Bisi Adigun, a badminton fanatic, tells the story of a recent competition he entered with a Nigerian friend in Dublin. During a game, one of the players collapsed awkwardly on his leg and lay in agony on the floor. Adigun's friend is a physiotherapist.
'Thank God,' I said, 'there's a physiotherapist in the house.' Everybody turned - who was I referring to? 'Where is he? Where is he?' I said: 'Here.' Eventually, this Asian student doctor came over, and they allowed him to attend to the man. It was him who said: 'No, this is a physiotherapist's work.' So my friend took over."
The crowd couldn't yet conceive of the black man as physiotherapist because they found it hard to square with the kind of stereotypes they absorb at every turn, Adigun believes. How often would they have seen the African as anything other than the victim, as "the wretched of the earth"? he asks.
"Where do you see black people? My heart bleeds when you see them in the public toilets giving you paper to dry your hands. You go to the pub and get drunk and you see someone giving you papers so you can give them 10 cent or whatever.
"And now Bisi sits down in front of you and tells you: do you know what you're talking about? And you go: I know where your mates, your kind, are. It's like a goat asking you. Every day, I confront that, every blessed day."
Though encouraged by the burgeoning since the early 1990s of drama that addressed Ireland's diversity, it was partly out of his unease at the limited portrayal of black people on stage that Adigun, an actor and musician who co-presented RTÉ's multicultural magazine programme Mono, founded Arambe Productions in 2003.
His aim was to give Ireland's Africans the opportunity to express themselves through the arts, offering them a path through fields where normally they might be denied access, and to introduce Irish audiences to plays in African traditions.
He quotes Bertholt Brecht's observation that "art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it". In this way, Americans are receptive to Barack Obama's rise because they are already familiar with the notion of a black president through the characters played by Morgan Freeman in Deep Impactand Dennis Haysbert in 24.
Others see the types of barriers that Adigun identified in theatre across the arts. According to Áine O'Brien of the Forum on Migrations and Communications at DIT, much could be done to unlock the creative potential of Ireland's migrants if cultural institutions were to make their funding processes more accessible to the uninitiated.
She suggests school curriculums could be broadened so that when pupils learn about literature, they do so comparatively. Another problem is that while EU citizens can study acting or go to art college on the same footing as an Irish student, those from countries outside the EU are required to pay fees so high that professional training is effectively closed off to them.
While migrant artists such as Marta Wakula Mac from Poland and the Nigerian sculptor Mike Ogaga Owairu have had their work exhibited, a lot of the work being produced by migrants is circulated only within their own communities and rarely impinges on the wider public consciousness. O'Brien's colleague, Alan Grossman, believes audio-visual media are best placed to harness the talents of migrants and anticipates that over the next five to 10 years there will be a proliferation of different kinds of projects "which tackle issues around identity, displacement, belonging, hybridity, people having multiple identities, through the creative arts". And perhaps when migrants can be properly heard, their concerns might not conform to other people's expectations.
Such has been the experience of Calypso Productions, one of the theatre companies regularly engaging with these questions. With the popular success of Roddy Doyle's Guess Who's Coming for the Dinnerin 2001, Calypso managed that rare thing for a theatre company. It made a profit.
With those funds, it set up the Tower of Babel project, which continues to offer Irish teenagers and the children of asylum seekers free weekly workshops in drama and music. Some 25 teenagers come along every week, most of them non-Irish.
"When we started off first, we thought, it will be wonderful - we'll do plays about the reasons they've come to Ireland, their backgrounds and their stories," says Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, Calypso's artistic director. "No. They've no interest in that. They don't want to be identified just as people who are refugees or asylum seekers.
"They're interested in maintaining their identity, but because they're young people, they want to blend in. They want to do plays about relationships. They're interested in the same things as any other teenagers."
