A new organisation of black people has urged the wider public to support them to "create a space" to discuss their experiences, including racism.
The call from the Black Collective of Ireland came yesterday at the end of a two-day conference in Dublin, the first such Irish event.
The collective told a press conference that society had not yet grasped that racism operated in systematic and institutional ways beyond incidents on the street. "We have seen in this conference just how deeply it has affected us," said conference organiser Ms Shalini Sinha, a Canadian-born Indian anti-racism trainer and UCD lecturer. "If anything, the need for us to continue to get together and create these spaces for ourselves is ever clearer."
Ms Sinha, who co-presents RTE's Mono multicultural magazine television programme, said the conference participants had "a particular experience as black people that has never been named in our white societies and it means a lot for us to try and do so amongst ourselves".
Ms Sinha said that despite the diversity of the conference participants, they shared something that was not about culture, but about something more basic - black skin.
Participants had learned a lot about how difficult and important it was for black people to create a space for themselves. They had also learned "how important it is that we communicate to you, the wider public, what needs to happen so we can have this space, what a difference it means to us and how you can help and support us," Ms Sinha added.
"Given the effect that racism has had - to make us feel ashamed, isolated, fearful, and rejected - you must understand the need for us to get together among our own community at times. It is essential in order for us to make effective connections then with our friends and allies on the issue of racism. However, in this society we cannot create the space ourselves just because we want to."
Ms Sinha said she hoped Irish society would rise to the idea that it was important to support black Irish identity and to name it and recognise that it had not been valued. There had been "an absence of a black voice in Ireland. I think we should all object to that and ensure that that voice comes through".
Members rejected criticism from some quarters that the formation of such a grouping was separatist. Ms Sharon Murphy, a black-Irish singer-songwriter from Galway, said it was interesting that people would use the word separatist when the collective's members were continually being excluded from society's dominant group.
Ms Murphy said she recalled that growing up in Connemara people never expected her to succeed. In the past 10 years she had begun defining her own experiences, no longer using white Irish definitions, she said.
People were in recent years beginning to name racism in Ireland. "That has always been a taboo but we can now discuss it openly and see where that leaves us," she said.
Ms Murphy and other participants were also critical of media images of black people as criminals or of Africa and Asia as being poor continents with no positive attributes. The collective intends to organise other events and can be contacted at shalini.sinha@ucd.ie