Being forced to switch off can lead to more problems than it solves

THE accountant stood at the kitchen sink, clearly trying to find something among the nuts, bolts, screws, box-cutters, tabloid newspapers, cigarette packages and rolled glue-tubes testifying to the work being done on the house.

“You didn’t want soap, did you?” I asked.

She assured me that washing hands was always good. I asked her what she’d actually been looking for when I had helpfully misdirected her efforts and made her hands so clean she could have done surgery on the cat without transferring the smallest bacterium to it.

“Thing to carry water,” she said slowly. “Water for ironing?”

I produced the little nozzled plastic container for getting water into the steam-iron and she beamed.

“I’m a gobshite,” I offered apologetically.

“Not a gobshite,” she said, laughing. “You trying you best.”

We bonded over one Irish semi-profanity with which she was pleasingly familiar. Suddenly, we were talking.

She works for a cleaning company while studying to get her Irish accountancy qualification, having worked as an accountant in one of the former USSR states.

Her experience in Ireland has been good. Starting with names. Most people here take the trouble to learn and pronounce her name properly. It matters. In other countries, she had to tolerate near-miss versions, or being addressed as if she were an unbranded commodity.

In addition, she finds that if you work hard, Irish people have no problem with you. The downside is that diligence militates against conversation, so her English has improved largely through television-watching. Her three children, all born in Ireland, understand her mother tongue, because she and her husband speak it all the time at home, but the kids respond in English, which they speak perfectly, proving the point that peers are better educators, in many respects, than parents.

She has brought her children back to her homeland once. Her husband didn’t travel with them. His parents’ deaths a few years back within months of each other removed his last tie.

“He not like reminded the poverty,” she explained. “Very poor, where we come from.”

Using a pencil on a bit of worktop, she demonstrated that the average wage in her home country is a quarter of the figure Irish Ferries offers, which is why so many of her compatriots are lining up for jobs in that company.

Not that she wanted to get into that controversy. That’s an Irish argument, and smiling silence is the way to avoid involvement in Irish arguments. Not, she hastened to establish, that Irish people want to argue with non-nationals. On the contrary. Irish people are so keen not to offend, they find it safer not to engage at all.

Integration and mutual learning, it isn’t. The safety-in-silence approach of many Irish people has been greatly exacerbated by an “expert” approach to diversity which is negative, humourless and minimal.

One management group recently brought in a diversity expert to improve their approach to their increasingly multi-cultural workforce. She got them talking about their company. Every few minutes, she would halt them and feed back to them some word one of them had used. “Normal” was one such word. The unfortunate who had used it was made to feel he was a racist deliberately establishing verbal apartheid. He shut up, boiling with frustration, since he’d been the one who wanted to develop a more articulated approach to diversity in the first place.

One of his colleagues blundered into expressing pride in the fact the company employed several people with disabilities. The expert looked a silent question at him: You’re PROUD of employing people who can undertake a task? He floundered, explaining that including disabled people takes effort.

“Disabled people?” asked the expert.

“Well for example,” the manager dithered, misunderstanding the reproach built into her tone, “Down Syndrome people sometimes are-”

“People with Down Syndrome,” one of his colleagues muttered, seeing which way the wind was blowing.

“As a management team, in all your references, you put disabilities before people. It is shocking,” the expert told them.

IN a final attempt at self-defence, one of the condemned pointed out they surveyed their staff regularly, and found general satisfaction with the way the company managed diversity. The expert murmured something about slave-owners in the deep South having convinced themselves their particular slaves were happy, all you had to do was listen to them singing in the cotton fields.

At the end of the session, the group had learned two lessons. The first was that if they got the language right, they were safe. The second was a profound hatred for everything to do with diversity. Both are lethal for the creation of a society where (to quote FDR) nobody feels left out. The injury implicit in the nineteenth century American signposts warning ‘No Irish Need Apply’ lay not in the language, but in the action.

While language is important, we are in danger of creating a culture which is clinically clean in its terminology, rather than a warm, inclusive, argumentative culture where mistakes get made and acknowledged without disabling humiliation and where learning comes through openness and humour. In this, we’re part of an almost unchallengeable trend in the West.

For example, David Napier’s 2003 study, The Age of Immunology, addressed how the American Arthritis Foundation polices the terms applied to arthritis, banning words like “victim” and “sufferer” but also insisting arthritis never be referred to as a crippling disease; because, according to the guidelines, “these words carry an image of inferiority”.

While nobody disputes the need to remove frankly pejorative terms from public discourse (and the most pejorative and frequently-used, these days, refer to age), Napier makes the point that over-control of language can distort reality. Observation, deduction and human reasoning lead ordinary people to view arthritis as a crippling disease. Forcing them to switch off and deny observation, deduction and human reasoning can lead to more problems than it solves.

An example of this was when one of my colleagues, working recently within a large manufacturing plant, didn’t get an important message she was expecting. It turned out the person receiving the message had handed it on to someone else, describing my friend to him: she was wearing a black suit and was on the small side with short hair.

“You didn’t tell him I’m black?” she asked, incredulously.

He had avoided that one. For fear of offending. The one characteristic which would have immediately identified her and allowed the important message to reach her on time had been airbrushed out.

Because to mention it might have run counter to the corporate diversity policy.

The language was right. The reality was rotten.