The Chinese New Year is upon us again. This is the key event in the Chinese calendar and promotes the culture of this huge country all over the world. Like our own St Patrick’s Day celebrations both here at home and all over the world, the Chinese New Year also underlines China’s vast diaspora and the sense of connection that exists between migrants everywhere and their home country.
The Chinese community in Ireland has already made an enormous impact over the last few decades. In cuisine alone the Chinese have brought affordable dining both to the restaurant trade but also through home delivery to virtually every home in urban and suburban Ireland.
The 2006 Census shows a mere 16,533 Chinese people living in Ireland. Of course every observer knows this figure is far from the statistical reality. In effect, the Chinese numbers are way down on the real numbers present here in Ireland.
At a lunch with the Chinese Ambassador in Dublin, I had the good fortune to meet with many new and long standing members of the community. When I asked the ambassador what he thought of our official figures regarding his own citizens, his face turned from a smile to a broad laugh.
The Embassy, he said, reckons there are at least 100,000 Chinese people here. This disparity between the figures and the reality on the ground underlines the reluctance a great many different ethnic immigrant groups have in terms of physically recording their presence in a new, strange country.
This reluctance is not just a feature of Chinese migrants, but also includes those from elsewhere within the European Union. It should not surprise us, since similar attitudes were also a feature of Irish migrants to London in the 1980s, as I remember it from my own emigrant experience there.
Yet for integration to occur in the long term, there has to be a profound shift in the thinking of migrants and a lessening of this suspicion on the part of migrants towards officialdom of every kind here in Ireland. This means that service providers, both public and private, are going to have to put more effort into both targeting their messages and advertising at the migrants, viewing them as a unique opportunity for the country to continue to succeed.
The danger is, of course, that by remaining, for all intents and purposes, invisible to the wider Irish society, migrants can become alienated and isolated from the mainstream of Irish life. This would be a real tragedy and a source of social instability well into the future. However, it is not just the migrants that have to change their thinking towards a more conscious decision to integrate. The Irish population must also make greater efforts to embrace migrants and see them as people, not strangers in our midst.
At the launch of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, President Mary McAleese put much stress on the very positive contents of the recent Euro Barometer polls, which indicated that a good degree of positive integration had already happened.
In fact, the poll results are extremely positive, and point to a greater increase in actual human contact between the indigenous population and migrants than in many other European countries. This is a huge plus for the future.
Already, for example, we are hearing positive news from the country’s school gates, where families are beginning to mix through participation in education. The local authorities and partnership boards can bring this process a long way further.
In many ways the progress of this below-the-radar integration will define how well Ireland succeeds in adjusting itself to the new diversity that will continue to play such an important part in Irish life. In a sense, on both sides of the equation, it requires people, both migrant and non-migrant, to have a strong curiosity about others and an ability to make the opening move.
This week saw the first pictures in the national press of two migrants becoming members of the Irish Navy. This was a positive affirmation of how quickly things are progressing. It would be wonderful to see greater migrant recruitment into the public services generally.
Conor Lenihan TD is Minister for Integration and represents the constituency of Dublin South West, which includes Tallaght, Greenhills, Firhouse, Temple-ogue and Boherna-breena
