The Immigration, Resi-dence and Protection Bill has already passed its second stage at Leinster House, and is now set to become law before the summer. Some of the reactions to date have been somewhat knee-jerk, however, and in a way typical of an immigration sector that has been mobilised around the rights-based approach that sits with the determination of asylum matters, rather than bigger-picture migration.
Ireland has already attained huge benefits from inward migration. The ESRI has estimated that the migrant contribution to our economic success could be as much as 3 per cent in the period since the 10 new states joined the EU in 2004. If anything, that dry economic assessment probably understates the advantages Ireland has derived from migrant effort.
In a real sense, both the price and long-term sustainability of Irish services and employment were at full stretching point in that period before the Baltic, central and eastern European states joined the EU. Even on the domestic front, homeowners were finding it impossible – or at the very least faced long delays – to have simple work done by electricians, plumbers and the like.
When the debate around migration began in Ireland seven or eight years ago, it was dominated by the asylum issue and was posited around the notion of wide-scale abuse of the process, and a perception that migrants were coming to the country merely to claim benefits and were making no real contribution to Irish life. This was followed closely by debates about whether immigrants were displacing Irish jobs.
I think it is fair to state that the period whereby these issues were central to the migration debate is now well and truly over. There has been a remarkable shift in terms of popular opinion and its appreciation that the migration debate requires greater subtlety and a more nuanced, as opposed to a negative, view.
From a policymakers’ perspective, the issue around inward migration to Ireland is about two very simple concepts or ambitions – that of long-term social stability, and the idea of greater labour market productivity.
It is in the interests of the Irish State to develop its labour market further by adding greater value to the goods and services it produces. It also serves to have a strong commitment to long-term social stability as a backdrop before which that huge effort to travel up the value chain occurs.
Hopefully a greater deal of common sense will now come into the picture with regard to the presence of migrants in Ireland and their huge importance, both in terms of the economy and also the continuance of the society itself.
To date it has been my preference to look upon the issues thrown up by inward migration in the above terms, rather than going down the road of exploring issues of identity thrown up by the existence of diversity in Irish life. My own view is that the pursuit of identity politics explains why those countries that explored both multiculturalism and assimilation failed their migrant populations.
In effect, we in Ireland must postpone issues of identity in preference for a continued development of our successful – and hugely globalised – economy and society. To do otherwise would be to threaten the gains we have already made. For these reasons I am impressed, since becoming a minister, at the efforts that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has gone to in his bid to make Irish society, as distinct from our economy, work in better ways.
Over the past few years he has strongly endorsed separate, but related, initiatives around citizenship, community participation and, of course, the faith-based initiative involving people of religion and those of none. These processes have been enhanced by a greater degree of tolerance and mutual recognition on the island of Ireland itself, between the Catholic and Protestant identities.
It is hoped that these separate initiatives will pay off in the long term by giving people a strongly rooted sense of what it means to be part of Irish society, and the civic dispensation that allows people to express their multifaceted and often complex identities.
Ireland has come through a compressed and pretty impressive period of modernisation, affluence and change. Therefore, a major re-think of the Irish identity and what it means to be Irish would probably unsettle rather than consolidate the welcome changes that have already occurred.
Conor Lenihan TD is Minister for Integration and represents the constituency of Dublin South West, which includes Tallaght, Greenhills, Firhouse, Templeogue and Boherna-breena
