The trouble with turbans and a multicultural policy that has failed

STUDENTS: don’t you just love them? Back in 1997 I was invited to UCC to debate that hoary old chestnut “This House wants a United Ireland”. After being noisily harangued by all the usual suspects for not wanting a million people coerced against their will, one young woman addressed me in the gentlest voice.

“Mr King, I am not Sinn Féin like those people behind me. In fact, I detest what the Provisional IRA has done to our country. But do you not think that if we had full independence, we could keep Ireland white and Christian. Surely not even Protestants want our country to go the same way as England?”

She said it in the sweetest possible way and, judging from her crucifix, I took her to be a very sincere Catholic girl. I really wanted to help, I really did. This was the worst kind of nationalism dusted with icing sugar.

Who would want to tell such a clean-living, angelic-looking slip of a girl that she was, all told, a racist pig? Ten years on, Ireland is far less Christian and white. Doubtless, many secretly mourn the old Ireland when the issues all seemed so much simpler. There certainly weren’t any gardaí claiming the right to wear turbans on duty. That was the kind of issue they had in London, not Clonakilty or Clones.

True, in 2007, there is a difference of scale but it’s worth bearing in mind that, just to take one example, the first Indians arrived in Ireland before the Rising of 1798. Not many people know that. Chances are they wore some kind of headdress, too.

The myth that there ever was a pure white, Christian Ireland is just that: a myth, a fable, a lie. Yet, staggeringly, not only are there, proportionately, more women in the Zambian parliament than there are in the Dáil, but there isn’t a single non-white face in the Oireachtas: a few Protestants, a couple of Jews and… rows and rows of white Catholic men.

The obvious remedy would have been for the Taoiseach to have used some of his Seanad appointments to reflect Ireland’s increasing diversity instead of handing plum posts to party hacks recently rejected by the electorate. The much harder task is for the parties themselves to make their appeals relevant to those citizens who are not white and Christian, recruit them as members, and encourage them to grapple up the greasy political pole. It was a delight then to see Portlaoise Town Council elect Rotimi Adebari as their chairman — on merit. While a Nigerian-born mayor made the evening news, some of the other big institutions in Irish life have become increasingly diverse in a very quiet way. Less than 15 years ago I recall taking a black woman friend into a bar in Co Mayo and someone asking very nicely if she could touch her skin because she had never met a black person before. Those days are gone – and thank God, too.

Asian doctors and African priests barely raise an eyebrow any more. And it seems an Garda Síochána, like the PSNI, has been noticeably successful in recruiting officers from a wide variety of backgrounds, anchoring it more securely in the communities it serves. Next time you drive at 70 in a 50 zone the garda who pulls you over might originally hail from Moscow, Warsaw, Calcutta or even Shanghai.

This is all to the good. We have gradually, and relatively smoothly, crossed the threshold into the pluralist, multicultural Ireland that Mary Robinson promised.

But to celebrate a multicultural Ireland is not the same thing at all as embracing multiculturalism. Some innocently believe that multiculturalism is merely to cherish diversity. It is not. Diversity is a reality we can either welcome or, as sometimes happens in mainland Europe, ignore. But multiculturalism is a whole mindset through which policy is determined.

Multiculturalism, as practised in Britain, was essentially about treating each and every citizen not as an individual, but as a member of an ethnic or religious grouping. In turn, each and every grouping was treated as if it were numerically the same and made to compete for resources and attention. All beliefs and practices were to be treated as equally worthy of respect.

Above all, the majority culture was seen as having no right to enforce its views on minorities. In fact, while all this difference was being applauded and celebrated, the majority (white, post-Christian and English-speaking) was, on a daily basis, made to feel ashamed of its culture and cast in the role of oppressor.

It is not just that this led to nonsense such as Muslim officers being excused from protecting the Israeli embassy. Nor is it just that would-be terrorists were warned in advance of police raids because people complained they were an assault on the “community” (multiculturalists’ favourite word meaning an ethnic or religious group, not a geographical locality).

It is not even simply that social workers turned a blind eye to female circumcision because that was “traditional”. Who is to say that particular African traditions are wrong as long as they are only applied to African girls? No, the folly of multiculturalism was that it, intentionally, prevented people of other colours and faiths from integrating — and integrating should be the goal. (It is unfortunate that Dermot Ahern is calling on people to “assimilate”, which suggests a one-way process).

Because multiculturalism insisted that official documents be translated into myriad different languages — and that English was the language of oppression — there are countless women in Britain who have lived there almost all their lives but cannot speak a word of English.

THEY were to stay at home (because that was “cultural”) and cover themselves up if they ever did go out in public. To the extent that they interacted with the host society, they could do so because the form to apply for a medical card was handily translated for them, at public expense, into Punjabi or Urdu or Somali or whatever.

And when such communities (that word again) failed to thrive — as was totally inevitable — the multiculturalists claimed it must be down to racism and the only answer was to throw yet more public money at them.

Unsurprisingly, succeeding generations often didn’t feel very British, not least because they were not treated as such. Instead, having been weaned on multiculturalism, they complained that it hadn’t gone far enough. They were being discriminated against because they were not allowed to live under Shariah law or to take drugs or to carry knives, or whatever the distinctive feature was of their “community” as it existed way back when in their country of origin.

The Government might be stressing a bit too much what immigrants must do to fit in as opposed to the responsibilities of the indigenous population. But it is absolutely correct to anticipate where allowing gardaí to wear a humble turban instead of a cap will lead. Hopefully, a compromise can be found on that particular issue. At the same time, asking a few gardaí to wipe off their ashes and take off their pioneer pins is a small price to pay if it avoids English-style ghettoisation.

That young girl at UCC had half a point.