Parading of multicultural harmony doesn’t square with the grim reality

SURPRISE. Today is International Day Against Racism and we’re in the middle of Intercultural Week. Bet you didn’t know that.

We've just spent a week celebrating what it means to be Irish and it was great, wasn't it? Great, I imagine, if you were a punter at Cheltenham (a lot less good if you were one of the eight or nine horses that died for our entertainment). Certainly great if you were an Irish rugby fan, although the valves and arteries of my heart must be in great shape if I survived the tension of those last 10 minutes in Twickenham.

And it was great to be on the streets of Dublin last Friday, despite the cold. The parade and the people were full of life and there was more colour than usual, in every sense of the word. The first group I saw were dancers. They were well out in front of the official parade and seemed content to entertain the waiting crowd. And the crowd was getting a real kick out of their very colourful national costumes and the drum beat to which they were dancing. They were African, possibly Nigerian, and were clearly very welcome. Throughout the day, Dublin had a really happy cosmopolitan feeling to it. You could enjoy it, and come to the conclusion that we're coping with immigration in a way no one would have believed possible. Certainly, the good-natured and multicultural atmosphere of the day could persuade anyone that integration is really happening.

And if all these nationalities, all these languages and all these skin colours can get along like this one day a year, maybe there's nothing to worry about. Maybe we've cracked it. Maybe we're already becoming a place where discrimination isn't something to be worried about.

I'm not sure that Mariyam Cementwala would agree. Mariyam is a Mitchell scholar (part of an important exchange programme, named after George Mitchell, who contributed so much to our peace process). She arrived in Ireland a couple of years ago, to pursue a year's study at NUI Galway. Mariyam is an independent and able person, despite having very limited vision and being a long-term cane user. She is also an American Indian.

Mariyam rented an apartment in Galway. It was a pretty short-lived tenancy, because the day after she moved in she was asked to leave. The landlady was concerned that the apartment, access to which involved negotiating a flight of stairs, wouldn't be safe for her. The decision to ask her to leave had nothing to do with her colour or ethnic origin, of course. It was only out of concern. Despite representations made by a number of people, the landlady was firm.

Mariyam left and found alternative accommodation. Eventually she took a case to the Equality Tribunal, which found that she had, indeed, been discriminated against, on grounds of disability. Among the people who gave evidence on her behalf was Professor Gerard Quinn, who is head of the law faculty of NUIG and was the supervisor of Mariyam's research while she was here. At the conclusion of his statement to the Tribunal, he said: "The whole episode made me feel sick and ashamed to be Irish."

How would Tanya Persaud feel about the notion that we have come to terms with difference and diversity? Tanya is an Australian, whose father is Afro-Caribbean. She worked in a well-known Irish hotel, where her immediate boss told her that everyone from the West Indies was lazy and that one of her colleagues was "as useless as an African". When she complained to the personnel department, her boss started making life difficult for her, to the point where she had no choice but to leave her job. Tanya's complaint to the Equality Tribunal (and I'm simplifying the story here for reasons of space) led to what was, in effect, a hefty fine on the hotel concerned.

Are cases like these straws in the wind? The Equality Tribunal hears cases under a variety of different grounds and, apart from membership of the travelling community, race and disability appear to be very high on the list of grounds that have led to active discrimination. As yet, there isn't what you might call a substantial body of case law in relation to these areas of discrimination. People with disabilities historically have been slow to complain and to assert their rights and I suspect people with foreign accents or a different skin colour might be reluctant to expose themselves to possible harassment, too.

So what is the experience of people arriving here from a foreign country, hoping to try to build a better life? Is there racism here, apart from the odd isolated incident? Are we doing anything about it? Not urgently, anyway.

OUR government appears to believe that there is no real problem here. At the World Conference against Racism, held in South Africa in 2001, it committed themselves to publishing a National Action Plan Against Racism. They even gave it an acronym NPAR and set up a page on the Department of Justice's website to tell us all about it.

And then the long, meandering journey began. After the World Conference it published a discussion document called (you guessed it) Towards a National Action Plan Against Racism in Ireland. The purpose of this document was to inform the consultative process (you mightn't have heard, but we've had a consultative process). And then there was the timetable. Consultation from March to July 2002, finalising the plan in October 2002, endorsement by Government and laying before Oireachtas in early 2003.

It didn't quite work out like that, of course. Consultation is such a long and wearying process and the next stage in the development of the plan turned out to be the publication of a discussion document, Diverse Voices, published in July 2003 and offered to the Government as a 'as a key resource and input into the process of preparing the NPAR'. It set out a broad framework for the plan, outlined a number of key ingredients and proposed, in particular, that the plan should be centred on five key principles protection, inclusion, provision, participation and recognition.

Eventually, last year, the plan was published. The usual speeches and fanfare and a tiny budget. And a hard-working and committed steering group has been working ever since, trying to deal with a real problem with the sort of budget that makes it almost impossible to be heard. As I said at the start of this piece, this week is Intercultural Week and today is International Day Against Racism. You'll only hear about that if there is enough goodwill in the media to promote the fact, because the steering committee simply can't afford to promote it and I don't see anyone else doing it.

And yet, a nagging little voice somewhere keeps telling me that this is a subject we need to take a lot more seriously. We can't turn a blind eye to the problem of racism, because racism is based on fear and fear is easy to foster and spread. A happy St Patrick's Day doesn't mean a multi-cultural Ireland. It's going to take a lot more work than that.