Finding integration through engaging with our past

Understanding our own history as migrants will help us to recognise immigrants' important contribution to Irish society, says Luke Gibbons.

In a dinner party scene in the recent short film Nuts, Irving Welsh's caustic view of Celtic Tiger Ireland, one of the characters remarks, with a casual certitude, that the Irish can't be racist: "How can we be? We're the original economic migrants." To which another guest counters, in case the parallels with the past are too close for comfort: "We contributed wherever we went. They don't."

In this short exchange, we can see some of the ironies and evasions of history that have informed many recent debates on immigration and cultural memory in the new multi-ethnic Ireland.

On the one hand, there is an uncritical claim to the moral high ground with respect to racism on account of Ireland's own colonial and diasporic history, as if the experience of injustice in the past automatically prevented its perpetuation in the present. On the other hand, there is the equally suspect hollowing out of history that denies any analogies between Ireland's past and the condition of immigrants in the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger.

There is indeed a sense that Ireland's own history of uprooting should generate sympathy towards the plight of the immigrant in Ireland today, but there is nothing automatic about this. In the first flush of economic success under the Celtic Tiger, it may be that the last thing Irish people want to be reminded of is their own Third World memory. As late as the 1970s, the OECD was still classifying Ireland as "underdeveloped", and the persistence of the Northern conflict was a reminder that Irish people still had to awake from "the nightmare of history" (in Stephen Dedalus's phrase).

Yet, in the last decade, Ireland became, in material terms, one of the most advanced countries in the world, being hailed variously as the "showpiece", "test-case" or "shining light" of globalisation.

"Surely no country in the rich world has seen its image change so fast," wrote the Economistin 2004, but this only raises the question: what is its image? If Irish identity during the Literary Revival had to forge a new image for an emergent independent nation, what image is appropriate to the era of the Celtic Tiger, to an age of unprecedented globalisation?

Certainly, the most dramatic change in the image of the nation is in the composition of the population itself, with foreign nationals now constituting 14 per cent of the country's inhabitants (compared to 10 per cent in the US). In the wake of these seismic shifts, it is perhaps no wonder that Ireland's memories of underdevelopment do not come easily, and may be as foreign to contemporary Irish culture as the strangers on its shores.

But while they are not automatic, such responses to the past are appropriate, and are no less binding if Ireland is to create the cultural spaces in which immigrants feel welcome today. This engagement with the past is not only of benefit to the host culture: it may also assist in turning acclimatisation into a dynamic cultural exchange. This is evident, for example, in the recent production of Jimmy Murphy's play, the Kings of the Kilburn High Road,by the Nigerian director and playwright, Bisi Adigun, in which African actors based in Dublin played the roles of Irish labourers in London.

The ordeal of the forgotten Irish in Britain was no less harrowing for being a reminder that it could just as easily be the plight of Africans in modern Ireland. Through casting alone, the production functioned as a two-way mirror, allowing Irish and immigrant cultures to see each other through the same darkened glass.

Nor is this kind of cross-cultural sympathy confined to the stage. The massive demonstration in Dublin organised by the trade union movement to challenge the gross exploitation of Latvian workers by Irish Ferries in 2005, and other less visible initiatives to counter discriminatory practices, can be seen as part of an overall determination to prevent history repeating itself, albeit with the Irish now in the driving seat. As Emma O'Kelly reported on RTÉ news in May of a labour dispute at Musgrave's food distribution centre at Fonthill, Co Dublin, in which foreign nationals were paid half the rate of "native" workers: "[The Irish workers] were agitated about this . . . They feel it is simply wrong. A lot of these men in their own day, in the 1980s, worked abroad, and they've seen it from the other side. They also feel their jobs and conditions will be eroded."

More than any other public figure, President Mary McAleese has given a voice to what has come to be known as the "historical duty" argument in relation to Irish responses to immigration. This was given its most succinct formulation in her Changing Face of Irelandaddress in London, in March: "The Irish know better than many other races how valuable the emigrants to our shores are. We know these things because of our own extensive history of being emigrants. . . . of all people on the planet, we have no excuse for getting it wrong and a lot of work is going in to trying to get it right. What is perhaps unique to the Irish situation now is the speed and scale of change, for we have absorbed in one decade what many other so-called countries of immigration absorbed over many decades if not centuries."

Such pronouncements are relevant to the Celtic Tiger, but related sentiments were also part of president Mary Robinson's attempts in the early 1990s to link a historical awareness of our diaspora and the Famine to human rights and developmental issues in the Third World.

For this reason, it is not a sense of history but a sundering of the past that poses the greatest threat to a multi-ethnic Ireland. Of course, there is more than one version of the past, and critics of current responses to immigration are not slow to point out numerous historical examples of Irish racism and xenophobia. Such insular views of nationalism are often attributed to the Literary Revival, but not least of the ironies of this movement was that its energies were not confined to Ireland, and it had a galvanising effect on other cultures, most notably on the Harlem Renaissance. The timorous, inarticulate outsider in JM Synge's Playboy of the Western World, who comes in from the cold to find his voice in a new community, became a metaphor for other cultures coming to consciousness, and finding their voices on the world stage.

One of the biggest hits at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival was a rewriting of Synge's play by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle in which the playboy is re-cast as a Nigerian refugee in contemporary Dublin. At the end of the play, the local community is brought to its senses through an encounter with the outsider, but the immigrant's relationship with his own Nigerian background is also restored with a sense of purpose and independence. Whereas the original drama turned on the relationship between the individual and community, the new version turns on the interaction of two communities. It would be fitting if this staging of the play was a dress rehearsal of a future multi-ethnic Ireland, a western world renewed through contact with other, wider worlds.

• This is a shortened version of Luke Gibbons's closing address,Ireland, Immigration, and Cultural Memory , at the recent international conference on Immigration in the New Ireland at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.