In Ireland we barely talk about immigration. It’s easy to see why

If we think of what large-scale immigration looks like, I suppose most of us would refer back to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The huddled masses, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the melting pot, the teeming tenements noisy with Yiddish and Polish and German and Italian and Irish voices.

It occurred to me to wonder what percentage of the US population in those decades was born in another country. The numbers are predictably huge. All through that period between 1870 and 1930, between 12 and 15 per cent of those living in the US were born elsewhere.

It still seems an amazing idea – almost one in seven people having come from far away. Remarkable, too, that in spite of all the tensions and prejudices, it was a largely peaceful process. Most of the immigrants managed to build better lives for themselves and in the process, make the US the richest country on earth.

I had a particular reason for digging out these figures. It is because, according to the 2022 Census, the proportion of people now living in Ireland who were born elsewhere is not as large as that in the great age of immigration in the US. It is much larger.

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It’s not 12 or 15 per cent. It’s 20 per cent. One in five as compared to one in seven or eight in the era of the huddled masses in the US. The great melting pot is not in the American past – it’s in the Irish present.

Between 2012 and 2022, 401,433 people arrived to live in Ireland from abroad. As of last year, over a million people born somewhere else had made their homes in Ireland. Over three-quarters of a million people living in Ireland speak a language other than English or Irish in their own homes.

This is an extraordinary phenomenon. Today, in the US, 14 per cent of the population is foreign-born. The proportion in the EU as a whole is similar. Ireland, along with Germany, Austria and Sweden is an outlier.

And yet, for something so momentous, this level of immigration is not talked about very much in official discourse. Asylum-seekers and refugees get some attention (most of it negative), but the vast majority of immigrants are not in these categories and so they are barely discussed.

It’s not hard to understand why: drawing attention to the scale of inward migration risks feeding a nativist “Ireland for the Irish” reaction that incipient far-right movements want to exploit. But not talking about something so obvious carries its own risks.

The inflow is not, after all, a secret: get on a bus, walk the streets, sit in a café, go into a classroom, go to a football match. The statistics are people: friends, in-laws neighbours, workmates, classmates, teammates and mates of the most intimate kind.

There’s every reason to think that Ireland is perfectly capable of talking about immigration sensibly. It would be crass to deny that racism and xenophobia exist, especially for immigrants who are not white. But still, the settling of such a large influx of people is a great achievement for Irish society.

It has been done, mostly, at a low level, in communities and workplaces, in schools and churches, in sports clubs and voluntary organisations. Although some people will say that it’s easy enough to do it when you have a booming economy, it is well to remember that we had a horrendous banking and property crash in the middle of this process. In those years of pain and humiliation, most Irish-born people did not turn on their foreign-born neighbours and scapegoat them.

Maybe part of the reason the society as a whole has behaved so decently is that we are still a migratory people ourselves. Our history and identity are formed by migration – and we still expect to be able to live wherever we damn well please. In the year to last April, 30,500 Irish citizens left to live abroad. People don’t always follow the Golden Rule of doing to others as you would like to have done to you, but the Irish have had a very long training in understanding migrants as human beings in search of a better life. We are those humans.

So, we should be confident enough in our collective ability to discuss, without rancour or hysteria, the implications of having one in five of our people originating from elsewhere. As it happens, many of those implications are ones we have to face anyway. Migration just sharpens them and makes them more urgent.

As David McWilliams has argued, it adds an element of danger to the failure of government investment to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the population. Amidst its economic abundance, Ireland is making public goods (housing, healthcare, transport) seem scarce. A struggle for scarce resources is not, to put it mildly, the best environment for social harmony.

Meanwhile, there seems to be little official urgency to think about what such large-scale migration means. Government housing plans, for example, are based on the expectation of net migration of 220,000 this decade. Three years in and that figure has already been surpassed.

Or consider the education system. One of the crucial ways in which the US coped with its great influx of diverse people was to create public schools that are not affiliated to any religion, making a neutral space where all children could be equally comfortable. What has the State done in this regard? Essentially nothing. There’s an official plan to get the Catholic church, which owns and controls most publicly funded primary and secondary schools, to “divest” itself of many of them. It’s an abject failure and it has no chance of future success. But the State continues to pretend that everything will work out just fine.

The degree to which it has worked out is indeed amazing. But riding our luck is not a good response to one of the most extraordinary changes in modern Irish history.