Immigration has benefited Ballyhaunis

The high-pitched labyrinthine chant of the muezzin as he calls the faithful to the mosque across the fields and trees of a typical west of Ireland landscape. Men whose dark skin and jet black hair is accentuated by their white shirts playing cricket on Sunday afternoons. Foreigners running the local economy. Mullahs giving orders in the meat plant.

In the dark imagination of many of those who are up in arms about the arrival of asylum-seekers in Irish villages, this is the nightmare that haunts their sleep. People who speak strange tongues, worship unfamiliar gods and play unusual games will descend on top of a contented, uncomplicated culture. They will be building mosques, demanding changes in the parish school and expecting us to adapt to their ways. And where can that lead except to rage and riots?

But this is a description of the past. I've just reread an article about Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo I wrote for Magill in 1988, at a time when, if you mentioned the words asylum-seeker, most people would think you were looking for the local mental hospital.

I thought Ballyhaunis would be a good place to describe what small-town Ireland was really like and how foolish, even then, the use of the word conservative to describe its culture really was. The notion that there was some kind of pure, traditional heartland, untouched by modernity, could hardly stand up in a place where most of the young people were emigrating and the main entertainment in the local ballroom on a Saturday night was a wacky live version of the American game show, The Price is Right.

Ballyhaunis was, admittedly, somewhat unusual because of the size and prominence of its Muslim population. Already, 12 years ago, this small town had a very visible smattering of Syrians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Turks, and other Eastern exiles, a presence embodied in the erection of a small but very conspicuous mosque.

NO ONE in the town suggested that these newcomers were fully integrated. Differences of culture, language, religion and sporting allegiance remained. The Muslims naturally avoided the three main centres of social life - the pub, the Catholic church and the GAA club. They were seldom invited into the homes of the natives.

Nor, however, was there any sign of ethnic tensions. The natives and the immigrants mixed perfectly well at work and at school. The locals spoke of the Muslims with respect, expressing admiration for their decency and family values. When I was in Ballyhaunis, no one ever expressed fear, hatred, distrust or dislike towards the immigrants in general.

This was not because the natives of Ballyhaunis were any more Christian, benign or tolerant than any other community in Ireland. The explanation was simple - economics. The Muslim population had come to the town because the local meat factory, Halal, owned by a Pakistani, Sher Rafique, exported most of its processed lamb and beef either to ethnic Islamic markets in Europe or to Islamic countries in the Middle East. The name Halal is the Islamic equivalent of the Hebrew word kosher, indicating food that has been prepared strictly in accordance with the demands of the Koran.

Chief among those demands was that an animal be killed while a mullah marks its individual death with the prayer Bismillah allahu akbar. When the factory was built in 1976, it was necessary to import Islamic slaughtermen who could act as mullahs. Gradually they and their families established a significant presence in the town.

They were accepted because they were needed. Without them, the factory could not sell its product into the Islamic markets. Local farmers would not have been paid as much for their sheep and cattle. Local men would not have had work. And all the local pubs, shops and services depended directly and indirectly on the money the factory generated. Ballyhaunis needed the immigrants, so it welcomed them. The Muslim community is now so well established that there is a significant level of demand for an Islamic primary school in Ballyhaunis.

ISN'T it amazing what self-interest can do for the spread of tolerance? It would be nice to think that it didn't have to be like this, that compassion and humanity alone would be enough to enable Ireland to deal with what is, in spite of the hysteria it has generated, a small problem. But the reality is that most people are motivated by a sense of where the immediate advantage lies for themselves, their families and their familiar community. In this, as in so much else, there is no need to look too far for explanations and solutions. It's the economy, stupid.

Even the paranoid rhetoric of being "swamped" by a "flood" of foreigners seems to disappear when there is money to be made. In the coming months, much of rural Ireland will in fact be swamped with outsiders. With six million tourists annually, we are getting close to a point where temporary migrants double the permanent population. But because these migrants are tourists whose money visibly creates employment and prosperity for the native population, they are welcomed with open arms.

As it happens, the same is true of those who are now described by what has become, astonishingly, a term of abuse: economic migrants. Anyone with the vaguest notion of economics knows that migrants are an immense long-term benefit to the countries to which they come. Just as Ballyhaunis needed Muslims, Ireland as a whole needs migrants. Only the perverse policy of preventing these people from working and then blaming them for being a drain on Irish resources has obscured this basic fact.

Those in the Government - Mary Harney for example - who know this should be speaking much more clearly and strongly about it. Depressing as it may be to acknowledge that our best weapon against xenophobia is naked self-interest, it seems that in this, as in everything else in contemporary Ireland, money may talk where compassion is silent.

fotoole@irish-times.ie