Questions get tougher

Immigration: Immigration remains the sort of unstable issue where unlikely events can quickly assume the air of a crisis, writes…

Immigration:Immigration remains the sort of unstable issue where unlikely events can quickly assume the air of a crisis, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent

The shot of a shawled Roma woman wringing an old blue rag into a paint-bucket, behind her a makeshift home reinforced with plastic posters bearing the earnest smiles of election-time politicians. The proud, angular face of the one-time asylum-seeker from Nigeria as he poses in the first citizen's chains of office. Or the line of black children passing the gates of a holiday centre for their first day at a school whose pupils, we know, are almost all the children of Africans.

Our gallery of the incongruous kept on replenishing itself in 2007. But as the political success of Mayor of Portlaoise Rotimi Adebari, the clamour over a Roma encampment on the M50 roundabout at Ballymun and the crisis over school places in north Dublin suggest, immigration is throwing up new kinds of questions - and more regularly.

In 1999, the first sentence of a draft document on immigration and asylum produced by the Progressive Democrats read: "Ireland needs an immigration policy". Replace "immigration" with "integration" and we have a mantra that best captures the political consensus eight years on.

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That shift in focus from admission to incorporation brought the appointment in June of Conor Lenihan as the first Minister of State for integration, a cross-departmental role that involves co-ordinating plans across the arms of Government. Lenihan's integration unit had barely been housed before an eventful summer gave him a preview of the best and the worst days he will face.

Rotimi Adebari's election in June, coming a month after another political milestone - the election of Hong Kong native Anna Lo to the Northern Assembly - was roundly acclaimed. Ethnic minorities may have been absent when the 30th Dáil convened this summer, but the election of Ireland's first black mayor gave powerful evidence that minority ethnic leaders were finding their voice.

With so much of Europe consumed with anxiety over immigration, perhaps a small midlands town was telling us how things could be done. It was the first time, presumably, that the Taipei Times covered a meeting of Portlaoise Town Council.

Lenihan's appointment followed a general election campaign in which immigration barely featured, and this despite change (past or prospective) being the dominant theme.

By the close of summer, however, three things had happened that confirmed that immigration remains the sort of unstable issue where the most unlikely events can quite easily and quickly assume the air of a crisis.

THE FIRST WAS a row that erupted in the quiet days of July over a Roma camp set up on the M50 roundabout at Ballymun two months earlier. About a hundred Roma had sought refuge in Ireland from what they claimed was a life of squalor and violent discrimination in northwest Romania. Rights groups saw it as a humanitarian crisis, others as welfare tourism. For a week the story was a fixture on the radio phone-ins, and for the authorities each day brought more awkward questions about how much control governments actually have over people's movements (almost none, if they're EU citizens) and how wise it was to ban most Romanians from working here despite their entitlement to travel freely in the EU since their country joined the bloc in January. Government ministers were relieved when the Roma finally took up an offer of a free flight home in late July.

If nobody could have anticipated events in Ballymun, then what of the back-to-school crisis in Balbriggan a few weeks later? As September loomed, it turned out that pressure on places had left many children, among them large numbers whose parents were immigrants, without a school that could take them.

With 32 children affected, the Department of Education asked Educate Together, a multi-denominational agency, to open an "emergency school" in Balbriggan. Within a fortnight the number of applications had risen more than threefold.

Television pictures of one black child after another passing the gates on the first day of school set off a nervous debate. If children were being segregated already, during the oft-mentioned "window of opportunity" in which Ireland can supposedly get things right, what were the chances of meaningful integration later on? Most blamed poor planning. As far back as April 2006, according to the latest census, the black Irish share of Balbriggan's population (6 per cent) was much higher than in any other town. And because of the tendency of new ethnic minorities to move to wherever other minorities are already established, the influx of more immigrants to rented housing in Balbriggan was easily foreseeable, critics argued. Not so, said the Department of Education.

What was evident was the trend, not the numbers, and such were the flows of people in and out of the area during the summer that the number of children in need of places doubled in August.

The problem in Balbriggan drew attention to some of the larger trends uncovered by the 2006 census, which was published this year. Ireland's immigrants, it turns out, are a young, well-educated and overwhelmingly urban group. One-sixth of the people living in towns and cities are not ethnically Irish, as against one-tenth in the population generally. Though statistics cannot capture the myriad ways in which immigrants have made Ireland a more interesting place, they can prove that they have made it a richer one. The economy finds jobs for most of those who settle, the census tells us, and according to one estimate, net immigration added between 2.3 per cent and 3 per cent to GNP between 2003 and 2005.

A THIRD DEBATE was set off by the most innocuous of events, when a Sikh man heeded the call of a recruitment poster aimed at ethnic minorities and signed up for the Garda Reserve, only to be told he could not wear a turban as part of his uniform. The Garda leadership defended the decision by arguing that a uniform dress code was aimed at retaining "an image of impartiality" while providing a service to all citizens. Government ministers agreed. The decision split many NGOs and migrant groups and apparently caused serious debate within the force itself.

But for an institution with an eye to future debates, the decision was as much about the Islamic headscarf as it was about the Sikh turban.

The debate that followed was as revealing as the decision itself; after all, this was one of the first high-profile tests of the official rhetoric of "interculturalism", the preferred term for a middle-way between the "assimilationist" and "multiculturalist" models pursued (and deemed to have failed) elsewhere. That the Garda had not foreseen the issue was telling, but so too was the Government response.

Supporting the decision, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said foreigners in Ireland need to "assimilate" into Irish society, thus throwing overboard the stacks of Government policy documents that describe integration as a two-way process of mutual give-and-take between native and newcomer.

Oddly, Minister of State Conor Lenihan said much the same thing. "If we are to take integration seriously, people who come here must understand our way of doing things. When the President and Ministers travel to the Middle East, they accept cultural requirements of the country and the culture they are operating in. It is a vice-versa situation with regard to Ireland."

IN GENERAL, HOWEVER, Lenihan has been easing his way into his many-tentacled brief. Though his speeches have contained few departures, the fact that he is the first Government politician to talk regularly about immigration gives him novelty value. A regular on the weekly circuit of seminars and launches, most of his announcements (a taskforce and a standing forum on integration are the biggest) have been widely welcomed.

His relatively easy ride has undoubtedly been helped by the fact that the Opposition parties, too, have still to get to grips with the issue, while many of those most likely to criticise him - migrant support groups and ethnic associations - are reluctant to jeopardise their chances of a seat on his taskforce.

Choppier waters lie ahead. Sudden as they seemed at the time, we know now that the roots of this year's problems in Balbriggan and elsewhere were embedded long before they made the headlines. As the experiences of others tell us, the trick in 2008 will be to make the most of migration's many opportunities while spotting problems before they arise. The questions may have become tougher, but the lessons remain the same.