Immigration meant there was need for "a project which seeks to redefine our view of Irishness and develop a shared vision of what Irish society is, and where it wishes to go," the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has said.
An "Ireland project", which "might help all of us to focus on the collaborative, interdependent, all-embracing nature of what we are trying to achieve as a society" was what was needed, he said in a speech yesterday.
It was delivered to the "Changing Shades of Green - Pluralism and the Changing Face of Ireland" conference at the Milltown Institute in Dublin by John Haskins of the Reception and Integration Agency. Mr McDowell was attending the Northern Ireland talks at St Andrews in Scotland.
We had a multicultural society, he said, "which arrived very recently". That was "an inalienable fact", but he felt a more useful concept was "interculturalism, which seeks to focus on how the different cultures speak to each other".
He continued that "one might go so far as to say that if the end product is a merely multicultural society, then we will have failed."
Reflecting on integration policies in major European countries, he said it was "increasingly obvious that the guest-worker approach did not work; that the definition of the immigrant as an outsider did not work; that the need for adjustment solely by the newcomer did not work."
Equally "the need for adjustment solely by the indigenous population did not work; that allowing the emergence of inequalities in housing, job skill levels, education, and general life outcomes did not work," he said.
The newness of the immigration phenomenon in Ireland conferred advantages. "We have some idea of the things which don't work - and this is our strength. This window of opportunity is not a very wide window and the immediate years ahead are crucial," he said. "Let us therefore seek to repeat history and make sure the future generation of newcomers become more Irish than the Irish themselves, but with perhaps a changed concept of what it means to be Irish in the 21st century."
Rev Dr Patrick Claffey, of the department of mission theology and culture at the Milltown Institute, told the conference that "the social fabric, the texture of our society has in fact altered." It could be argued, he said, "that we are coming into a situation where we have to renegotiate a new social contract for a changed society." Given the failure of integration experiments in Europe, he suggested the Canadian policy of multiculturalism be looked at.
He noted it "not only recognised the reality of pluralism in Canada, but contested the French model of assimilation."
Ali Salem, general secretary of the Irish Council of Imams, said: "I hate the word 'assimilation'. It is trying to kill my identity. It should be 'integration' and allow us all grow together."