President Mary McAleese has warned against the ghettoisation of immigrants and said newcomers must be given every chance to join society's mainstream.
In a wide-ranging address to a seminar hosted yesterday by the Immigrant Council, Mrs McAleese suggested that Ireland had "no excuse for getting it wrong and every chance to get it right" on immigration and diversity. As with Irish emigrants, it was natural for immigrants here to long for the familiar and find comfort among their compatriots. However, just as Irish emigrants wanted to join the mainstream in their adoptive countries, the same would be true of new arrivals in Ireland.
"We have to have the willingness to strike out into the mainstream but the mainstream has to be very, very careful that in the message it is sending out, in the way that it conducts itself, it's not creating hermetic seals that are hard to permeate," the President said.
"The incubation of ghettoisation, just as it didn't help any other immigrant group anywhere in the world, is not going to help us either. It has no place in our country. It can end up being a short-cut to racism, and that too has no place in our society."
On the education system, Mrs McAleese argued that in the reception given to the 6 per cent of the school population who were not born here, "we are sketching the future shape and character of our society".
While intense and urgent work was being done in areas including teacher training, the provision of support teachers and intercultural training, she identified language training as "the single most important, cross-cutting, life-transforming" area.
"Twenty-eight thousand children in our schools today do not speak English as a first language. Everything we do, or everything we fail to do, we will pay the price for, or we will reap the rewards of, in a very short period of time," she continued. Mrs McAleese said those who had legitimate concerns about the impact of migration had to be heard.
"It is important that we create a space for those voices so that worries not in the least racist in themselves do not fester into racism, but rather are talked out and dealt with in an 'all of us together' way rather than an 'us and them' way. Those who come here are now 'us'. There is no 'them'. There is just us, all of us."
Remarking on the economic and social benefits of inward migration, Mrs McAleese said: "This influx of talent, cultures and peoples presents us with a new set of realities, a new set of opportunities to build on, and challenges to deal with, to ensure that tomorrow's Ireland is a place that is flourishing humanly as well as being prosperous."
The founder of the Immigrant Council, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, said Ireland was now recognising the importance of integration, but that much more needed to be done. "We hear talk about the successes and failures of our integration policies but the reality is, we don't yet have one," she said. "Effective integration won't just happen. It requires leadership and appropriate resources."
Dr Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, told the meeting that the world was entering an "age of mobility", where people did not move across borders permanently, but rather for short periods of time.
This would present states with a "major challenge" as the policy tools currently in use were more suited to older understandings of migration.
The meeting also heard from the Mayor of Portlaoise, Rotimi Adebari. The Richness of Change, a series of short films documenting the experiences of migrants in Ireland, and produced by the Forum on Migration and Communications at DIT, was launched at the event.
Full text of the President's speech: http://www.ireland.com/focus/
