Irish people risk perpetuating a new cycle of discrimination and long-term exclusion if they fail new members of society by not having a proper integration policy for immigrants, the Merriman Summer School has been told.
The director of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at UCC, Mr Piaras Mac Éinrí, warned the Republic was creating the conditions for newly marginalised communities.
Addressing the annual summer school last night, he said: "We have already failed to create a society where travellers can feel welcome and valued as equal citizens; do we really want to add to the ranks of the excluded and the despised?"
He added: "Yet this is not inevitable. The challenge is to foster an open and honest national debate in which the options are clearly defined and discussed. The challenge is not to deny but to draw upon our own past histories, inside and outside this country, to find those resonances which may enable us to build policies capable of achieving a broad degree of acceptance of difference on the part of mainstream Irish society."
In his address, Beyond Tolerance: Towards Irish Models of Multiculturalism?, Mr Mac Éinrí said: "We must have a policy on integration because it is the right thing to do, not just from the perspective of human rights, but also of enlightened self-interest."
He pointed out: "At least 6 per cent of the total population is composed of immigrants, many of whom have no previous connection with Ireland - a challenge we have never before faced in modern times." Accordingly, he said, "we need to supplement the necessary debate about arrival and reception with one about the long-term picture, that is, integration".
Mr Mac Éinrí defined multiculturalism as "validating diversity and harmony between different groups; instead of building higher walls, it offers security of identity while promoting a creative and dynamic hybridity". However, he said that the loose way in which the term has come to be used in Irish public discourse "is actually unhelpful and even dangerous".
He said: "On the one hand, the rather fuzzy way in which the 'pro-diversity' and anti-racist lobby uses it hardly provides us with an effective road map for defining future policy.
"On the other, the lack of clarity about the term is also fuelling the concerns of those who fear change, sometimes for understandable reasons, and who do not know where it is leading us.
"Everyone is a little nervous of the new. It behoves those who favour change to explain what they mean, and what implications such changes might have for the lives of ordinary people.
"Those of us who belong to the pro lobby when it comes to immigration and integration have by and large failed to take our case to the public in terms which are understandable and which connect with the language and traditions of public discourse here."
Mr Mac Éinrí said multiculturalism would not work without active State intervention and support, "but it cannot be managed in the long-term on a top-down basis, the aim must be to facilitate partnership-based, bottom-up approaches"
Mr Mac Éinrí said that some of the leaders in the anti-Nice campaign had resorted to an anti-immigration position "which is not only xenophobic and cheap in its tactics, but also inaccurate".