JOHN HEWITT SUMMER SCHOOL:MODERN IRELAND must be based on "making room" for everyone living on the island regardless of their ethnic origin, migration specialist Dr Piaras Mac Éinrí from University College Cork has told the 21st John Hewitt Summer School in Armagh.
The theme of the school is "Let There Be No Wall" - a line from one of Hewitt's poems, Freehold- allowing Dr Mac Éinrí to this week expand on his views of migration and interculturalism in Ireland.
Dr Mac Éinrí welcomed the electoral achievement of former mayor of Portlaoise, Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari, saying it "reflects well on him and reflects well on us for reflecting well on him". But he said the "jury was out" on whether that success would translate if migrants sought seats in the Dáil.
He said Ireland must learn how to live with difference while "the newcomer must go a reasonable part of the distance to become" part of society. Dr Mac Éinrí found that states "only move to deal with diversity when they are constrained to do so".
Dr Mac Éinrí, citing several examples, referred to the positives and negatives in terms of attitudes to immigrants. In sport he referred as a positive to Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, the Cork hurler, by way of parents from Fermanagh and Fiji ("neither place best noted for prowess in hurling").
By stark contrast he recalled how young Nigerian Teboga Sebala, while playing for Carlow's Éire Ógs, had to suffer sideline insults by teenage girls goaded on by adults at a GAA game.
In the same theme he viewed the influence of Wolfe Tone's "universalist republicanism as opposed to its narrower romantic nationalist 19th century variant" as helpful in influencing benign attitudes to immigration. (This prompted one member of the audience to suggest Daniel O'Connell as a better role model over his "support for Jews, his opposition to slavery, his anti-colonialism and his Enlightenment values".)
Dr Mac Éinrí said there was also the positive notion of "historical duty", as in Ireland as an emigrant nation having a responsibility "to adopt an open and welcoming attitude to migrants". There was also "progressive integrationist thinking" in the Catholic and main Protestant churches. The Belfast Agreement was also useful in that it recognised the necessity to accommodate difference.
On the debit side he referred to the problem of "cultural insularity" as was reflected in an element of the No vote to the Lisbon Treaty. This vote, he suspected, also contained a "far-right" element and a form of Catholicism which believed the Archbishop of Dublin was "not Catholic enough".
He also pointed to "illiberal secularism" which could not contemplate the reasonable accommodation of religion in society. Difficulties were also exacerbated by elements of the British media which were perniciously xenophobic.
Dr Mac Éinrí also wondered would the Eucharistic Conference in 2012 and the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 2016 lead to another form of religious or nationalistic "atavism".
He said that if Ireland was prepared to "dig deep" it could create an inclusive society and live up to the 1916 Proclamation to "cherish all of the children of the nation equally".
"Such a nation cannot be based on narrow politics or blood or soil or religion or language, but on making room for all of us who inhabit this island," Dr Mac Éinrí concluded.
