MERRIMAN SUMMER SCHOOL 2002 

BEYOND TOLERANCE: TOWARDS IRISH MODELS OF MULTICULTURALISM? 

1 INTRODUCTION: POSING THE QUESTION

It is an honour to be here in Clare, at the best known of all Irish summer schools, to talk about the topic of multiculturalism, which in recent years has generated a lot of heat, but not very much light, in Ireland.

Since our theme is the accommodation of difference and how those differences might be incorporated into society, it is worth noting that Clare has played its own, not insignificant, role. How many other Irish constituencies can boast of having elected two distinguished foreign-born TDs, with foreign-sounding names? One is Dr Moussajee Bhamjee; the other was a certain Éamon De Valera.

The term "asylum seeker" was known in Shannon airport before it had become common currency in any other part of the country. Indeed, Clare for long was the only place outside Dublin with a significant number of asylum seekers and it is to the credit of the people of Ennis, in particular, that they were made so welcome and that many have integrated so well.

On a less happy note, Clare is also home to Knockalisheen, a former Army camp near Meelick, which housed Ireland's first significant group of refugees. The Hungarians who fled the Soviet repression of 1956 encountered conditions so harsh that they went on hunger strike and almost all subsequently left for Canada. In the 1960s Knockalisheen was proposed as a centre for Traveller resettlement, which, if it had been implemented, would certainly have become a kind of Irish Gulag, well away from towns where real integration might have taken place but which, for the most part, sadly did not. Multiculturalism and integration are not just about the foreigners in our midst, but also about accepting diversity in its broadest sense. It is a shame and a scandal that the town of Ennis has not had a serviced permanent halting site since 1997 and that the question remains unresolved to this day.

Nowadays, Knockalisheen has found a new role as a large reception centre for asylum seekers. However good the facilities may be, and I am sure it is staffed by dedicated people, it remains a place apart.

My title 'beyond tolerance: towards Irish models of multiculturalism' is simply explained. Roy Jenkins' famous formula for integration, when he was British Home Secretary in the mid-1960s, was that it should be seen as

Not a flattening process of assimilation, but as equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.

Since that time, and it seems a long time ago now at least in terms of British policy, there has been some criticism of the Jenkins formula, despite its merits. Perhaps the word which offended the most, although possibly unintentionally, was 'tolerant'. Did people want merely to be 'tolerated'? And did 'tolerance' suggest a kind of indifference rather than true acceptance? How might one go beyond 'tolerance' as an objective of social policy?

Here in Ireland, by contrast, immigration is still all very new. We spend much time, for good and understandable reasons, talking about reception - the arrival stage of a person in the country - and not enough about integration - what happens afterwards. And yet, leaving aside the specific difficulties faced by many immigrants, there is one ineluctable reality. Many if not most of these people are here to stay. Ireland will become, for better or for worse, their home and their children's home.

Accordingly, we need to supplement the necessary debate about arrival and reception with one about the long-term picture, that is, integration. In saying this I am not ignoring the fact that we send the wrong signals at the reception end by our present inadequate immigration and asylum policies. Why, for instance, should high-skills immigrants be given better treamtment than agricultural workers, hotel workers and others - whom we need just as much - and who are subject to virtual social exclusion, with few rights or entitlements, and limited prospects of becoming full members of our society? And how can we talk of integration and harmony while following policies which, however much we may proclaim their intention to be otherwise, just happen to have a disproportionate impact on people whose skin colour is different or who have arrived recently as immigrants here? 

Why have a policy on integration? The answer is simple - it is the right thing to do, not just from the perspective of human rights, but also of enlightened self-interest. At least 6% of the population is composed of immigrants, many of whom have no previous connection with Ireland - a challenge we have never before faced in modern times. If we fail new members of our society, we will not be failing them alone. Instead of being able to benefit from the talent and energy and creativity which new migrants can bring, as they have done in such countries as Canada, the US, Britain, France and Australia, we will be creating the conditions for newly marginalized communities, new underclasses, to emerge. We have already failed to create a society where Travellers can feel welcome and valued as equal citizens. Do we really want to add to the ranks of the excluded and the despised? 

Yet this is not inevitable. The challenge is to foster an open and honest national debate in which the options are clearly defined and discussed. The challenge is not to deny but to draw upon our own past histories, inside and outside this country and to find those resonances which may enable us to build policies capable of achieving a broad degree of acceptance of difference on the part of mainstream Irish society. 

It is not simply to accommodate new migrants here that we need to do this. One of the central myths of independent Ireland - this part of the island - was that we all shared in a common set of social values and a common culture. Yet, looking back, this was never the case. Exclusion did not begin with recent immigrants. One has only to think of traditional minorities, such as Protestants, Jews, the Travellers already mentioned and other ethnic minorities, Italian and Chinese for instance, to realise that there never was a monoculture in Ireland. Even if no immigrants had arrived in the past ten years we would still have needed to debate the new, secularising, non-monocultural Ireland which was already emerging in the 1980s. And we would still have needed to address in an open and sympathetic way the genuine fears of those who felt threatened by such changes. In short, even without newcomers, we would still have needed a new and more inclusive - in a word, multicultural - definition of Irishness. 

How, in a nutshell, do we deal with difference? Or, to put it another way relevant to the specific context of immigration, how does one become Irish - can we move beyond blood and soil as a basis for identity? Should people coming here be obliged to assimilate, and become like us in every way - 'you're in our country now'? Or should we adopt a multicultural approach, accepting the differences between the many cultures and valuing all? If we do, are we relativising all of our own value systems - and would this be a bad thing? And anyway, who are the 'we' and what are our core values? 

English poet Rudyard Kipling had definite views about the homogeneous nature of community when he wrote: 

The Stranger within my gate, 
He may be true or kind, 
But he does not talk my talk - 
I cannot feel his mind. 
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, 
But not the soul behind. 

The men of my own stock, 
They may do ill or well, 
But they tell the lies I am wonted to, 
They are used to the lies I tell; 
And we do not need interpreters 
When we go to buy or sell. 

The Stranger within my gates. 
He may be evil or good, 
But I cannot tell what powers control -- 
What reasons sway his mood; 
Nor when the gods of his far-off land, 
Shall repossess his blood. 

The men of my own stock, 
Bitter bad they may be, 
But, at least, they hear the things I hear, 
And see the things I see; 
And whatever I think of them and their likes 
They think of the likes of me. 

This was my father's belief 
And this is also mine: 
Let the corn be all of one sheaf -- 
And the grapes be all one vine, 
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge 
By bitter bread and wine. 

There is a fatal flaw with Kipling's view: the 'stranger' is always within our gate. We, as a nation of emigrants, should know this better than most, as we ourselves have been inside so many other people's gates. To demonise this stranger is to demonise your neighbour. 

Yet we know what Kipling is talking about. For ethnicity - which is what we would call Kipling's subject-matter nowadays - is kinship writ large, the kind of blood ties that mean you will put yourself out for people you don't know simply because you share this perceived bond with them. Ethnicity is the emotional part of communal identity, the comforting sense of living among people who understand each other, who can, like a comfortably long-married couple, finish one another's sentences; who share the same sense of humour and the same sense, real or not, of a common past. Of course, as sometimes happens with long-married couples, it can also be the blanket which smothers our complex individual identities, our creativity and our differences. 

By contrast with such terms as 'kinship', 'ethnicity' and 'community', multiculturalism doesn't have a good press, to say the least, in Ireland. Here is Sunday Independent columnist Patricia Redlich a few weeks ago, talking about our new Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform and his get-tough immigration policies: 

But thanks to Michael McDowell, political correctness has been dealt a death blow on the issue. Which now allows the sane, serious and knowledgeable in the field of illegal immigration to take charge. And they won't base their recommendations on a happy clappy notion of multi-culturalism. Which is just that, happy clappy and inane. Step out at the wrong station on the Paris Metro and you're in Algiers, not integrated France. 

I had the good fortune to live in the 'Algerian' part of Paris for a couple of years. It was a vibrant, mixed and friendly area, where I felt at home and so, evidently, did other people of many different backgrounds. It was much closer to my idea of 'integrated France' than the affluent all-white quarters in the western parts of the city, where the nearest you get to a multicoloured society are the tartan coats with which many wealthy Parisians outfit their dogs. Redlich evidently doesn't know Paris very well, but that's not my point here.  What is it about the term 'multiculturalism' that so enrages such people as Redlich, Kevin Myers, John Waters and Ruth Dudley Edwards? What exactly do we mean by it? How and when has it been implemented? What are the limits of multiculturalism? What about our own indigenous cultures - are they to be swept away, drowned in the tide of diversity? And does multiculturalism alone provide the basic for creating an equal and just society? 

The loose sense in which the term multiculturalism has come to be used in Irish public debate is actually unhelpful and even dangerous. On the one hand, the rather fuzzy way in which the 'pro-diversity' and anti-racist lobby uses it hardly provides an effective road map for defining future policy. On the other, the lack of clarity about the term is also fuelling the concerns of those who fear change, sometimes for understandable reasons, and who do not know where it is leading us.  

It behoves those who favour change to explain why, and what implications such changes might have for the lives of ordinary people. Those of us who belong to the 'pro' lobby have by and large failed to take our case to the public in terms which are understandable and which connect with the language and traditions of public discourse here. 

I propose, therefore, briefly to review the history of multiculturalism in other countries. I shall then explore the Irish experience of dealing with difference before identifying a few issues which I feel could be considered in elaborating a policy for the future.

2. THE INTERNATIONAL BACKGROUND TO MULTICULTURALISM

States have different ways of dealing with the realities of multiethnic society. At one extreme they can choose to keep people separate, as happened in apartheid South Africa. Another possibility is assimilationism, where immigrants are welcome provided their own cultures are left at the door. Such state do not attempt to accommodate new cultures. Outstanding examples of the assimilationist model include France and pre-1970s Australia (and in the latter case, only for white immigrants). Unfortunately, assimilation, even if one ignores the psychological damage caused to the person who loses a vital part of his/her identity, really only works with cultures which are fairly similar in the first place.

Multiculturalism provides for full incorporation and rights for the individual but with no loss of cultural identity. This also requires extensive changes in State policy.  This is a more recent philosophy and the outstanding examples are Canada and contemporary Australia, which I shall talk about at greater length later. It is also worth noting that before the advent of the modern nation-state - essentially a product of 19th century romantic nationalism - very many states were multiethnic and even multicultural in some shape or form. The Roman Empire extended citizenship to new ethnic communities, or tribes, it had conquered, and also found ways of recognising the continuing vitality of other cultural identities it had absorbed, such as that of the Greeks. Even in modern times the USSR may have Russified many of its structures of governance and control of the 15 constituent republics but it allowed a surprising degree of latitude in matters of language and cultural identity (which also shows, of course, that it is possible to affirm cultural identity while denying real power to those same minorities). 

Origins of multiculturalism - the philosophy of multiculturalism 

Multiculturalism does not have a single uncomplicated meaning. It is not a doctrine with a fixed set of beliefs, nor even a set of policies which states should follow if they are to avoid ethnic conflict. It is not a panacea for ethnic harmony and indeed, if misunderstood or poorly applied, it may itself become part of the problem. Multiculturalism does not require anyone to abandon their own cherished beliefs, simply to recognise that others may cherish theirs with equal passion. It has more to do with attitudes and perspectives, openness and a willingness to negotiate, than with fixed, immovable positions. 

An eloquent definition of multiculturalism is offered by Professor Bikhu Parekh, who chaired the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which completed its report in 2000. Parekh makes three key, inter-related points about our social identities:

• Human beings are culturally embedded in the sense that they grow up and live within a cultural structured world and organize their lives and social relations in terms of a culturally derived system of meaning and significance. We are not determined by our culture but we are certainly 'deeply shaped' by it. Ask any ex-Catholic!  You can abandon Catholicism if you so choose, but you will remain an ex-Catholic all your life. 
• Different cultures represent different systems of meaning and visions of the good or the virtuous life. But no culture is complete or perfect and all cultures can learn something from other ones. Medieval Europe learned much from Irish monastic culture, while we would know much less of Greek philosophy or mathematics had it not been for the work of medieval Muslim and Jewish thinkers who kept alive a knowledge that had been lost in its homeland. A culturally self-contained life is virtually impossible for most human beings in the modern, mobile and interdependent world - everyone here is partly American, and British and European, at least, as well as Irish. This does not mean that all cultures are equally rich and good, but no culture is wholly worthless and each one means something at least to its members. Equally, no culture has the right to impose itself on others. 
• Third, every culture is internally plural and reflects a continuing conversation between its different traditions and strands of thought. There is coherence, but identity is plural, fluid and open. There is no single Irishness, but many Irishnesses. 

How does this rather philosophical definition work in the real world? For a start, neither society nor even any individual culture is homogenous. There can be no valid Eurocentrism, or Afrocentrism or any other ism. Nor, says Parekh, should we forget overriding or transcendent values such as human solidarity, a sense of rootedness, and the capacity for contentment. 

Furhter, multicultural societies cannot be based upon ethnic belonging because that would exclude too many people. But there must be an idea of 'political' belonging, of a shared commitment to country and community and to its continued existence and well-being as long as that country and community, in turn, does not discriminate against some of its members. Such communities have a right to demand a degree of loyalty and to ask that the general interest and integrity of the community should not be harmed. Loyalty is not the monopoly of conservatives. The State reciprocates by striving to provide equal rights, decent standards of living and an opportunity fully to participate in collective life. 

Finally, the State needs to deal with those factors which get in the way of the full acceptance, or recognition, of all members of the community. The stereotyping in a negative way of people who belong to particular cultures needs to be resisted. One major way of doing this is by analyzing prejudices, particularly those of the dominant community - which have most impact upon all members of the community - and restructuring the 'prevailing inequalities of economic and political power'. Dominant groups do not give up their dominance without a struggle. The multicultural state must be able to manage such debates, and even conflicts, without falling apart. 

The USA debate 

Before considering examples of states which have tried to put Parekh's multiculturalism into action, I'd like to focus briefly on the USA, because multiculturalism American style has undoubtedly influenced popular thinking here. It is commonly used in the USA either as a factually descriptive term - American society is undeniably multicultural - or as a reference to particular policies such as the introduction of quotas in areas like universities and the labour market ('affirmative action') or the hotly contested area of curriculum reform, with the replacement of works by DWEMs (Dead White European Males), such as Shakespeare, by a literary curriculum which is thought to reflect more closely the ethnic and cultural composition of the USA. 

This American debate about ethnicity and racism closely parallels that about gender and sexism. Let us take the example of curriculum reform. It is reasonable to argue that the curriculum should show a concern with literary merit. It is also reasonable to feature works which represent to the greatest extent possible the lived experience of the many strands of American life - men and women, Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. We would not think these days in Ireland of studying only the works of major English writers in English while omitting Irish ones, or men only while omitting women. This did not stop Bord Fáilte producing a poster some years ago of 'famous Irish writers', all of whom were male, although I am informed, and this rather undermines my own case, that eight of the twelve were Protestants. It is reasonable, too, to argue that reading Edna O'Brien tells us something about the universality of the human condition, which should be valid whether it is read by a woman or a man, in Tuamgraney or in Timbuctoo. But it also seems reasonable to say that people will respond to work which has a special resonance for them because of the specificity of place, people and subject matter. Hence the demands in the USA to reform the curriculum to include rather more writers of mixed ethnic, racial and gender backgrounds. 

However, the debate about political correctness and multiculturalism in the USA produced a fierce ideological battle and the dust has not settled yet. Influential authors such as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) argued passionately for the centrality of the classics - the European classics - to be preserved in the curriculum; his influential book was subtitled How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students. Bloom's contribution was an important and intelligent one from the perspective of a right-of-centre old-style liberal, but others were less temperate. It was also argued that affirmative action was little more than tokenism and that ultimately it devalued the qualifications and experience of the very people who benefited from quota-based recruitment systems. In any event legal actions led to the setting aside of affirmative action in a wide number of instances. 

The concept of 'political correctness' was central to these debates. Seen in a positive sense, it tried to make the public domain a safer and more supportive place for women and minorities by supporting diversity and by attacking racist and sexist discrimination and by outlawing sexist and racist language. However, ideologues on the right of the spectrum complained that 'pc' was a form of censorship and that anyone who challenged its tenets ran the danger of being labeled a racist or a sexist. 

This was sometimes true, but in turn it led to another abuse, whereby those opposed to equality and change could use the 'pc' label as an effective and frequently superficial term of abuse.  Some people will have found Ruth Dudley Edwards funny, while others will have been offended, when she wrote in a Sunday Independent article on 2 June last headed 'the equality industry has gone mad' 

Forget one-legged lesbians: now you have to be an obese, trade unionist Asian cross-dresser with a prison record in order to get a job 

It can be argued that contrarian journalism exaggerates for effect in the same way as Father Ted sends every stereotype of Irishness off the scale. But behind the very frequent use of such slapstick lies a more serious purpose: an implacable opposition to multiculturalism of the type found in Britain and the USA today and a determination that what such writers label the 'race relations industry' will not find a foothold in Ireland. They are at one in this regard with the far right of British tabloid thinking and their analysis is every bit as crude. It also ignores the very considerable successes achieved by both British and American society in more than thirty years of fighting for a culture of rights and respect for diversity. 

My contention is that the 'pc' debate in Ireland and Britain, including the attack on multiculturalism, is in fact largely an American import, but without the intelligence, vitality, passion and analysis which characterizes the best of the US original.  It has become little more than a slogan, but it has allowed the frequent lampooning of Irish and British legislation and policy in the field in a way clearly designed to undermine the acceptance and effectiveness of that legislation. It is undeniable that the race relations sector in Britain and the US has been guilty of some bizarre decisions. I think, for instance, that some UK adoption policy decisions, refusing to place children of one skin colour with adoptive parents of another, were both absurd and racist. 

Let us, however, consider Canada, the country where the term multiculturalism actually originated and where the Government has formally adopted it as official policy to an extent not found in any other country. Compared to the rather shrill discussion about multiculturalism in the US and even Britain the Canadian approach has been more thoughtful, balanced and successful. Canadian policy has also been careful to stress the two-way nature of the process; diversity can only thrive within a framework of agreed common principles. 

Canadian multiculturalism 

The Canadians were first to create a formal policy of multiculturalism under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1971, using legislation and policy to build harmony between English- and French-speaking, First Nations, or indigenous, and immigrant Canadians. 

This policy was implemented in several stages. The 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms forbade discrimination, but the preservation of specific cultures was not guaranteed. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1985 was a first in the world, but it was very far from being an 'anything goes' recipe. The act was derived from a strongly rights-based approach, citing the Canadian Constitution and a range of Canadian and international law, including the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (only recently ratified by Ireland following the passage of the Equal Status Act 2000). It recognised diversity as fundamental to Canadian society, but had no difficulty in 'strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada' i.e. French and English. 

Further measures in 1994 focused on three areas: anti-racism, integration, shared values. The Government's role was seen as crucial. To quote political philosopher Will Kymlicka, 'contributing to this shift was the perception that cultural maintenance and cultural pluralism were insufficient to overcome structural inequities confronting many of those from non-English speaking background ethnic groups.'  Hence there were new policies, concerned not simply with cultural identity but on what we in Europe now call social inclusion. 

Quebec is often considered to be the exception to the Canadian model, an irredentist French-speaking, inward-looking province whose attitude to Canadian multiculturalism is not so much one of supporting different cultures but of supporting one culture - the Francophone one - against dominant, English-speaking, Canada. But it too has taken the new diversity to heart. 

The website of the city of Saint-Laurent, Quebec, proclaims that it is not merely multicultural - a self-evident fact - but intercultural as well. 

The purpose of adopting an intercultural policy is to prevent us from sinking into the natural tendency of human beings to prefer contact with other people like themselves, inevitably resulting in a city made up of a number of solitudes. The new millennium must focus on a conscious, determined effort to bridge the gap between cultural communities. 

I find this admirable, informed and sympathetic. Moreover, it is direct when it comes to basic principles:

• English and French are recognised as the main languages used in public services 
• Respect for difference is a value that must be prioritised 
• Promoting harmonious relations between residents with various cultural backgrounds is a priority 
• The standards recognised by Quebec society must be respected by all residents, particularly those standards relating to social behaviour, respect for the environment and equality between men and women 

Saint Laurent does not dodge the thorny question of accommodating difference, but nor does it try to legislate for every eventuality.

 ... to what extent should we adapt our ways? Should we respond to the specific requests of certain cultural groups? And if so, how do we respond to the requests of these cultural communities who occasionally want special treatment or more flexibility in the usual rules? 

The concept of reasonable accommodation is the answer to these questions... The concept is based on reciprocity and balance. 

Granted, efforts must be made by the host society; however, efforts must also be made by residents of all cultures to adapt to the host society. 

Australia 

Australia had an explicitly 'White Australia' policy until the 1960s. Post-World War 2 Australian immigration criteria emphasised racial purity. Anyone with the remotest trace of non-White blood was denied the right to immigrate, Jews were systematically kept out and even southern Europeans such as Italians and Greeks were only accepted with the greatest reluctance. 

Yet, over time, Australia's paranoia about being over-run by Asian hordes gave way to pragmatism and the undeniable demographic and economic reality that the country needed immigration, just as Europe does today. 

The Australian approach differs in some respects from that of Canada.   There is no Act or charter, but a National Agenda (1989) for a Multicultural Australia. It has three dimensions: cultural identity, social justice and economic efficiency. It also has explicitly stated obligations as well as rights: 

• Primary commitment to Australia 
• Acceptance of rule of law and principles of Australian society 
• English as national language 
• Equality of sexes 
• Right of others to express their views and values 

Sweden

Sweden is worth mentioning as an example closer to home. The historical background to the shift in Swedish policy was the presence, not of non-European immigrants, but of large numbers of Finnish workers. Assimilation had not worked for them as they wished to retain their own culture. Sweden's strong welfare state provided the basis for a new model. It was based on three principles:

• Equality - immigrants should have the same living standards as everyone else
• Freedom of choice - genuine choice between retaining and developing cultural identity and assuming Swedish identity
• Partnership - native and stranger benefit from working together.

Recurring policy issues thrown up by multiculturalism 

• The most urgent issues are the promotion of interethnic contacts, intergroup negotiations and personal security for individuals
• We need to decide how asylum seekers, contract workers and guest workers should relate to the host community? What are their rights and entitlements and what services will they need? How do they make the transition to full membership of society? We must avoid the obvious dangers of underclass status 
• How can distinctive ethnic culture be expressed? Partnership, power-sharing, minority representation are essential here. 

Evaluating multiculturalism 

The overall effect of policy initiatives in states like Canada and Australia was seen as cumulative - change doesn't depend on one policy and doesn't happen overnight. Major initiatives have included language support (for ethnic minorities learning the major host community language and for minority languages), religious tolerance, cross-cultural training, diversity in employment, educational reform, changes in service provision, employment anti-discrimination laws and housing measures to avoid ghettoization. 

The following might be identified as key elements in a successful multicultural policy 

• A shift from cultural maintenance to equal rights - multiculturalism is not just about ethnic restaurants, national days and colourful costumes, or even linguistic and cultural support 
• A high level of commitment by the state to ethnic minorities in spite of recessions - immigrants are not expendable, throwaway economic production units who can be discarded when unwanted 
• Adult education: this is a key element in achieving the integration of immigrants at community level 
• The role of the private sector is also vital, and the economic advantage of achieving long-term integration of new migrants will be most obvious to them 
• Public support for such policies is essential. Politicians have the major role here but so have the other social partners * Integration and multiculturalism must extend to all groups. 

Does multiculturalism work? 

• Yes. And if states actively support it, it is less divisive. Perhaps the key difference between Canada and European states, however, is one of attitude. Canada regards immigration as an ongoing and necessary element in the process of nation-building; citizenship and multiculturalism are necessary tools. European states, by contrast, regard immigration as a threat to the integrity of the nation, which is considered to be historically formed and complete. Yet we have only to look at the demography of ageing Europe to appreciate that this attitude must change if we are to welcome and integrate new migrants. 
• Although multiculturalism will not work without ongoing and active State intervention and support, it cannot be managed in the long-term on a top-down basis - the aim must be to facilitate partnership-based, bottom-up approaches. 
• We need to take a long view of integration 
• We should build on existing experience and programmes 
• Diversity should not merely be tolerated but welcomed as beneficial for our whole society. 
• It must be combined with social justice programs which include host society disadvantaged. This is vital if further divisions are to be avoided. 
• Education has a key role. 

Conclusions 

Will Kymclicka, already cited, offers interesting evidence to show that public opinion and practice can be influenced by an intelligently led top-down approach combined with effective programmes on the ground. He considers some of the arguments put forward by critics of multiculturalism. Examining citizenship, political participation, official language acquisition, and inter-marriage rates - four fairly basic measurements, although not comprehensive - he shows conclusively that (a) multiculturalism brought about a change for the better in inter-ethnic relations rather than ghettoisation (b) Canadian attitudes and behaviour, measured in terms of changes since the introduction of the multiculturalism policy, were substantially better than countries such as the USA and the UK.  The measurement of the social acceptance of mixed marriages, for instance, show that whereas 52% of Canadians disapproved of black-white marriages in 1968, 81% approved of them in 1995. In 1988 the approval rate was 72% whereas only 40% of (US) Americans approved of them and 25% felt they should be illegal. The percentage of people who agreed with the proposition that 'different ethnic groups get along well here' in 1997 was far higher in Canada (75%) than in the USA (58%) or France (51%). 

In short, multiculturalism validates diversity and harmony between different groups. Instead of building higher walls, it offers security of identity while promoting a creative and dynamic hybridity. This latter point is important, as one of the criticisms of multiculturalism has been that it regards each member of an ethnic group as being the same as the next, seeing only undifferentiated ethnicity and imprisoning the subject within a new boundary. 

There remains the issue of how to deal with the dominant ethnicity - in our case, that of the various strands of Irishness itself. Before turning to that I'd like to say a little about the European context. 

A changing Europe 

Demographic ageing is a reality in Europe today. Who will pay for our pensions, and look after us in our old age? Who will keep the wheels of industry turning and renew the vitality of our society - when even Ireland, with the highest birth rate in Western Europe, cannot replace its own population? If we cannot produce them ourselves, we must find them elsewhere and make them welcome. 

Lincoln said America could not be half-slave and half-free. A Europe divided into citizens and non-persons, what one writer has called denizens, would be equally intolerable and fly in the face of several centuries of enlightenment thinking about individual human rights. 

Migrants are only the outward manifestation of a greater fluidity in the world, a by-product of globalisation and the communications revolution. Nations are not fixed and borders are not absolute. It is not merely a matter of keeping the stranger out, something which is no longer possible anyway. People unfix themselves here and set up new homes there, only to return sometimes. Nations may have strangers in their midst; they also have their own diasporas, strangers in other people's midst. We need to find ways of recognising this global movement and global coexistence. This does not mean 'open door' policies; any state needs to manage movement and change. It does mean the need for a new openness and fluidity, reflecting the facts on the ground. 

Paradoxically there has been a reaction to the new globalism and flux in the form of a general retreat to nationalism in Europe. The new plasticity frightens many, who look for solid points of reference like the traditional ethno-nation state. Yet this can no longer accommodate the new changing nature of our societies. The challenge is to change the definition of the nation, from the ethnic to the political. Nationalism does not have to mean aggression, exclusion, intolerance. If the concept 'nation' can be made more flexible, to include different cultures and a concept of shared community, but also those who float in and out of it or who retain a diasporic connection with it, we can begin to develop new and flexible ways of responding to change. We are well placed to do this in Ireland because of our own histories. So are places like Catalunya and Scotland, both of which have managed to re-define Catalan and Scottish identities in interesting and creative ways. It is time to reclaim nationalism from the extreme right. One way to do this is by emphasising the diversity of our own origins, not their alleged unitary nature. We can claim a new politics of multicultural citizenship, including reassurances for 'traditional' cultural identities. Identities are multiple, negotiable, process. 

This type of new politics is affecting even those countries thought of as assimiliationist, such as France. Referring to the crowds in the streets after France's 1998 World Cup victory and to the mythic status of football hero Zinedine Zidane, the propaganda organ of the French foreign ministry waxed lyrical: 

Flags are raised over the crowd to the rhythm of tom-toms; the French flag but also the Algerian flag in homage to the Kabyle origins of 'Zizou'.. ...

It was a question of football but also of much more than that. This truly national victory is in the image of France as it really is - multicoloured and supportive of the values of a tolerant, humanist Republic. Players from the Antilles, Armenia, Brittany, the Basque country, New Caledonia, Normandy, Guadaloupe, united federally under Jacquet, from the Loire, the cradle of France. A symbol of the French nation! This team embodies the dream of the melting pot, French-style, and encourages the French to identify themselves positively with what they really have, a pluralist country. 

It is unfortunate that French realities do not altogether correspond to the dream set out here, but it does point in the direction of the kind of change needed if diverse forms of French-ness really are to be recognised. 

3   THE IRISH BACKGROUND 

Turning to Ireland, contrast the sentiments just expressed with the following: 

No thoughtful Irishman or woman can view without apprehension the continuous influx of Jews into Ireland and the continuous efflux of the native population. The stalwart men and bright-eyed women of our race pass from our land in a never-ending stream, and in their place we are getting strange people, alien to us in thought, alien to us in sympathy, from Russia, Poland, Germany and Austria... people who come to live amongst us, but who never become of us... (Arthur Griffith, 1904). 

Quoting this passage and others, TCD sociologist and writer Ronit Lentin, whose work engages in profound and challenging ways with Irish constructions of racism and exclusion, says the point of departure should not be multiculturalism, but self-examination. In theorising racism in Ireland, she argues, we need firstly to consider Irishness itself and put paid to the notion of Ireland as a monoculture.

It is a cliché of Irish life that the official culture of the State for the first forty years of its existence, reflected a hegemonic and unitary concept of Irishness. Apart from its explicit content - the ending of Partition, the restoration of the Irish language, Catholic domination, the secondary status of women, the privileging of rural over urban identities - there was an underlying assumption, lip service to diversity notwithstanding (Ireland's first President was Protestant), that difference meant inferiority, or at least, it meant that the different should be isolated or remain silent. 

Ireland was a largely isolationist and inward-looking country. Socially unacceptable acts by the individual were met with exclusion. Unmarried mothers, Jews, Protestants, the mentally ill, Travellers and the poor knew their place or, if they did not, were soon reminded of it in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  The net effect was the preservation of apparently unitary but essentially archaic and coercive social norms. Before asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants ever began to settle here in some numbers, we had already defined our own internal 'others'.  

The ruling structures in the newly independent State also reflected realities of power and class. A relatively small middle class, urban and rural, inherited the earth. Those less fortunate were disproportionately over-represented in the ranks of emigrants, taking with them much of the energy which would have been required if the status quo was seriously to be challenged. This is touched upon in the mid-1950s Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, where one contributor saw emigration as useful because it 'releases social tensions which would otherwise be the subject of radical change'. Tom McGurk's powerful piece in last Sunday's Sunday Business Post (11 August) put it starkly: They built England and lost Ireland.

Ireland was largely insulated from the winds of change, including the winds of war, which swept the rest of the continent. It must sometimes have seemed that the outside world, modernisation and change were themselves the enemy. Thus Irish society remained officially oblivious to the fact that neutral Ireland provided tens of thousands of soldiers and workers, male and female, to the war economy of neighbouring Britain. 

Coming into the latter half of the twentieth century, Ireland was thus one of the countries least able to respond to messages about pluralism and hybridity, notwithstanding the fact that the Irish themselves were a migrant nation to a degree unique for the time. Those who stayed behind found themselves in a culture which privileged tradition and feared change. The changes which had convulsed Europe - war, decolonisation, immigration and ethnicisation of society for good and for ill - found little or no echo here. 

It is only relatively recently that we have got around to questioning this isolationist identity. The first target, understandably, was the monolithic, reverential and exclusive version of nationalism and all that was seen to go with it. This is expressed savagely - and unfairly, but creative writers have no obligation to be fair - by Dermot Bolger in his play In High Germany:

I thought of my father's battered travel bag, of Molloy drilling us behind the 1798 pike, the wasters who came after him hammering Peig into us, the masked men blowing limbs off passers-by in my name. You know, all my life, it seems, somebody somewhere has always been trying to tell me which Ireland I belonged in.. 

We have, I hope, since worked our way through many of the excesses on both sides of the revisionist and anti-revisionist debates. The nation still stands, although it also stands in need of re-definition. 

There were rapid changes from the 1970s onwards, many as a result of our membership of the European Union, then the EEC.  Women became more visible and sometimes, if not always, more empowered. Modernisation continued apace through reforms in such key sectors as education and industry. 

But social mobility and economic opportunity changed little, and Ireland continued to be a country of few immigrants. Although the 1970s was the first period in modern Irish history which saw net immigration, the vast majority were returning Irish emigrants and their families. In the 1980s there was a small though significant trend in continental immigrants from such countries as Germany, the Netherlands and France, but the implications of their presence were soon swept away by the return of massive emigration in the late 1980s, as the baby-boom generation of the 1960s left school or college and found themselves adrift in a shrinking economy burdened by massive debt. They emigrated in their tens of thousands - 70,600 in 1989 alone. 

We had little experience, therefore, of immigration or diversity. What we had was mainly from the other end, as immigrants ourselves - and then it was often not spoken of back home. The Irish competed for jobs and status in other societies where sometimes the simple fact that they were white, in parts of the USA or 1950s Britain for example, was their ticket to acceptance. In the process, they often themselves absorbed the dominant racist beliefs of the host society. I would note in passing, however, that emigrants whom I recently interviewed in the US said without exception that they could relate to and sympathise with the plight of asylum seekers, refugees and illegals in Ireland, because it was their story, at some point in their lives, as well. 

Those few immigrants who came as refugees to Ireland in earlier times found themselves dealing with a mixture of incomprehension and lack of policy and support. I mentioned the case of the 1956 Hungarians earlier.   When Chilean refugees from an American-inspired coup in 1973 came to Ireland, they found goodwill towards them, especially in radical left-wing Catholic circles, but very little in the way of support from the statutory services - even basic language training was not provided until 1977. We were unable to comprehend the specific needs of the migrant - especially the forced migrant - and in fairness we were still a relatively poor country. The notion that we ourselves might need to change as a society was well in the future.  But so was the notion of respect and support for other kinds of difference - disabled people, unmarried mothers, Travellers. 

By the time the Vietnamese Boat People arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were some ideas about their needs, at least as far as language training and other basics were concerned. But there was no real understanding of how to encourage social inclusion while respecting the cultural heritage of the Vietnamese. The disastrous attempt to promote their integration through their dispersal around the country on a one-family-per-town basis soon broke down as these families inevitably drifted back to Dublin, the one place where some kind of critical social mass existed for them. There was no recognition that such movements of people challenged, not only the lack of services for them, but the very nature of Irish society and identity. Irish identity remained rooted, literally, in place, patriarchal and hermetic. 

As a result , support for immigrants here has for the most part been left to the voluntary sector. The Irish Red Cross looked after the Hungarians in 1956 just as nowadays more than 50 dedicated voluntary organisations work with asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants today. For those who will become permanent residents, no attempts have been made as yet to introduce multiculturalism into the mainstream of Irish life. While the late 1990s saw the beginnings of change, it would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of this historical policy vacuum, the reliance on a voluntarist approach and the legacy of inexperience which has informed official Irish attitudes. 

Recent changes 

Irish policy has indeed started to change in recent years, driven by the self-evident facts of market demand for workers as well as by the arrival of asylum seekers in some numbers - although modest by other countries' standards - on our shores. But by and large what changes made have been made have been pragmatic and short-term, rather than a strategic, long-term, planned process. Part of the problem is the fractured nature of the policy response. 

The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is responsible for immigration law and immigration controls in Ireland. That Department is also primarily responsible for the Irish contribution to developing EU and international policy on immigration and related issues. 

Other Departments also have a role to play. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is responsible for the issuing of work permits. In one specific field, that of officially accepted or Programme refugees (e.g. the Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian communities) the Department of Foreign Affairs is involved in a key capacity, while it also retains a 'watching brief' on human rights-related aspects of Ireland's immigration policy in general. 

Recent developments in legislation, policy and practice have included a greater degree of inter-departmental cooperation in the fields of immigration and integration. Moreover, insofar as a public debate has taken place at all, the situation of refugees and asylum seekers, while unrelated in the strict sense to immigration and the labour market, has been the main impetus for innovation and the most visible example of altering forward thinking at official level, although new work visa arrangements for high skills immigrants also represent an important labour market initiative. 

The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has taken interesting initiatives, such as a report entitled Integration: a two-way process in 2000 and last year's public consultation on immigration policy, but the focus in these and other initiatives has remained for the most part on present challenges, such as the reception of asylum seekers, or traditional policy issues, such as admissions, residence and citizenship. 

The problem is that a true integration policy, as opposed to an immigration policy only, embraces many different Government Departments and agencies. We need what our neighbours in the UK call 'joined-up government' if we are to achieve real change. But there is a strongly inertial quality about policy making and policy structures. 

What happens when an emerging policy area is inchoate, sprawling, complex, and requires a multi-agency approach to address it? The danger is that those policy areas which are most clearly capable of being linked to existing chains of accountability will be the only ones to be addressed and that any such engagement will be in the context of a defensive move to ensure that if anything new is going to happen the Department in question retain control. One has only to think of the reaction during the lifetime of the last Government when a junior Minister in the Department of Foreign Affairs adopted a critical stance with regard to aspects of asylum policy which another Minister and another Department, Justice Equality and Law Reform, regarded as its territory. 

Secondly, if there is to be any inter-departmental coordination, it is likely to be weak and to be dominated by the Department which already has some kind of primacy in at least part of the field. And thirdly, if in the process of these deliberations it emerges that a truly radical approach is required, with perhaps new systems of accountability, or even, God forbid, new Government departments or independent statutory agencies with real teeth, everyone will close ranks to see that nothing so radical happens.  

Take, for instance, the establishment by the Department of Justice of the Reception and Integration Agency or RIA. In spite of fine work by dedicated civil servants - many of whom were verbally abused by communities up and down the country which opposed the dispersal of asylum seekers to their towns (and later changed their minds in nearly all cases) the name is a misnomer. The RIA deals only with asylum seekers and refugees, not immigrants in general, and it only deals with reception, not integration. It does have a number of civil servants seconded to it from other departments, but policy, in the broad sense, remains in the hands of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. The RIA does not have a statutory basis, an independent voice or an independent budget. 

The net effect of this is that the Department of Justice, by default, has responsibility for policy areas which are not its proper responsibility at all. To take just a few examples: what I have argued are the 'big' questions of integration, such as whether an assimilationist or a multicultural/intercultural model should be adopted or how the educational curriculum should be reformed to reflect the new realities of our society, are arguably not areas where this Department has any special competence.  

Towards Irish multiculturalism? 

Summing up, there is little evidence that the recent use of terms such as multiculturalism and interculturalism (which is used to denote a multicultural society with meaningful interaction beween the cultures) have substance as opposed to expressing an aspiration. A brief review of the party manifestoes for the recent election, for instance, is hardly reassuring. 

By and large it is platitudinous. The PDs recognise that 'Irish society is now more racially and culturally diverse than ever before' and promise to tackle marginalisation and racism, but little more. The Greens criticise the Government's lack of an immigration policy and promise various short-term measures but again have little to say about long-term integration. The Labour Party goes a little further than most in recognising the need to 'accommodate' multiculturalism but their ideas hardly go further than Jenkins' famous and by now rather pallid formula of the mid-1960s. Fine Gael's policy is the most cursory of all, calling merely for a consistent immigration policy and action at EU level - there is nothing at all about integration or multiculturalism. Fianna Fáil's manifesto speaks weakly of the need to 'help them (immigrants) to become full and active participants in Irish life' but advances no ideas about how this might be achieved. 

The only party which shows some understanding of the issues is Sinn Féin, which some may find ironic given its record for lack of tolerance of other kinds of difference on this island. Its manifesto says correctly that anti-racism must be built at community level. But apart from calling for anti-racist education and a multi-agency task force - as do the Greens - it avoids taking any detailed position on integration or multiculturalism. 

How then do we advance the debate? There is  the danger of a top-down approach in which a prescriptive un-elected élite is seen to be promoting concepts and practices which have not been explained or debated properly. But whatever the risks, we should accept that a mature open debate could actually underpin and support policy once it is agreed, even though that very debate carries its own dangers. In other words we need to take the risk of spelling out the need for such a policy. I believe that if this is done in an open and informed manner there is every reason to believe that the necessary support can be won. 

Multiculturalism is not a 'free-floating' concept. It must be embedded within a broad series of mainstream policy sectors and not seen as an 'add-on' option. Crucially, it must be complementary to and integrated within a clear framework of core values for all of Irish society, including respect for equal opportunity and individual rights.  

For example, it is one thing to promote equality for Islam with other religions and to accept such culturally specific practices, for instance, as the wearing of the hijab or Islamic headscarf, say, by pupils in secondary schools. It is quite another to depart from the fundamental value that men and women have equal rights in Irish society. As we have seen in the Canadian and Australian examples, it should be possible to negotiate respect for diversity within a framework of agreed values. 

It will not, of course, be a simple matter to draw the boundaries. The example I have just given shows that much. Feminists might argue in perfectly good faith that the wearing of the hijab is in itself problematic in its symbolic meanings,  but then many Muslims would claim that any such suggestion is itself Eurocentric and prejudiced. But at the very least open debate would enable us to work against stereotypes and ignorance and to test and define the boundaries of our core values. If we do not do this, we are building on sand. 

4 MODALITIES OF CHANGE. REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL? 

In considering how we might move towards the multicultural state, we can distinguish between the following kinds of action 

• Preventative action against racism: In Ireland we now have the beginnings of effective legislation, notably the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, (which has proved weak but is currently under review), the Equal Employment Act and the Equal Status 2000, currently in the news. The hope has been that this legislation and the resultant case law will help to create a new climate where racism of any kind is unacceptable. Unfortunately there is a tendency in this country to rely on the courts to take those decisions which politicians sometimes wish to avoid. The courts may act but this in itself will not suffice. Indeed, as current efforts by the Vintners' Federation to restore a policy of exclusion in Irish pubs shows, it can actually produce a backlash. The key is robust enforcement and strong political support; otherwise the way will be open to mob rule. 
• Voluntarist awareness raising campaigns and the like. The Know Racism campaign is one such example. Again, as with legislation, this is a necessary, indeed essential, element, but not sufficient. 
• Specific sectoral integration programmes, focusing on diversity in the workplace, anti-racist practice and education - the latter must be at the heart of any initiative 
• A top-down prescriptive legislative framework recognising multiculturalism as a core policy element
• A participatory approach which seeks to create spaces of empowerment for new communities within mainstream society and to replace a unitary model of identity with a different model based on the concept of connected points within a broad inclusive network of Irishness, seen in horizontal rather than vertical terms. One could re-imagine contemporary Irishness as being like the Internet, decentred but characterised by nodes of greater or lesser significance, thematic as well as spatial, and providing a level of connectedness not previously possible. 

Are there distinctive aspects of the Irish experience which might actually help us in framing this debate for ourselves? After all, in spite of our internally constructed exclusions, 'imported racisms' of various kinds, our complicity in global North-South inequalities and the role played by some Irish people in the past as agents of European colonising power, there are also a few potentially positive points of departure. We should aim to find those aspects of our own experience and history which might serve as useful starting points in constructing a debate here about multiculturalism. 

The following issues, in no particular order, strike me as relevant: 

• The connection with the majority world just mentioned. It is problematic but there is a degree of affinity with oppressed peoples in this country. We can see this clearly in the popular support given to voluntary aid agencies and in the interest in Ireland in the work of people like Fr Brendan Forde in Columbia or Fr Niall O'Brien in the Philippines. Radical elements in the Irish Catholic Church have been to the fore in re-defining their own power relations with people in poorer countries and in developing partnership-based approaches based on mutual respect and cooperation. These tendencies are finding echoes in critical movements within the Catholic Church in Ireland even if, in my view, that Church as an institution has missed a golden opportunity to regain some kind of credible moral voice in broader Irish society. 
• The experience of having been colonized - I leave to one side the somewhat arcane revisionist argument that this never actually happened - has left us with a still not fully examined internalised legacy. 
• The fact that Irish people have been victims of racism and marginalisation themselves, not least as Britain's historical Others (Hickman, Walter). A comparative approach to these constructions of otherness as they were visited on us, compared to our racism towards others now, would focus our own minds. 
• For the younger people of Celtic Tiger Ireland the hard times endured by earlier generations of emigrants are already awkward echoes of a remote past. Yet an understanding of the lives of tens of thousands of Irish migrant workers in Britain, for instance (what Bobby Gilmore has called the 'migrant heart'), can only enhance our understanding of immigrant lives here. 
• If one adds to that an understanding of the efforts made by Irish people in Britain, America and elsewhere to preserve their own culture even as the children of those migrants became integrated members of mainstream society, this can go some way in assisting us to understand the situation of others in our own midst. 
• Ireland's own socio-cultural identity is in danger of being marginalized, if not swamped, by cultural globalisation.  It will not ultimately be easier for us as a nation to retain our own identity in this global environment than it will be for immigrants coming here to retain their culture. The connections between identity, cultural production and power hardly need repeating here. Some Irish politicians have failed to appreciate this point; one has only to compare the rather simplistic Boston/Berlin cliché with the strong popular French desire to keep is own film industry. If we consider the attitude of certain politicians towards RTÉ, it seems odd that they would be indifferent if our own narratives of ourselves and our various histories - core elements of identity - were replaced by the products of a mogul whose power in the English language media is near-monopolistic, whose output is bland and whose market-driven ideology has nothing to do with any kind of culture except profit. 
• There has been an interesting shift the way in we think about the Irish language.  The older objective of an Irish-speaking Ireland has gradually given way to a newer, if as yet unstated one, of creating spaces where Irish may function as a lesser spoken language with certain specific support systems, with the support of large numbers of non-Irish speakers. We are still some way from a rights-based approach with specific guarantees for Irish speakers, but speaking as a bilingual person myself I strongly favour the abandonment of a position which was not only domineering but exclusionary, unrealistic and unattainable.   The newer approach, provided it is accompanied by meaningful empowering measures, can equally be applied to other minority identities, whether immigrant or indigenous. The Irish language community would need, however, to have a hard look at some of its own attitudes, which can at time be isolationist, elitist and intolerant. 
• The Belfast Agreement is an exercise in multiculturalism. There is an explicit recognition that there are two mainstream cultural traditions in Northern Ireland and that the rights of both must be recognised, validated and safeguarded. Moreover, the process of explicit negotiation and recognition of such rights itself provides a valuable template which in turn is leading to the recognition of other minority communities within Northern Ireland. It is imperfect and has been criticised on the grounds that it merely reinforces the walls between communities and studiously ignores questions of power and past injustice. We need to bear in mind that the Agreement, like the partnership model for social inclusion in the South, carries with it the risk that marginal groups will find they have bought into a consensus where they are not given their own voices and where power continues to be exercised against them. But all that said, it has provided some way out of the morass. 
• Confident nations are less bigoted. The Canadian example, including Québec, shows this. The new civic nationalism of countries such as Scotland and Catalunya bear out the same point. Turning to the local, I don't think it is fanciful to claim that Clare's own strong traditions in areas music and sport, and its pride in itself, have been a factor in the willingness to accept new people and new ideas. We can celebrate our own cultures with confidence and share them with newcomers. 
• A multiculturalism which ignores social inequality will not last. Those who are already marginalised are prone to react negatively if they perceive rightly or wrongly that newer groups are being given pride of place. The liberal model, with its tendency to understate the operation of power and inequality in society, cannot in itself ensure equality. 
• On the other hand, traditionally excluded groups may well make common cause with the new excluded, forming powerful new movements of resistance to an over-comfortable status quo.  The State, paradoxically, needs to facilitate this and not simply co-opt the views of its critics. New structures are needed to make this possible. This has major implications for the statutory sector and for the partnership model, which does not currently explicitly recognise ethnicity as a factor to be taken into account or multicuturalism as a mechanism which might be helpful. 
• It has been rightly argued that multiculturalism cannot survive without a comprehensive social policy and a genuinely participatory approach.   The commitment to inclusion and social citizenship embodied in the welfare state concept must not be traded for the limited perspective of the market economy, where the powerful will inevitably win the struggle for the distribution of power and resources, perpetuating patterns of inequality and marginalisation. 
• We can reclaim nationalism from the narrow-minded if we emphasise the diversity of our own origins, not their alleged unitary nature. A shift from ethno-specific citizenship to 'social' citizenship, emphasising our shared membership of the community as the basis for citizenship rather than birth or nationality, ought not to be impossible in the present climate. Curriculum reform is part of the process. 
• Multiculturalism should celebrate all cultures, including the dominant one. 

Finally, we should not see multiculturalism as a solution to all our problems, because it is not. Radical empowerment can only be based on partnership built from the bottom up, not the top down. As I have suggested, this must mean, among other things, including action to address the social marginalisation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the community development programme and in other programmes designed to combat poverty and exclusion such as the National Anti Poverty Strategy. We also need to avoid the danger of imprisoning individuals behind new ethnic walls. 

Ethnicity is now understood in social theory as shifting and negotiable and must always be enabling from the individual's point of view. A single individual may have several identities; those identities may even shift and change over a lifetime.  Even within the same family, some incomers may wish to assimilate to the mainstream society while others may prefer their own ethnic identity. We should not impose any specific choice. But it is reasonable, and all the more so in the light of the events of 11 September 2001, that in return for the full recognition and validation of cultural identity, within a framework of common rights and entitlements,  our society, in return, should ask for the loyalty of all those living in it, as common citizens of the Irish civic nation. 

Kipling wanted the grapes to 'be all one vine'. There are good wines made from a single vinestock; but the best bordeaux are always blends of several types. 

Another poet, John Hewitt, put it thus: 

We are not native here or anywhere 
We were the Keltic wave that broke over Europe, 
and ran up this bleak beach among these stones; 
but when the tide ebbed, were left stranded here in crevices, 
and ledge-protected pools 
that have grown salter with the drying up 
of the great common flow that kept us sweet 
with fresh cold draughts from deep down in the ocean. 

We are, once again, drawing on that great common flow.

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