| JOE HORGAN THERE are lots
of them. They have a lot of children. They drink a lot. They somehow manage
to be both lazy and yet take numerous jobs from locals. The suggestion
is that a lot of them aren’t too bright. It is said that where they
have come from is quite backward. They seem to cling together.
Sound familiar? Anybody Irish in Britain ever hear that some of the same
things were being said about them? Anybody remember arriving in England
and getting the impression that most of the locals thought this about
them?
Well Ireland’s immigrants are now finding themselves in that same
position as they come here for the same reasons that so many people left
here in the first place. It has gotten to such a level that the Polish
Ambassador found it necessary to come out and publicly state that Polish
people were not drunkards and were not lazy. They had come to Ireland
to work hard, he assured the country.
His words are unlikely to counteract the lazy bigotry of those who believe
such things but the fact he felt it necessary to say them tells you in
a few short lines an awful lot about this country.
Of course a lot of these people will be employed here in Ireland in the
very same way that so many Irish were employed in Britain. They’ll
be on building sites or laying down motorways. In years to come listen
out for their voices and their stories of what it was like being an immigrant
labourer in Ireland at the turn of this century. We might then hear what
it was like working for those companies that are notorious for underpaying
and yet continue to get lucrative contracts from the Irish state.
We can hear the pattern of this new Ireland every evening on our radios
as the litany of misery that is the modern commuter’s life is repeated
day after day. Places that were once communities with organic names and
lives are reduced to intersections and junctions and turn-offs and toll
booths. The reality of these lives and these places is already apparent
as blossoming new estates, built to ensure easy access to places of employment
so many miles away, are now described as being bereft of any community
facilities whatsoever.
People are waking up in dormitory estates that are nothing but warehouses
for workers and finding that existing as families for just a few hours
at the weekend leaves them feeling lost.
It is a wonder some days that we are not all lost, because the country
often seems in a state of being constantly built. In fact there is something
increasingly dislocating about the whole mania that is the new roads project.
The country is being rebuilt in such a way that whole swathes of land
are now just adjuncts of somewhere else, they are not places in themselves
but parts of a route on the way to another place. Hearing the militant
voices behind this is something quite scary in itself. One of the leaders
of the main employer’s body was speaking recently and his mania
for more roads, more fuel, more workers and more, more, more was like
listening to a fire and brimstone preacher of old. Or Ian Paisley, maybe.
These same people who are always at the forefront of decrying old Ireland
and its backwardness and its poverty and its religion are our new zealots.
They have no doubts at all about the rightness of their position, no uncertainties
at all about their faith. They have mammon on their side.
They also have a new set of cheerleaders on their side as the tabloid
influence in Irish life continues to grow. These are the pro-big business
voices that masquerade as the friends of the ordinary people whilst peddling
the views of the wealthy and powerful. Most recently, The Irish Sun, close
sister to the English one to the extent that they share an awful lot of
the same pages and reports, ran a headline that was almost Orwellian.
The Sun, home of patriotism and the union jack and our troops and hop
off you frogs might like to know that The Irish Sun, identical in every
appearance except for the insertion in the title of the Irish bit, ran
with a front page horrified at the thought of God save the Queen being
played in Croke Park.
So in this new country it’s the Irish that need reassuring building
labourers aren’t drunk or lazy and The Sun that is protector of
the Gael. I wonder what the Polish make of all that.
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