http://www.translocations.ie/docs/v02i01/translocations-v02i01-02.

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Hickman, Mary J. (2007). Immigration and monocultural (re)imaginings in Ireland and Britain,
Translocations. The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review 2.1: 12-25.

Immigration and Monocultural (Re)Imaginings in Ireland and Britain[1]

Mary J. Hickman
Director, Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University
(e-mail: mary.hickman@londonmet.ac.uk)

Abstract
This article argues that the tendency to perceive Ireland as becoming multicultural due
to immigration installs an imbalanced power relation between a (re)imagined
monocultural host and immigrants and over-determines the moment of becoming
multicultural. These monocultural imaginings are implicit not only in the expressions of
reactive national identities in Ireland but also in the articulations of the advocates of
Irish global modernity and can only be maintained by ignoring previous immigrations,
travellers and partition. The article engages in a comparative examination of Britain in
the 1950s and 1960s and traces how the monocultural reimagining of a multiethnic
nation as a white homogenous host, at what was similarly represented as a moment of
incipient plurality due to immigration, has underpinned responses to immigration ever
since. In the current period, it is argued talk of diversity is predicated not on the
acceptance of plurality but on the notion of a host that is being subject to
diversification. The article ends by suggesting the challenge that faces Ireland if it is to
become multicultural.
Keywords: Transformations, National Stories, Multiculturalism, Social Cohesion,
Diversity
Introduction
I want to discuss the socio-economic transformations of Irish society
(Editorial, Translocations 2006) in a way that problematises the dominant
conceptualisation of the Ireland that is enmeshed in these transformations. Sustained
net inward migration is frequently cited as one of the most evident aspects of the
transformations underway in Ireland. Indeed one measure of the changes is the
demographic data. There was net emigration from Ireland in every intercensal period
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the exception of the 1970s, until
1996. As soon as European transitional funding (set in place for five years when Ireland
entered the European Economic Community in 1973) ended in 1978 net annual outward
migration figures reasserted themselves. Ireland haemorrhaged young people for a
decade from the early 1980s with about 10 per cent (360,000) of the population leaving
between 1981 and 1991 (Dowling Almeida 2001). Barely 20 years later Ireland is
experiencing its largest population total for over 100 years. Between 1996 and 2001 the
population of Ireland grew by eight per cent (291,249) of which 58 per cent was
estimated to be by net inward migration (2002 Census Preliminary Returns, CSO). An
amazing turnaround and well worthy of the term social transformation. In response to
this immigration, Ireland appears, despite a very different recent history to that of the
rest of north-west Europe, to be engaged in practices that in their essentials replicate
those of its near neighbours, in particular, Britain. In part this is due to common

membership of the European Union, in part to the existence of the Common Travel
Area between Britain and Ireland, but it is also the consequence of a specific, dominant
discourse of Irish national imaginings.
At the time other north-west European countries were experiencing a previous largescale immigration in the 1950s-1970s, Ireland was contributing to the substantial inflow
to Britain by sending upwards of half a million people there in little over a decade. The
immigrations that occurred after the second world war produced varying reactions in
Europe from the denial of the existence of immigration in Germany to institutionalised
ethnic minoritisation in Britain, but most eventually produced variants on a theme of
multiculturalism, though not necessarily the relatively structured and legislated form
found in Sweden. French exceptionalism remained in its pursuance of overt
assimilationism. Ireland experienced this recent history as a country of emigration not
as one of immigration, and thus in the contemporary period of further population flows
into and across Europe, the predominant imaginings of the nation as articulated in the
Irish public sphere are of a monocultural nation being subject to transformation.
Ireland, in certain respects, therefore, appears to be in the situation that these other
European countries were in the post-Second World War period, although the relative
size of its incoming population and the sources of its immigrations are obviously
characteristic of the current phase of globalisation. The similarity lies in the way in
which the current moment is being represented in Ireland, that is, as a moment of
reconstitution as multiethnic. Fifty years ago other European nations either reconstituted
themselves as or denied that they were becoming multiethnic. In each case this process
involved the negation of previous multiculturalism. In point of fact most European
societies were formed in the past by the historical interweaving of emigration, migration
and settlement and the resulting layered articulations of race and ethnicity. However
the foundational myths of European nations do not acknowledge this historical
multiculturalism. With the emergence of the nation state it was the powerful
assimilating centre that was celebrated. The discourses and practices of contemporary
multiculturalisms in Europe are layered on those of prior immigrations and the
transformations they in turn brought about. These prior transformations have, however,
often been written out of national stories or incorporated into national stories in a way
which removes their transformatory power.
The current moment in Ireland could be configured as an opportunity to learn about
integration from both the failures and successes of policies and practices in other
countries. However, the way in which Ireland is being conceptualised makes it much
more likely that the approach adopted, to what is perceived as incipient
multiculturalism, will mirror what has happened in other European nation states.
Focusing on integration, my contention is that the way in which Ireland is being
envisioned in much public discourse jeopardises attempts to achieve an integrated,
multicultural Ireland. In the first half of the article I examine the contemporary
discourse of monoculturalism in Ireland and end by arguing that this carries many
echoes of the process underway in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s when the notion of a
white, monocultural host society was central to the response to immigration. In the
second half I examine the history of integration in Britain, including its premise of
internal hierarchies, and question whether current notions of Britishness can deliver
social cohesion/integration before returning to raise some questions that have relevance
for Ireland.

The perils of monocultural (re)imaginings: Ireland and Britain compared

In May 2003 I participated in a conference, Re-Imagining Ireland, held in
Charlottesville, in the United States, and organised on a lavish scale by the Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities. The stated aim of the conference was to pose the
following types of questions. Who are the Irish and where does Ireland stand in a global
context? Where is Ireland going and how do its people view their course in the
21stcentury? How can the Irish, or any people, come to respect cultural diversity, bridge
social divides, and find peace, bringing all sections of a society together in a process of
reconciliation and development? Five years on from the Good Friday Agreement, seven
years into a run of rampant economic growth and net inward migration, and in a period
when Ireland or Irishness, seemed globally fashionable, the Foundation obviously felt it
was a good time to bring together more than 100 journalists, writers, politicians, artists,
scholars, musicians, and citizen activists, most of them from Ireland, but also from the
USA and Britain. The goal at a time of social change was to encourage new bonds and
affirm old friendships, to find and celebrate the transforming power of culture, to
support participants in a reflective re-visioning of Ireland (www.re-imaginingireland.org).
In this context I was most struck throughout the conference by the many times that I
heard Ireland referred to as a monocultural society. The onus of the references to
monocultural Ireland in Virginia was that a re-visioning of Ireland was required
because Irish society had to accommodate that it was now becoming multicultural as a
result of increasing immigration. In one stroke this articulation of the need for a
reimagining of Ireland links becoming multicultural with immigration and the
assumed resulting multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-faith composition of the society.
This over-determination of the moment of multiculturalism carries within it the
impossibility of re-visioning Ireland in the way sought by the largely liberal,
cosmopolitan speakers predominating at the conference, all of whom in their different
ways were or saw themselves as representative of a progressive Ireland. What
undoubtedly was meant by many of the references to the need for a re-visioning of
monocultural Ireland was that the practices and ideologies of Irish global modernity
(Gray 2002) should become hegemonic within Ireland.
The notion that Ireland was monocultural before immigrants arrived in the 1990s is
widespread. It circulates in casual comments on blogs (www.tomrafertyit.net/2006/12/),
in serious journalism (Keane 2002) and in academic articles (see for example Kline
2004, Kelly 2005). It seems to me a notion fraught with problems and dangers. There
are after all both new immigrants and old ethnic minorities in Ireland (Lentin and
McVeigh 2002) and this is without going back to the momentous immigrations of the
seventeenth century that have ensured the multiculturalism of Ireland to this day. As
Piaras Mac Enri argued at a recent Merriman Summer School:
One of the central myths of independent Ireland this part of Ireland was that
we all shared in a common set of social values and a common culture. Yet,
looking back this was never the case. Exclusion did not begin with recent
immigrants. One has only to think of traditional minorities, such as Protestants,
Jews, the Travellers and other ethnic minorities, Italian and Chinese for
instance, to realise that there never was a monoculture in Ireland. (2002: 2).

Ireland is, of course, a social formation within which different cultures circulate and
intersect based on: class, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity/race, politics, region,
county, settler/traveller, language and including cultures based on perceived relationship
to Britain. Its history reveals that like most other nation states Ireland is a hybrid
product, the result of a long history of unequal contestations between a variety of
cultures and socio-economic and political forces.
Despite a fostered reputation of being the country of 1000 welcomes, immigrants have
often faced a hostile reception in Ireland past and present. The Ireland of the
welcomes is not always apparent if you visit from Northern Ireland or if you visit from
England, are of Irish descent and have an English accent. In both these instances an at
best ambivalent, and often adverse response, can greet claims that a visitor might make
about being Irish. What is apparent in contemporary Ireland is the existence of a
hierarchy of Irishness. Possession of the right birthplace and accent are both of
paramount importance in gaining recognition (Hickman et. al. 2005). Different accent,
clothes, antecedents and skin colour can all be signifiers that constitute an individual as
Other in Ireland past and present (see, for example, Hamilton 2004). These hierarchies
are configured differently in different institutional settings and in different localities.
Focusing on these hierarchies illustrates the ways in which Ireland has always been
multicultural in a wider sense than the usual usage of that term. Not only has Ireland
been multicultural in ethnic terms but also in terms of other social divisions. The current
critiques of monocultural Ireland by the commentators and spokespeople of Irish Global
Modernity remind me of the 1980s when Desmond Fennell, theIrish Press journalist,
described how the urban, liberal, middle class of south Dublin viewed themselves as
Nice People versus the Rednecks. The Rednecks were the relatively ignorant, rural,
working class bigoted Catholics who the Nice People saw as making up the rest of
Ireland (Fennell 1986). In the 1980s the castigations of the Nice People centred on the
immanent Republicanism of the Rednecks; today the temperature of progressivism is
taken in terms of attitudes towards the globalisation of Ireland and the immigrations that
are one of its most potent signifiers. This may have the effect of isolating and alienating
the losers in the globalised transformation of Ireland. Indeed a poll in Ireland in 2005
demonstrated that public attitudes to immigrants vary with age group and social class. It
indicated that younger people and those from a higher income bracket were more
accepting of immigrants and of the changes which Ireland is undergoing (OMahony
2005).
As I see it, it is not the case that Ireland, apparently a mono-cultural society in the past,
is now, because of immigration, undergoing transformation into a multicultural society.
Rather, in this period of globalisation it is sharing in a pan-European experience
(especially notable in the 15 countries that were members of the EU prior to
enlargement in 2004) of demographic fluidity and inward migrations. In some, like
Britain, outward migrations are also significant in this period. This moment of national
reformation in Europe, part of simultaneous, contested processes of homogenisation and
differentiation, is one where the ethnicities and racialisations of specific groups have
become the dominant language through which national (re)constructions are taking
place. Ireland is sharing in this process and is not as exceptional as usually represented.
This is, for example, hardly the first period of internationalisation and globalisation that
the country has experienced (Foster 2007). Ireland is going through a process of
reformation but not from the position of being a monocultural society. It is, however,

sharing in the contemporary processes described above, but without the history of a
seminal reconfiguration of the nation during the last two hundred years for which the
catalyst was incoming migrations. Ireland in that sense is playing catch up.
Obviously I am not disputing that in Ireland many people perceive(d) the nation as
being monocultural but this was/is only sustainable as a result of partition, the
marginalisation of travellers as members of the nation and the ignoring of groups of
people of immigrant descent living in Ireland. The argument I want to pursue here is
that in some respects this 21st century moment in Ireland seems to share some
characteristics with that of the 1950s and early 1960s in Britain. That was a time when
Britain, already a multi-ethno-national, hierarchical society, reimagined itself as both
white and culturally homogenous in the face of immigration from Ireland, the New
Commonwealth and Pakistan. The economic conditions in Britain then and Ireland now
are not identical. Britain in the 1950s was going through a process of national rebuilding
and expansion after the Second World War. Ireland for the past decade has ridden the
crest of unprecedented investment and expansion to the point where it is the second
richest society in the EU. But what these moments of change and expansion do share in
common is that both countries required substantial immigrations to support economic
and social change; and these particular moments have been the occasion for
reconfiguring the nation as a white host. To understand what I mean by this I want to
examine the British case in more detail before returning to considering the significance
for Ireland of what I am arguing.

Integration and Britishness

Plurality was specifically excluded from the national (re)imagining in Britain that
accompanied the processes of reconstruction and reconfiguration underway in the postSecond World War era as immigration mounted from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Ireland. The arrival of these migrants in the 1950s stimulated the
reconfiguring of a class and ethno-nationally stratified nation as white and homogenous
(Hickman 2005) leading ultimately to the widespread acceptance of the term White, or
latterly White British, to connote the ethnic majority. In this way class, regional,
national, religious and ethnic differences within White were masked and a
homogenous indigenous population was arraigned against the other within, in the form
of new, visibly different immigrant communities. It was the moment of conception of
what type of society was receiving immigrants: it was a host society and it was white
and culturally homogenous. Ever since this period a fundamental representation of the
white homogenous host has underpinned all discussions of ethnic and racial issues.
There was an eventual acceptance that mid-century migrants were in Britain to stay,
and, consequently, the new migrants of the 1990s and early twenty-first century have
had to be othered in a different way. Nowadays the concept of diversity is used as a
signifier of difference, of immigrants, of minority ethnic groups, in other words of a
national community that includes Others. Encapsulated in the term diversity is a form
of cultural fundamentalism:
To accept that which is different from the standard is already, in some sense, to
accept difference into the standard. Those who do not fit into a standardised
pattern must still fit into the nation: they fit, not by being the standard, but by

being defined in terms of their difference. The nation still constructs itself as a
we, not by requiring that they fit into a standardised pattern, but by the very
requirement that they be culturally different (Ahmed 2000: 96).
In other words diversity is always already speaking of a host or core constituency
that is being subject to diversification and (re)contructs itself by identifying that
difference. Underlying this notion is the assumption that formal political equality
presupposes cultural identity and hence cultural sameness becomes the essential
prerequisite for access to citizenship rights (Stolcke 1995). In the 1980s and 1990s the
idea of multiculturalism has been pivotal in national political debates/discourses either
in order to resist heterogeneity or to implement multicultural policies in a narrow form
so as to neutralise or contain the potential transformatory power at a political and
cultural level of increasing reliance on shifting labour populations. Even in this
relatively constrained form multiculturalism is, post 11th September 2001, identified as
part of the problem. Multicultural societies can only function now, it is argued, on the
basis of some minimal convictions shared by all its members. In Britain, for example,
this has led to a renewed emphasis on the role of Britishness in achieving a workably
diverse society.
The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in London deplores what it identifies as
increasing polarisation and segregation in Britain, code for a split between Muslims and
the rest, and under its recently departed chairman, Trevor Phillips, argued strongly for
the merits of Britishness as a coalescing identity. Phillips argues that integration is a
two- way process and that there have to be rules that everyone understands and abides
by. This two-way street to change, as Phillips articulates it, involves settled
communities accepting that new people bring change and newcomers realising that they
have to change if society is to be integrated (Phillips 2005). The subtle distinction here
is that integration relies on a change of attitude amongst the settled but a change of
behaviour and values amongst migrants, that is, they have to sign up to and behave in a
way that demonstrates their acceptance of shared values and common traditions that
already exist. This conception of integration is predicated on positioning the migrant as
an outsider who has to change. British comfort with diversity is revealed as based on a
power relation in which the settled, us/we/our, have it within their purview to be
tolerant of the newcomers, them/other/outsider.
The thrust of my argument here is that Britishness as currently promoted (for example,
by the new prime minister, Brown 2006), with its litany of ways in which people are
expected to prove their eligibility to be British, means that the basis of social cohesion
or integration represents a shift away from multiculturalism and a return to assimilation.
A return to an overt conception of a host to whose ways guests should adapt. The
dominant view is that if immigrants change and sign up as Britons this will diffuse the
hostility, that is, it will change the attitudes of their hosts. It is based on the
assumption that it is not so much competition for resources and rights that forms the
basis of hostility to immigrants but rather what is perceived as their lack of entitlement
to these rights or their acquisition of them ahead of others, that is, people who have
been nationals/citizens longer. By emphasising the need for new immigrants to commit
as Britons this approach/ policy fails to engage in a debate about how all sections of the
population might respond to the upheavals of globalisation and maintain the social and
economic rights, protections and entitlements that have been hard fought for in the past.
Instead of reinstating a monocultural Britishness this would necessitate reconfiguring

the imagined community of the nation and the basis for entitlements. It would risk
linking a discussion of how these rights and entitlements have been eroded under the
present and previous governments to one of the very set of issues that masks these
inequalities. State policies of social cohesion, the name for the version of integration
being proposed, are attempting to draw a national boundary around different modes of
belonging and different shapes of diasporic space (Crowley and Hickman 2008
forthcoming).
This current policy direction in Britain as regards immigrants is one fraught with
contradictions: Attempting to return to a policy of integration on the basis of monocultural Britishness not only fails to tackle racism, it also obscures the lack of agreement
over what Britishness means (Cannon 2006: 2). To illustrate this I want to turn to the
work of Tariq Modood, a well-known academic and commentator especially on
Muslims in Britain, who has not rejected multiculturalism, in the way Phillips is
seemingly in danger of doing, but who places his faith in Britishness. Modood (2005)
does not want assimilation, a one-way process, or integration, a two-way process that
works in the same way for all groups, but multiculturalism, defined as where processes
of integration are seen as two-way and as working differently for different groups. He
sees the British, especially the English, as more open to multiculturalism and
international exchange than other Europeans. He advocates reimagining or reforming
our national identity, our Britishness so that everyone can be a part of it without
having to deny or privatise other identities that are important to different Britons. It is
very apparent that when Modood is addressing Britain he is actually considering
England. The only problem for him is when he comes to consider the possibilities of
shared identity; at that point he admits that English is a closed ethnicity. It might be
possible to be Asian-British but never Asian-English.
Where his argument seems to come unstuck, therefore, is in the relationship of
Englishness to Britishness. British has always been an overarching identity designed
to cohere the disparate elements both of the United Kingdom and a far-flung Empire. In
addition it has always been a hierarchical identity the terms Celtic fringe or ethnic
minorities have made this clear in other words openness has been based on
incorporation into a hierarchical system. Modood does not examine that as an ostensibly
plural, civic identity, Britishness masks the hegemonic dominance of Englishness. Or, it
has until recently. Neither does Modood consider the ethnic histories that Britishness
has sought to incorporate for much of the last two centuries. Nor does he reflect on how,
what he refers to as, colour and cultural racism have both been threaded through that
history. In other words, Modood buys the story of cultural homogeneity prior to the
1950s. His ahistorical approach means he describes the importance of religious
identities for Muslims as a new conception of ethno-religious identities (emphasis
added) despite the evidence that, for example, many Irish immigrants in Britain had a
similar relationship to the politico-cultural importance of Catholicism regardless of
whether they practised their religion or not. The interweaving of religion in British
national formation has always meant that religion is a key social division.
It is extremely difficult to disentangle what constitutes Britishness from what defines
Englishness. British identity, especially in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth
century, always contained a strong element of ethnic particularity based on its English
core. The English constructed themselves as the backbone of an inclusive sense of
Protestant nationhood that aimed to assimilate all differences within an overriding

principle of identity: Britishness. Mixing, however, does not necessarily produce

propinquity. In the nineteenth century the imagined world of Britishness was a
hierarchical one differentiated by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class and region.
Despite all being subjects of the Crown this imagined world was one in which an Irish
working class Catholic migrant and a black Jamaican, be s/he slave or freeman, were
positioned differently from each other but also very differently from a white English
Protestant gentleman (Hall 2000). The vestiges of these hierarchies, the previous
meanings accorded to difference, are still legible though unstable beneath newer ones,
creating a multiplicity of ideas, potentially in currency at any one time (Jacobsen 1998).
In the 1990s what 'British' represents came under pressure: within England from
minority ethnic groups and the integrationist project of the European Union; within
Scotland and Wales from demands for devolution and from the evidence that many
people in both countries have become less likely to cite Britishness as a significant
part of their identity; and in Northern Ireland from the entry of Sinn Fin into the
mainstream political debate and the emergence of the peace process. Despite its hybrid
origins modern Englishness does not include an acceptance of internal difference at the
level of cultural belongingness and it is Britishness that has to do this work. However,
the thorough separation of Englishness from Britishness is essential if there is to be a
reformulation of the latter as an identity to which all, including new immigrants, can
belong. This involves addressing the multiple hierarchies that Britishness as a national
identity has masked.
The above analysis suggests that the success of the British at integration was based on
a hierarchical monocultural imagining that masked past and present inequalities. There
is a further means of assessing the success or otherwise of integration policies in Britain
and the value of monocultural imaginings and that is by considering the experiences and
identities of the second generation. Second generations are a crucial barometer not only
of their parents experiences but also of how elastic is the acceptance of those born in
this country. In this context it is interesting that only half of British Muslims
questioned in a poll for Channel 4 in 2006 said they thought of Britain as my country
with nearly a quarter saying they thought of it as their country, and the younger the
respondents the greater the disaffection (Garton Ash, The Guardian 10 August 2006).
This compares with an earlier survey that produced evidence of two-thirds of Asian
respondents saying they felt British and found no contradiction in hyphenated and
multiple identities (Modood et.al 1997). This is not an exact comparison but is certainly
indicative of changes that can occur over relatively short periods of time. A recent
survey of second-generation Irish people in England found that over half would prefer a
mixed or hyphenated label for example, British-Irish with about a quarter
describing themselves as Irish and a slightly smaller proportion selecting British or
English (Walter 2004, Hickman et. al. 2005). This varied pattern of identifications
amongst a population commonly viewed as easily assimilated, due to whiteness and
supposed cultural similarity, not only points to the fallacious basis of such assumptions
but also to the hybrid and multiple identities which are a condition of secondgenerationess (Silverstein 1996; see also Andell 2002 for a discussion in relation to
Italy). In Britain the practice of discussing multi-generational ethnic groups has resulted
in less attention to issues of generation and consequently there is little literature on
second generations in Britain (see also Ahmed et.al. 2000).

The second generation experience a society as insiders (whether they are viewed as that
or not), who have often witnessed the everyday hostilities, humiliations, and
discriminations that their parents endured. This can produce a range of responses
including alienation. For the second generation, having observed and experienced how
British society operates on the inside, it is no wonder that this may for some combine
with a critique of the wars western powers like Britain wage. In this context, as
Bolognani (2007) found, there has been a revival of the myth of return among
Pakistani youth as a form of political transculturalism often prompted by a feeling of
threat in Britain. This revival has occurred in the case of the younger generations,
especially since the events of 9/11 and the war on terror (Bolognani 2007: 73).
Likewise, during the 30 years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland there is evidence of
the second-generation Irish in Britain being radicalised (Hickman et. al. 2005). There
was a very wide spectrum of response towards the situation in Northern Ireland amongst
the second generation - ranging from a keep quiet approach to complete support for
the security forces to a substantial body of opinion that had nationalist, and for many
republican, sympathies. Many second generation Irish have moved to Ireland during the
past decade but with mixed experiences. The point is that allegiances are contingent as
well as hybridised and multiple. As circumstances change different elements of
individual and collective identities may come to be articulated or defended. These
multiple allegiances of second generations are viewed as problematic, in part because
they are taken to belie successful integration and lead to attempts to identify what
might radicalise youth in particular. In this context Britishness is advocated as a
prerequisite for integration even while the evidence of hybridised and hyphenated
identities multiplies.

Discussion and Conclusion

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the moment of multiculturalism in
Ireland and the perils of the monocultural imaginings that characterise it. The tendency,
however, is to perceive Ireland as becoming multicultural due to immigration and this
installs an imbalanced power relation between the monocultural host and immigrants
and over-determines the moment of becoming multicultural. These monocultural
imaginings are implicit not only in the expressions of reactive national identities in
Ireland but in the articulations of the advocates of Irish global modernity. I have argued
that a comparative examination of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s can trace how the
monocultural reimagining of a nation as a white host, at what was similarly
represented as a moment of incipient plurality due to immigration, has underpinned
responses to specific immigrations ever since, even during periods of apparent
acceptance of multiculturalism as official policy. In the current period, therefore, talk of
diversity is predicated not on the acceptance of plurality but on a notion of a host that
is being subject to diversification. Although in Britain Muslim girls can wear their head
scarves (although not the veil) to school, unlike in France, this does not mean that in
Britain there exists a less assimilationist project. It is arguable though that Britishness
can barely do the work anymore of cohering the historic, constituent elements of the
United Kingdom together, let alone deliver either social cohesion or multiculturalism.
An enormous challenge faces Ireland as ten per cent of its population (and rising) has
become foreign born in little over a decade. This is not just an issue of instituting and
managing immigration policies, however important, but it is also an opportunity to

focus on what sort of society Ireland wants to become. There are many voices raised in
favour of a multicultural vision. The point I am making is that unless this vision is
accompanied by a full acknowledgement of Irelands historical multiculturalism it will
be doomed to failure. However well intentioned the advocates of multiculturalism are,
without this recognition an implicit assumption about Ireland as a white, monocultural
host grappling with large numbers of incomers will persist. Instead of envisioning
Ireland as a unique, relatively insulated entity at the western extreme of Europe that
globalisation has now mainstreamed, it is important to see Ireland as a hybrid nation,
that has long been integrated into the global economic system, and is based on a variety
of political and cultural hierarchies and social and economic inequalities. If this is not
confronted, what chance is there that the nation can truly be (re)imagined as
multicultural? Can the shift be made from considering Ireland as a nation that
now includes Others to recognising Ireland as a nation of Others? Perhaps a start could
be made by interrogating the use of the term non-national in Irish discourses about
immigration?
We might ask more generally: is it possible to produce a nation state with policies
capable of acknowledging that integration is multifaceted and multilocated both for new
arrivals and the (very) long term settled? Maybe our attention should be focused on
exploring the dynamics of social integration in localities and communities and
examining how inclusions and exclusions are negotiated at the local level in urban,
suburban and rural contexts. Discourses may appear relatively fixed at the national
level, but on the ground there may be variations. There is often a difference between
the positioning of a social group in national hierarchies and the actual configuration of
experiences, practices, hierarchies and identities of specific members or sub-formations
of that group. While, for instance, the official, national view in Britain today is of
parallel lives and polarising segregation, the actual situation is far more variable. These
are issues that need urgent addressing and I hope very much that this new journal will
be not only a very important arena in which to discuss migration and social
transformations in Ireland, but also a significant new element in wider debates on
integration and multiculturalism.

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in

Endnotes
[1]

This article is a revised and expanded version of the paper presented when I
was asked to launch the journal Translocations: The Irish Migration, Race
and Social Transformation Review in Dublin on 9 November 2006. I would
like to acknowledge conversations with Helen Crowley and Piaras Mac Einri
as very helpful in developing the ideas in this article, responsibility for the
contents, however, remains entirely my own.