Sir, – Your editorial "Irish identity: Time to renew the Republic" (August 23rd) argues that a lack of an "us and them" mentality in Ireland is due to the absence of a cohesive homogeneous identity, which has prevented any strong anti-immigration platform in Ireland.
While the editorial suggests that “we cannot ask immigrants to integrate until we explain to ourselves what it is they’re integrating into”, could we not ask as to why these immigrants have come here in the first place, with the large numbers of migrants coming in earnest since the 1990s (concurrently when the Celtic Tiger started to pick up).
After all, immigrants have come to Ireland largely due to its prosperity, not in careful consideration of Ireland’s cultural and historical heritage, nor for any sense for its “fluid, open-ended understanding of identity and belonging”, as the editorial suggests. If we are indeed “all emigrants” ourselves, why was Ireland a homogeneous nation up to recently and why didn’t immigrants come before the 1990s?
Ireland was founded as a national state for the Irish people, not unlike Armenia is an ethnic state for Armenians and Israel exists as a Jewish state, even though the latter two ethnicities have most of their existing population in diaspora, as do the Irish.
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Instead of scrambling for an alleged need to “fashion a new narrative frame for Irishness in the 21st century”, perhaps we should ask instead as to how Ireland is any different from other nations founded on an ideal of self-determination for a particular people with a distinct culture and identity. – Yours, etc,
STEPHEN OLIVER
MURRAY,
Ballsbridge,
Dublin 4.