of all the screens that separate recent arrivals from the rest of society, language invariably looms largest.

"When you don't have language, how do you communicate?" says Adebari.

"There's a support group for immigrants here in Co Laois, and some of our members haven't got English. At our meetings, those of us who have English struggle to understand them. So I can imagine how it is in the wider community."

But there are structural constraints too, especially in politics. Recent immigrants are entitled to stand and vote in local elections, but they can do neither at national level. When the 30th Dáil convenes in a few months, not one member of an immigrant or ethnic minority community that numbers over 10 per cent of the population will be there.

Is the general absence of minority voices a symptom of a broader, systemic problem, asks Ronit Lentin of the sociology department at Trinity College Dublin. "There used to be three Jewish TDs - nobody any more. We used to have Moosajee Bhamjee, a Muslim Indian TD. He's not in politics any more. We have never had a Traveller senator or TD. What's going on?"

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