Douglas Gageby Fellowship:Despite electing the first Chinese-born politician in Europe, the North is an intolerance hotspot and intimidation is increasing, Ruadhán Mac Cormaicreports in his continuing series. Migration and the reinvention of Ireland
Until the last minute, her hope was tempered by experience. Polling day was closing in and, though she willed Anna Lo over the quota, Gwen Ong could then see only one outcome.
"I was telling friends: 'I know Anna, and I like her. But somehow I don't think people are ready for a minority ethnic person in politics.'"
Ong delights in having seen otherwise, for when the Alliance Party candidate was elected last month to represent south Belfast in the Stormont Assembly, Ong sensed that she and many others were being carried past the milestone with her.
"It was quite a landmark for the Chinese people, and for the minority ethnic people. It was wonderful. Something has changed, for people to actually vote for her. That was really, really heart-warming. I was honestly moved."
But though the moment confirmed to Ong that people had a new awareness of the diversity around them, the days that followed were to remind her of the distance yet to be travelled. "People who didn't want minority ethnic people here in the first place are now even more resentful because we have representation in politics," she says.
Soon after Lo's election, Ong was shouted at by some passersby as she walked through Belfast city centre. "I went to a bus stop and two girls started saying: 'these people are tarts', and all that stuff. Then I sat beside this mother and daughter, and the young girl just looked at me and said: 'she's smelly'. I thought: I shower every morning, and I usually use perfume as well. It made me pretty self-conscious for a while, but after that I realised she's got a problem - the problem doesn't lie with me."
If the election of Anna Lo, the first Chinese-born politician elected to a legislature anywhere in Europe, portends a growing tolerance towards Northern Ireland's burgeoning ethnic minority communities, it could scarcely have been better timed.
In February, a survey carried out by researchers at the University of Ulster suggested Northern Ireland was one of the most intolerant places in the western world. People in the North, it found, were the least likely to want to live beside someone of a different race and were more opposed to migrant workers than most of the 19 countries surveyed. They were also the most unabashedly homophobic.
Old epithets were duly exhumed, and the discussion was reduced to the location of Northern Ireland on some putative league table, as the "race-hate capital of the western world". But the findings did appear to tally broadly with those of previous studies.
The result of the most recent Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, published last year, showed that racial prejudice has become more entrenched in the past decade. A quarter of those questioned reported being either "very" or "a little" prejudiced against people from ethnic minority groups. In 1994, only one in 10 felt the same way.
As perceived prejudice has risen, so too has the frequency of reported intimidation and attacks against ethnic minorities. According to the PSNI, race-related "incidents" are increasing: between April 2006 and January 2007 the police logged 914 incidents spanning the range of the racist's repertoire: verbal intimidation, stone-throwing, harassment, arson, graffiti, attacks on property and physical assault. In the same period the previous year there were 770 incidents.
Gwen Ong speaks warmly of the opportunities that Northern Ireland has opened for her. She sees some improvement, but cautions against complacency: the daily, routinely menacing slurs that many endure are not picked up in the statistics, she says.
"Can you imagine if I faced six racist incidents in a day? I would be calling the police to report each incident, and then another four, and after that another five? It would sound like I'm whingeing. The police would be sick and tired of me."
Ong, who came to the North from cosmopolitan Singapore a year ago, was so shocked at the intensity and severity of the intimidation she found in Belfast that she accepted an invitation last year to appear on television to discuss the issue. And while she was pleased that her intervention kindled debate, there was a backlash to follow.
"People were angry and they thought that by intimidating me I would shut up. I had a guy walk past me and say: 'She's the one. She's dead.' Come on, get a life.
"Things like that don't scare me, unfortunately for them. Maybe unfortunately for me as well.
"It used to offend me quite a bit because I come from a society that's quite racially tolerant . . . Coming here, from being in the majority and joining the minority, you certainly become very much aware that the scales have tipped and you have to be more careful about things. I can't just walk up the street and think: it's a perfect day, blue sky. You start thinking: am I going to be harassed today? How many times?"
With hate crime claiming more headlines in recent years, an unflattering spotlight has been trained on parts of south Belfast where incidents have been particularly frequent, co-ordinated and brutal. Here, in loyalist paramilitary strongholds such as Donegall Pass and the Village, compact, hemmed-in, working-class districts whose allegiances are still proclaimed loudly on the gable walls, large numbers of houses are rented privately.
Drawn by low rents and proximity to the university, the city hospital and the city centre, many of Belfast's immigrants - Malaysian students, Filipino nurses, Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi shopkeepers, and eastern Europeans - have settled in the area.
The PSNI has made efforts to encourage tolerance and the reporting of incidents, and much has been done to rejuvenate dilapidated estates and remove graffiti as soon as it appears. But despite some progress, intimidation is rife and physical attacks are not unknown. Chinese takeaway owners still pay protection money to criminals with local power.
There is embarrassment in these parts of south Belfast at the stigma that endures, but there is seldom reluctance to talk about it. Usually, a journalist who visits a small community to write about bad news is met by a stampede of optimists - seers of change and improvement, prophets of better days ahead.
But here, ask about racism and you meet fluent, almost fatalistic pessimism. When I mention this to one community worker, he answers without a blink, like an actor speaking from his script: "Talking about racism means they don't have to talk about the bigger issue: sectarianism."
But then, even discussion of racism is divided along sectarian lines. The majority of racially motivated incidents occur in Protestant areas, and the problem is popularly seen as that of one side only. Last year's Life and Times Survey showed that, between 1994 and 2005 the proportion of Catholics who said they were prejudiced against people from ethnic minority communities doubled from 9 per cent to 18 per cent, but over the same period the proportion of Protestants almost trebled, from 12 per cent to 33 per cent.
The dates suggest the same question posed recently by the researcher Robbie McVeigh: if racism, however measured, is increasing in Northern Ireland, how is this connected to peace? Keep in mind, says one support group worker, that for loyalists the peace process has been perceived as a gradual loss of ground - territorial and political - to Catholics. Further ground is now being lost to immigrants and other minorities.
The instinctive stance of the besieged and defence-minded is to view all change as a bad thing, he suggests. And the corollary is that for Catholics, who tend to see things getting better, rupture with the past is, in itself, to be welcomed.
A second point relates to the housing market. Protestants have more contact in residential areas with ethnic minorities, and the experience in many Protestant areas is of demographic decline. As Dr Chris Gilligan of the University of Ulster points out: "People who are socially mobile tend to be geographically mobile - they're moving out of the areas."
Because Catholics are more likely to remain where they are, there is less housing turnover and so fewer immigrants live among them. This means that the tolerance credentials of Catholic areas haven't been tested, says Gilligan. A similar observation was made in an editorial in the Andersonstown News when attacks in loyalist areas were at their height some years ago.
Gwen Ong once wrote a letter to the four largest political parties, detailing her daily ordeal and calling on them to speak out. Nothing came of it, she says. With few exceptions, those working to fight racism are critical of politicians' lack of courage.
Muhammad al-Qaryooti, the director of the Belfast Islamic Centre, recalls his surprise on seeing previously supportive politicians side with opponents of a plan to build a mosque in Craigavon some years ago. One politician claimed residents would be kept awake by "wailing".
"Some of them were politicians who were friendly to the Muslim community. One of them said to us: 'I listen to my voters.' People are friendly to you when you talk to them; then you find something hidden," says al-Qaryooti.
While Northern Ireland's experience of racism is not inherently different from those of England, France or the Republic, decades of political stagnation have compounded the problem. (As late as 1992 the British government was insisting that the case for anti-racist legislation was "not proven".)
There was a lack of preparation for the changes that peace and economic growth would bring, says Jolena Flett of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, notably the arrival of migrant workers to fill gaps in the labour market.
"I don't know that if this was the 1960s and this was happening, no one would say that this is worse than anywhere else. When you look at the government structures, and the non-government that has been here, and under direct rule how disconnected that's been from what's going on on the ground, you can see why this has been an issue . . . Now obviously there's still racism in the United States and England, but the way that it's responded to, the things they've gone through, have changed a lot of people's attitudes and their way of looking at things."
changingplaces@ireland.comRuadhán Mac Cormaic is the winner of the 2007 Douglas Gageby Fellowship. His series, "Changing Places", runs every Wednesday.