Listen to thisThe times they are a changin'
Ireland was, for centuries, one of the more traditional
agrarian, poorer, underdeveloped, smaller European countries, but this
has changed completely over the past couple of decades – (we can’t do
much to increase the size of our political borders being an island and
having a relatively small army so we still are a small geographical
state). For more than a century and a half, we experienced constant
emigration and Irish people populated all the continents. The St.
Patrick’s day parades in Montreal, New York, Chicago and Sydney are
often larger than the ones held in Ireland.
When we joined the European Union (EU) in the mid-1980s things started to get better for us and in every respect we became less insular as a people. We now have a booming high-tech sector and the return of thousands of our citizens who could formerly not find work at home. I remember well when I finished High School how many of us genuinely thought we would only meet each other in the Irish bars and clubs on foreign soil. The majority of my class mates did, in fact, emigrate. Now, tens of thousands of migrant workers from the new Europe have come to live amongst us – some by choice, some out of necessity.
The findings of the 2002 census show that there were 273,520 people usually resident in the state on census night who were not classified as Irish nationals. Immigrants in Ireland include a wide range of people who have come here for a variety of purposes – with a work permit, visa or other authorisation; people seeking asylum; people with refugee status; students; and people who are the non-national spouses or partners of Irish citizens.
Same but different
We have a Russian deli in downtown Galway and a Polish bar in Galway. We
have two Brazilian shops in a rural village called Gort. Our own
youthful population have recently been coined as the “expectocracy” (McWilliams, 2005). All of this has, I would argue, radically changed
the Irish Child and Youth Care landscape. My wife, Susan, was managing a
project where a majority of her service users were non-Irish. Indeed, if
we look to the top five countries of origin of new asylum applicants in
one year period we note: Nigeria – 557; Somalia – 88; Romania – 77;
Afghanistan – 57 and Sudan – 32.
This is going to pose all sorts of challenges for us and I will outline just a few of them here. In later CYC-Online columns, I will develop these points in more detail:
There are approximately 3,000 Child and Youth Care students studying for their HETAC/DIT level awards. Many of these students are required to study a language and most of the colleges offer the standard fare of French, German and Spanish. The demographics of the families migrating here clearly show that they speak eastern European languages such as Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish. Our African friends typically speak Nigerian and any number of African dialects. So, what languages should our programs now promote and from where might we locate lecturers with skills and qualifications in these?
It seems to me that all College courses should now offer a module in first year of their studies which might generically be called “Cultural Diversity”. Our Child and Youth Care Workers certainly need to be aware of the different religious and cultural implications of working with specific populations. (Susan will provide an example of this from her practice in next month’s column).
Irish social welfare services should be offered training in Cultural Diversity and people from these minorities should be centrally involved in both the planning and delivery of this. The understanding of the “family” and the “individual” differs radically between our new visitors and, indeed, the Irish and this is complex.
We are going to have to fundamentally (re)examine what it actually means to be Irish in the 21st Century. It is no longer about colour, about religion, about creed. We will have to cast our net much wider than has ever been in the case in our history and many people won’t like where we are travelling as a nation State.
Child and Youth care providers will have to institute new programs which are culturally sensitive to the shared service user profiles that we are starting to see in the field.
These are just some of the challenges that I see ahead of us as we try to maintain best practice standards and show some leadership in the field. A positive landscape of tolerance and understanding needs to be cultivated. Many Child and Youth Care students and, indeed, practitioners, were socialised in rural environments where they would not have had a great deal of sustained exposure to “foreign” nationals, yet we need be at the forefront of advocacy in this new and exciting Ireland.
