There's a lot to be learned from our history and our present day about how we treat those who arrive on our shores.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has stressed the importance of migration for Ireland, saying it enriches society. However, he said robust systems were required to ensure we are welcoming those genuinely fleeing war and oppression and returning those who are not. So how good are we at welcoming people to our shores? And why have we struggled to reflect the presence of minority groups across the institutions of society?
Dr Amanullah De Sondy, Head of the Study of Religions department at UCC and chair of the race equality forum and historian Prof Diarmuid Ferriter from UCD joined the Today with Claire Byrne show on RTÉ Radio 1 to discuss. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
Commenting on the Taoiseach's remarks, De Sondy argued it wasn't the right thing for Varadkar to say. "We we need to be very careful about the language that we use. Language can be weaponised, it can instil, it can motivate people to do all sorts of things. The deeper issue here is that there is a distressing and a real harmful gap between the reality of Ireland and what we usually see in here, when it comes to all things Irish. And that is an issue that we're all grappling with, which means that we're having to counter very clear ideas of hate and the burning of bridges."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ News, tens of thousands attend anti-racism march in Dublin
"This is a very dangerous time. We need action which is going to implement the idea of making sure that this is an Ireland that's going to be welcoming to people, people who are different," said De Sondy. "I have a very privileged life and I'm protected by the university. And also, if I may say so, I have a Scottish accent, I have brown skin, it doesn't match what comes out of my mouth and that stops people from being blatantly racist."
He said we have a "real issue" of how we deal with people who are different and that it's "time for us to act and to change the narrative and to counter this."
Taking a historical view, Ferriter talked about a 1977 survey of 2,300 Dubliners by Jesuit sociologist and social justice activist Father Micheál Mac Gréil. "He caused quite a stir in 1977 when he published a book called Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, which revealed what he referred to as very strong racist attitudes. Latent and dormant as they may have been, because there were only about 11,000 non-nationals in Ireland at that stage. But he did pose the question as to what would happen if there was ever any significant migration into Ireland; would these attitudes come to the fore?"
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week, President Higgins describes spreading of far-right extremism as "unforgiveable"
"What it revealed was that only 24% of those who were surveyed would accept a black person into the family. The context there of the 1970s includes questions as well about their attitudes to communism and atheism and alcoholism and single mothers and so on. So it was a wider survey. But he updated it at various stages over the decades, including to coincide with the period of significant migration to Ireland, and that was new."
Ferriter said migration has very much defined the Irish people, "but it was an outward migration for so long". He said from 1700 up to the present day, roughly 10 million people have emigrated from the island, exceeding the population of Ireland at its historic peak in the 1840s.
READ: How the far right are misrepresenting Irish history
"Even those who were seeking refuge in Ireland at earlier stages of the 20th century received quite a hostile reception. There was a Jewish pogrom in Limerick in 1904. Hungarian refugees came in here, just over 500 of them between 1956 and 1958, they had a very difficult experience in Ireland and did not feel welcome, and the solution was onward migration to Canada."
"But we also have a relationship with race that is very much bound up with our involvement in the colonial enterprise. We were exploited, we were discriminated against, and the Irish people suffered considerable racism abroad. But they also, of course, were very much involved in the imperial project and could be determinedly racist themselves, when it came to competition with other migrants," said Ferriter.
READ: How bullying due to race or ethnicity occurs in Irish schools
When abolitionist Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in the 1840s, "Daniel O'Connell very vainly introduced him as "the black O'Connell of the United states". But in fairness to O'Connell, he was quite principled about abolition and his stance on abolition; he wouldn't accept money from those who supported slavery in America because it was drenched in the blood of slaves, as far as he was concerned," said Ferriter.
"Frederick Douglass recorded that his reception in Ireland was very positive, that they didn't see him as a colour, they saw him as a man. Yet later, when there was very significant Irish immigration to the United states, he singled out the Catholic Irish as being particularly racist when it came to replacing immigrant labourers."
READ: Were the Irish slaves? Frederick Douglass and his Irish awakening
Referring to Ireland's treatment of the traveller community, Ferriter added: "no, I mean racism is not just colour-coded. Indeed some politicians have discovered over the years that there is an electoral advantage, when it comes to speaking about travellers and speaking in a negative way about travellers. We do have those homegrown issues and we do have that question of different forms of racism, at different stage stages."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's The Late Debate, are anti-immigration protests here to stay?
Returning to how racism can be addressed, De Sondy talked about the power of reaching out and "discomfort" in moving forward. "I was recently reading about 'white fragility', a term that was coined by Robin de Angelo, and it basically says that when white people are faced with the idea or conversation about racism, there's a very defensive reaction. It's a discomfort and I think through that discomfort, we will we will be able to strengthen something.
"I think what comes from discomfort in conversation is we begin to see each other as human beings. When I teach my students on issues of Islamophobia, my biggest challenge often is getting my students to see Muslims as human beings. That might come as a real surprise. It is because we have a long history and a long legacy of how we've created Muslims into monsters and history tells us that we always create monsters at a specific time. For a very long time, whether you saw it in Hollywood or in cartoons such as Aladdin, Muslims where the monsters."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ News, conference on "Islam and Ireland" hears experiences of muslim people in Ireland
"The thing is that racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia is not a rational or a logical enterprise. They work on the premise of putting somebody down and psychologically torturing them, so that they feel oppressed and that's exactly what's happening when we see these demonstrations against asylum seekers and immigrants," said De Sondy.
Asked if it was about making irrational beings, rational, De Sondy said: "It's about countering. Everybody needs to have a say, but I hope that we can counter that with love, so that we say that this is not what Irishness means. And that we can broaden our tent or our church in what Irishness is, I'm not seeing that enough. This has to come from grassroots organisations, from our politicians and it needs to be represented."
"On a positive note, the vast majority of people in Ireland are on the side of pluralism and diversity. That gives me hope every single day," said De Sondy. Ferriter added the importance of recognising that an awful lot of questions around race and racism are also bound up with class issues and social economic issues.
