Less melting pot than salad bowl
For many immigrants, Ireland has become an increasingly attractive place to live over the past few years. Many Africans and Asians have been established here for more than a decade, while as a part of the EU, Ireland’s doors have been opened to new arrivals from eastern Europe, people from places lacking the means for their citizens to make a successful living. It also helps that Ireland is an English-speaking country bordering the United Kingdom.
In spite of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, skilled labour is still in demand, and immigrants continue to meet the requirements. Indeed, the Irish landscape is constantly changing as different cultures find a place here. So a change in mindset on the part of the Irish State became inevitable. But a big question remains: how do all these cultures co-habit?
In terms of daily living, there’s the option to adapt to the Irish way of life, even in just our conversations: ‘me ma’ or ‘me mam’ replaces ‘my mum’, ‘grand’ replaces ‘fine’, and so on. But beyond this surface assimilation, what about immigrants’ inherent cultures? Are they imported or discarded? The simple answer is neither: they are simply tolerated.
Irish culture today is less a melting pot than it is a salad bowl of cultures and ways of life. This ‘salad bowl’ concept was coined to describe the way cultures in the American society exist without necessarily imbibing beliefs from each other. And that perfectly describes what exists in Ireland.
But it does create a strange feeling when worlds are crossed. When you visit a Chinese restaurant, you get the notion that they live in a different world of their own. A visit to a Nigerian barber or a Polish supermarket again feels like stepping from one country right into another, a feeling entirely apart from the average shop or office on O’Connell Street.
Recently the Minister for Justice slammed the State broadcaster RTÉ for not doing enough to integrate foreign cultures into the mainstream Irish way of life. But is it only RTÉ that is to blame?
Ireland will not enjoy an image as a modern western multicultural society or economy if it keeps to the old belief that anything beyond ‘the norm’ should be kept slightly out of the way. Thinking about this, it’s no wonder why Ireland’s newer ethnic groups aren’t given much encouragement to come out of their shells.
Olajide Jatto is a software engineer and writer based in Dublin.
