Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Ironies of Irish multiculturalism
A letter I sent to the Irish Times on 24 December 2009
Madam
Fintan O’Toole’s (spot-on as ever) article on the ironies of the Bishops’ multiculturalism (December 22, 2009, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1222/1224261109443.html) has broader ironic implications.
One irony relates to the church’s role in migrant integration. Having lost their key role in education and health service provision, Catholic religious orders have been working with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. While extremely useful, many of the projects initiated by relilgious orders are run by white, Christian, settled Irish people, without giving leadership roles to migrants and other racialised people. This top down, and at time destructive approach means that migrants have little say in how these organisations are
funded and run.
The other, even broader, ironic implication relates to Irish integration policies. On the one hand, the Republic of Ireland claims to have ‘got it right’ in avoiding the pitfalls of both French assimilationism and British
multiculturalism through what it terms ‘interculturalism’ and ‘integration’. However, integration policies, which since the recession have been conspicuous in their absebce, are targeted only at ‘legal’ migrants with refugee status or work visas, leaving other migrants, including asylum seekers, here ‘legally’ to seek refuge, out of the loop.
On the other hand, the state insists on integration ‘on our own terms’. Thus it demands proficiency in English, the state’s second language (while at the same time cutting the number of language support teachers), as a pre-condition to acquiring citizenship. And thus An Garda Siochana refuses to allow Sikh volunteers to don a turban on duty, while not outlawing Catholic symbols, all in the name, the Garda insists, of ‘impartiality’ and ‘cultural diversity’. All of which makes a joke of the mantra of integration as a ‘two way process’, and is a far cry from the republican values of civic equality upheld by O’Toole.
Yours etc,
Ronit Lentin
Support CDPs and Migrant-led organisations
Copy of a letter I sent to the Irish Times:
Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology
TCD
Madam,
The shortsightedness of the government’s plans to subsume community development projects in area partnerships (Letters, 25 November) was eloquently articulated by four community activists on Vincent Browne’s TV3 show on the same day. Cathleen O’Neill of Kilbarrack CDP, Rita Fagan of St Michael’s Family Resource Centre, Bronagh O’Neill of the Canal Equality Campaign and Margaret O’Shea of the Kerry Network for People with Disabilities highlighted the services CDPs provide, often by volunteers, to their communities, and the loss to theses communities of taking the projects away from the people they are serving. The transfer to area partnerships has been decided upon without consultation and it is evident that now more than ever CDPs are both ‘good value’ and essential in providing services such as childcare, after school care, programmes for women and disabled people, not provided by the state and local authorities.
Likewise, migrant-led organisations and networks, whose case has not yet been championed, are also facing drastic funding cuts. Like the CDPs, they also provide much needed services to their constituencies, often on a voluntary basis. These services, including empowerment and advocacy, language training, gender-based programmes, and basic advice on rights and entitlements, are not provided by the state or local authorities. Thus, like the CDPs, migrant-led organisations save the state money while at the same time facilitating the smoother integration of migrants into Irish society and preventing the eruption of banlieu-style disturbances in the future.
The planned cuts and amalgamations are supported by leading philanthropists, whose financial largesse involves the over zealous management of CDPs and migrant organisations, often leading to the decimation of the very sector they purport to support. I call on Minister Eamon O Cuiv and Minister of State John Curran to guarantee the continued funding and autonomy of both CDPs and migrant-led organisations whose contribution is vitally needed now more than ever before.
Yours etc
Ronit Lentin
Cry freedom
Last week, when Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of political science, published an article in The New York Times arguing that boycotting Israel is the only way to make any progress towards justice for Palestine, Israelis and Jews all over the world called for his dismissal. Their excuse for opposing boycott is ‘academic freedom’.
Yet, as philosophy professor in Tel Aviv University Anat Matar reminded Ha’aretz readers, only when well-heeled Israeli academics begin to pay a real price for the continuous occupation of Palestine, will they take genuine steps towards ending the occupation.
Academic freedom is relative. On the one side of the fence we have Gaza’s children beginning the school year in shattered classroom, with no building materials allowed by Israel to rebuild their bombed schools, without school books, notebooks or writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the Israeli embargo – Israel can boycott Gaza’s school, yet no one protests.
In the West Bank hundreds of students are under arrest in Israeli jails, and the ‘separation fence’ (otherwise known as the ‘apartheid wall’) preventing students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and research labs. Conferences abroad are an impossibility – yes, Israel can boycott Palestinian universities and no one protests.
On the other side of the fence Israeli academics guard their freedom of research what the regime wants them to research, appointing former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University prides itself on having 55 of its research projects funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defence; the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defence Department is funding nine other projects. All Israeli universities offer special study programmes for the military. Yes, Israel can conduct military research and no one protests, and only a small number of academics speak against the occupation. And when brave academics like Gordon and Matar call for a boycott, they are accused of opposing academic freedom.
As Obama, Mitchell, Netanyahu and Abbas eventually get together to rekindle the ‘peace process’, let’s spare a thought about freedom. What is the meaning of freedom when you cannot send your child to study in a school building rather than rubble? What is the meaning of freedom when you never know whether you will reach your university lecture on time, due to the interminable checkpoint regime? What is the meaning of freedom if, as a Palestinian Israeli citizen, you can be detained for hours in the airport before you can reach the conference you were invited to give a keynote lecture in abroad - as has happened to a number of my Palestinian colleagues? What is the meaning of freedom if, brave Israeli academics who call for boycotting the occupation regime are met with international calls for dismissal as happened in Gordon’s case? I am an Israeli citizen, and I believe that boycotting Israel is the first step towards freedom.
So what if she forged?
Pamela Izevbekhai with her children
I am writing this before the case has been decided and before we know whether a Nigerian mother who is seeking asylum in Ireland for herself and her daughters is allowed to remain in Ireland.
Much has been said about Pamela Izevbekhai’s case. Her recent admission, on the Marion Finnucane show, that her asylum claim was based on forged documents provided a dramatic turning point not only in her own case, but in the whole complex relations between the Irish state and African, particularly Nigerian, asylum seekers.
The end of (Irish) migration studies?
Translocations - the Irish inter-university ejournal for migration, race and social change - is in danger of closing. In NUI Cork, migration studies is threatened with closure. and what about Ireland’s other migration studies projects?
No one has heard from the Minister of Integration Conor Lenihan for weeks - once his budget was cut by 26%, he stopped making public appearances. Some might say that this is just we well, but the fact remains that the issues of immigration, and integration, and interculturalism, and equality seem off the agenda in the new climate of panicky economic meltdown. Migrants from Eastern Europe, we are being told, are going home in their thousands (a recent report in the Guardian put the figure at 1,200 per week returning to Poland from Britain and Ireland). Asylum applications are the lowest to date. And while deportations continue on the quiet, there is no talk about it. Nor have we heard much talk about language acquisition, education issues, service provision, housing.