Green, white and orange has changed to a rainbow state

IT IS an ironic reflection of the rapid deterioration of Ireland’s manufacturing base that we are now even reduced to importing our xenophobia from abroad.

Fine Gael tried to justify their kite-flying idea to offer unemployed migrants six months’ dole money to get out, and stay out, of the country by insisting it could not be seen as scapegoating foreigners as the party had borrowed the initiative from Spain.

A similarly confused attitude to the new Irish by the old Irish is laid bare in the Amárach Research survey, which shows while more than half of us think immigration has had a good impact on the country, two-thirds of those questioned now want it restricted as the chill winds of recession begin to blow bitter and cold.

But those who blithely expect a downturn in the economy to be the trigger for those who have settled here over the past decade to suddenly get the next flight back to Kracow/Vilnius/Lagos totally misunderstand the historic patterns and lessons of mass migration.

The scale of the republic’s journey from bleached white mono-culture slowly emerging from the heavy cloak of the Catholic Church, to rainbow coloured multi-culture over the space of little more than a decade cannot be overestimated.

Ireland has absorbed nearly 500,000 people in just 10 years — an equivalent figure for Britain in the same timescale would be 8 to 9 million — and although more than half have now returned home, the country has been changed utterly and forever by the experience.

The sheer speed of the change has left many unsure of their attitudes as they offer, at times, contradictory views of the situation. A hard-core of one in three cite “extreme worries” over the impact on the health service, with another 39% expressing some worry. But the health service would find it even harder to cope with the demands placed upon it without the army of foreign-born workers absorbed over the past decade.

The fears over job displacement — either real or imagined — also played a larger than acknowledged factor in the defeat of the Lisbon treaty, in middle income as well as traditional working class areas. However, polite society has decided to ignore this aspect of the no vote.

Our confused attitude to the nation’s new look is exposed in the snapshot survey of opinion that highlights an underlying unease about the impact on schools and hospitals of the mass migration, while generally seeing the cultural shift as a good thing.

Voters clearly believe the Government has not moved sufficiently ahead of the curve in terms of integration, with those questioned displaying a palpable anxiety that ministers are not giving enough emphasis to bringing the old and new Irish together.

FG has been playing a dangerous game of attempting to tap into the underlying unease in some quarters over migration with recent attempts to test public opinion with loaded calls for “segregation” of immigrant children with poor English in schools and repatriation of jobless migrants.

The individual calls by lone frontbenchers can be given easy deniability as party policy, while at the same time the response to these “dog whistle” blasts — so called as they only reach the ears of a certain strain of the electorate — can be assessed and calculated.

As the party that has presided over the era of immigration, Fianna Fáil is unable to pander to its more populist instincts, again leaving it to “maverick” TDs to go on solo runs.

Former Labour leader Pat Rabbitte got burned before the last election when he tried to embrace job displacement fears with lurid worries about “40 million Polish plumbers” readying themselves to buy a one-way Ryanair ticket to Dublin. The negative reaction to the comment has scared Labour from returning to the issue effectively since, despite its impact on the party’s natural constituency. Two-thirds of voters may want immigration restrictions, but the accelerating motor of the EU is the free movement of labour and that will not change. The host country cannot expect to recoup the economic benefits of the influx while remaining unaltered by the experience.

The newcomers will help re-shape our society just as the Irish in part transformed the societies of the US, Britain and Australia in the past.

The key role for the Government is in countering the inevitable growing pains and easing the unavoidable tensions this is bound to trigger, especially as Ireland slips into recession.

The survey shows an Ireland torn between a lingering wish for a rosy, re-imagined past and the reality of understanding the financial boon change has delivered. However, we are all in a new state now and there is no going back.

The future of the republic will be painted in all colours of the rainbow, not just green, white and orange.