OPINION:As a society, we need clear policies that rethink identity and belonging, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic.
IN THE week after the Lisbon Treaty referendum, as pro-treaty politicians kicked at the embers of their campaigns and scoured for answers in the amorphous mass of the No vote, five TDs from four different parties rose in the Dáil and pointed a finger in the same direction.
Labour's Joan Burton saw immigration as an issue that was "profoundly disturbing for both women and men", while Fianna Fáil's Michael McGrath picked up on it as a "subtle undercurrent" that was "lurking in the background". Minister for Health Mary Harney confirmed that it arose as an issue in some working-class parts of Dublin, but Lucinda Creighton of Fine Gael went further and said it resonated right across the country. She blamed the Government for failing to put in place a "successful immigration policy" or to show leadership by explaining its benefits to people.
But the most expansive contribution came from Fianna Fáil's Chris Andrews, who told the house the immigration issue was not lurking, but was "very much on its hind legs and about to cause severe problems unless we deal with it". And then this: "I do not believe for one minute that the Irish are racist, but we must speed up the appeals process. When people have no further recourse to the law, we must deport them quickly. Multiculturalism is not the way forward and strict integration is the best option. When one considers the examples of France and England, one will realise diversity has brought considerable problems. Ireland must address this matter."
That was about as far as the discussion went. Of course, the week after the referendum may not have been the time for prescribing policy remedies, and perhaps their instinctive caution kept politicians from delving further into fraught, unfamiliar terrain. They may have held back in the knowledge that the post-referendum polling did not necessarily corroborate their impressions. But nonetheless, the post-Lisbon debate has been a reminder of the strange relationship between the Irish politician and one of the major issues of the day.
Beyond pointing out that immigration and integration are important issues that some people worry about, most politicians have remarkably little to say about them. A long-time TD once told me this was because they were reluctant to "ride the tiger" or to risk being misinterpreted, but there is also a sense that politicians have not yet mustered the confidence to talk about these questions in any meaningful way.
The recent Dáil discussions reminded me of an odd exchange between Enda Kenny and Bertie Ahern in the house last October - inconsequential in itself but reflective of a pattern. During questions on the responsibilities of junior ministers, the Fine Gael leader asked the then taoiseach if he would consider amending the remit given to Conor Lenihan to include integration as well as immigration. After all, the issues were closely related and the integration area was "highly important in the context of the kind of society that will emerge in Ireland in the next 20 years". Ahern said he would consider the issue.
It was odd because Lenihan's title was already Minister of State for Integration, and he had regularly pointed out that immigration policy wasn't a major part of the brief.
Neither the opposition leader nor the man who appointed Lenihan seemed to know.
Few would argue with Creighton that we need a "successful immigration policy", but she gave no inkling of what one might look like. Andrews offered three solutions to the whole conundrum in his Dáil speech: a faster appeals process (for asylum seekers, presumably), quicker deportations and "strict integration", whatever that means.
The failure to grapple with the complexities of the integration puzzle means that a critical arm of Government policy evades real scrutiny. For example, the Office of Integration recently published a "strategy statement" which sets down the broad themes of official thinking, but there has been scarcely a word spoken about its content since the day it was published.
All of this matters. Integration is a process as much as an outcome, a two-way exchange that will require not only Government action, but a reformulation of the way we think about fundamental ideas such as identity and belonging. If it is to be anything more than an empty mantra, it will depend on newcomer and native buying in. If politicians don't engage with it, how can they expect others to do so?
The superficial level of the debate also means we constantly get mired on discursive sidestreets. Witness how often the conversation ends up with someone mentioning the drink, for instance. Two years ago, former Labour leader Dick Spring said that where immigrants were concerned, "we are not providing any adequate services in terms of integration. You see them in rural Ireland on a Friday evening going to the supermarket and off-licence, just stocking up for the weekend. They are certainly not participating in Irish society at the weekends and I think that is extremely dangerous."
Is this really the most telling indicator of integration? Is it not entirely understandable that a Pole who comes to Ireland, just like the Irish who went to London, will seek out those who speak his language and share his reference points? We'll have a problem if, in 10 years' time, an immigrant who arrived in 2004 can't speak English, can't get his qualification recognised and can't find a job that matches his abilities - but not because he used to drink at home in his first year here.
Perhaps the busiest sidestreet of all is the hijab debate. Although it's well worth asking how the State should respond to religious diversity, there is a danger that while talking of the need to avoid mistakes made elsewhere, we unwittingly fall into precisely the same traps they laid for themselves. Religious symbols such as the headscarf or the turban were never in themselves the cause of the problems faced by France or the Netherlands. But they were often used as emblems to mask much deeper failures of social policy which left many immigrants and their children at a remove from the rest of society. The French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray put the idea well when, in a discussion on France's headscarf debate, he cited Hungarian historian István Bibó's contention that when a community fails to find within itself the means to deal with a problem that challenges its self-image, it may be tempted to adopt a defensive ploy. "It will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for the real one that it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter," he said.
There are cases to be made for and against allowing religious symbols in State schools, and certainly integration involves an insistence on certain core values, but making the hijab - or drinking patterns - a pivotal benchmark of belonging trivialises that very concept. Above all, the challenge of integration requires the clever deployment of the well-honed tools of social policy.
The integration battle won't be won or lost on the barstool any more than it will at an intercultural coffee morning. It will be won or lost in the classroom, in the city planner's office, in the local language training centre.
Those who are uneasy about the changes of the past decade should be listened to, but migrants should not be allowed to become foils for the projection of conflicts that often have little to do with them. And if straitened economic times are not to bring new strains and tensions, everything must be done to ensure that Ireland and its immigrants continue to get the best from each other.
It would help if politicians showed more of an interest.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is Immigration Correspondent