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Date Posted: 21:20:06 06/08/08 Sun GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: The New Ireland (Chicago Tribune)


www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0605irelandjun05,0,2166377.story
chicagotribune.com
The new Ireland
By Joshua Hoyt
June 5, 2008

It is a beautiful spring Saturday in Dublin and the Congolese musician Kanda Bongo Man is celebrating "Africa Day," playing to a full house in the shadow of the statue honoring Irish patriot Charles Parnell.
Welcome to the new Ireland, where your hotel maid and construction worker could easily be Polish, the security guard Nigerian, the shopkeeper Chinese, the food-court restaurant Mauritanian, the mushroom picker Latvian and the doctor Indian.

The 14 years of almost solid record economic growth called the "Celtic Tiger" has multiethnic stripes.
Ireland has always been famous for the emigration away from the island. Famous emigres and their descendants range from Bernardo O'Higgins, the liberator of Chile, to President John F. Kennedy. As recently as 1996, Ireland was a net exporter of people. No more. The 2006 census showed that in the space of less than 10 years, Ireland has been transformed into a nation where more than 10 percent of its population of 4 million is foreign born.

Being a prosperous global nation has meant for Ireland the same thing that it has meant for the U.S., an influx of immigrants. The most dramatic jump in Immigration came in 2004 with the entry into the European Union of the Eastern European states. The largest numbers of the new Irish have been white and largely Catholic migrants from the United Kingdom, Poland and Latvia. In fact, 78 percent of the migration has been from Europe, the U.S. and Australia. The overwhelming majority of the migrants have been working-age adults.

Nevertheless, for a previously homogenous island, the changes have been shocking. Recently, the Ministry of Education had to address the question of whether the daughter of an Irish convert to Islam and his Yemeni-born wife could wear her head scarf in school. This might not seem like too great a challenge, but in Ireland the vast majority of primary education is still Catholic. The teachers teach first communion and you must speak Gaelic to become a teacher.
The outcome of the controversy was a typically Irish compromise: The girl was allowed to wear the scarf, as long as it conformed to school colors. Such has been much of the measured Irish response to the demographic change.

On the one hand the Irish have eliminated the right to birthright citizenship for the children of the foreign born, tightened access to asylum, reduced non-EU professional visas by 50 percent and are currently debating a new Immigration, residence and protection bill that will comprehensively reform Irish Immigration law.

On the other hand, the major political parties have not adopted the anti-immigrant demagoguery that has characterized the Immigration debate in the U.S., Great Britain and much of Europe. The Irish government sponsors anti-racism campaigns. In 2007, the new post of minister for integration was created, and his recently released report, "Migration Nation," recommends a policy of mainstreaming, a "whole of government" approach to encouraging immigrant integration, and measures to prevent migrant exploitation and encourage civic participation. Migrants have begun to participate in local elections and last year a Nigerian immigrant was elected the mayor of Portlaoise.

And so the Irish experiment with becoming a global nation continues. Eventually, the nation will need to come to grips with how to educate non-Catholic children, how to hire non-Gaelic speaking teachers and civil servants, how to deal with racial diversity and how to expand a national identity to include those whose ancestors were not around for the struggle for independence from Britain. With the first serious economic downturn in years it will be interesting to see if the Irish moderation holds.
But for now, Ireland seems comfortable with the fact that the prosperity of a global economy includes immigrants, and that Celtic green can include the peoples of the world.

Joshua Hoyt is the executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. He has been the guest in Ireland of the Irish Institute of Boston College, a U.S. Department of State initiative that grew out of the Good Friday Peace Accords.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

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