DukeEngage participant Eugenie Dubin explains how her time in multicultural Dublin put her at odds with preconceptions about places new to immigration
After being in Dublin for several weeks with the other participants in the DukeEngage programme, I started to really contemplate what we saw, did, heard and spoke of during our stay.
My first realisation was general. I’d come to believe that people often go through life without thinking; that they never wondering about the people around them and always accept the events that occur around them as just banalities.
My time in Dublin put me at odds with this nonchalance. As a group, we have engaged ourselves in looking at life through an analytical lens, tackling migration and integration in Ireland. My own interpretation has been shaped by my experience of a new city in a small country.
Walking around the streets of Dublin, I saw a civic-minded, entrepreneurial culture radiating opportunity. There are countless independent eateries and shops, produce vendors advertising their goods, hopeful musicians playing on Grafton Street, charity shops supporting Enable Ireland and Oxfam, young adults canvassing for Amnesty International, and tourists adding volume to the crowded streets.
It’s in this environment that we discussed migration with Irish citizens and foreign nationals, and had the opportunity to work with organisations that support migrants’ rights, facilitate communication and promote interculturalism.
These conversations have sometimes revealed attitudes of indifference or resentment toward migrants, particularly economic migrants. For example, an Englishman living and working in Ireland who spoke to a colleague of mine attributed resentment toward immigrants to competition for jobs. It was his opinion that immigration in Ireland was not a positive phenomenon.
The other attitude that we commonly encountered is more nonchalant. A Moroccan waiter said that there are so many Irish people moving elsewhere for work that they have no place to say anything about migrants coming in – an attitude echoed by an Irishman we met, too.
These responses have raised a host of questions, and made me believe more strongly in the work we were doing this summer. And that brings me to my second realisation. Although we encountered some stories of hatred and racist attitudes, there is much support for intercultural dialogue and migrants’ rights. What’s more, in speaking with two people from a mosque in Dublin, we heard accounts of how some Muslims are coming to feel at home in Ireland.
It seems to me that, taking into account economic issues as well as the recentness of immigration into Ireland, the existence of Dublin City Council’s Office for Integration and organisations such as Educate Together and the New Communities Partnership means that the Irish Government, native Irish and naturalized citizens are going to “get it right”. I imagine this resulting, at least, in a diverse school system and an attitude of welcomeness and interest rather than indifference.
In comparison to the United States, I think of Ireland in terms of its scale, its accessibility and its style of civic engagement. It is not everywhere that you will have the chance to meet the equivalent of the Lord Mayor of Dublin or the President of Ireland (as Neal, one of my fellow students did) and witness an anti-abortion protest within the same month. I may be naïve, coming to Ireland from a country as big as the US, but I see a young country of roughly four and a half million people where exposure and education about different cultures is increasing. To me, change seems possible.
Eugenie Dubin is a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in Ireland as part of the DukeEngage programme.
