Irish with a difference

Is Ireland a multicultural society? No. I am Irish, my wife is Irish and my daughter is Irish. Ordinarily, such a statement would not be a big deal. By "ordinarily", I mean if I were from Galway, Roscommon or Cork, in the same way that my wife is from Mayo. But I am from the Yoruba land of western Nigeria. Therefore, many people here don't regard me as being really Irish. Nor, for that matter, do many of these people regard my mixed-race daughter to be as equally Irish as other children born on the same day in Dublin's Holles Street hospital. It was the birth of my daughter on the evening of 18 September 2003 that made me begin to think seriously about Irish identity. Is my daughter really Irish? I know I am Irish but not really Irish, but what about her? Will she ever understand why she is Irish and, at same time, not regarded as really Irish? What is it that makes one really Irish? Is it the colour of one's skin, the passport one holds, the language one speaks or the birth places of one's parents? Although the June 2004 referendum shed some light on what Irish people think about their citizenship and nationality, it left a lot of questions unanswered. What, for instance, are the rights of the young Irish citizens who were recently deported with their mothers to Nigeria? These children are technically "aliens" in Nigeria. They belong here and it is, in my view, unconstitutional to deport them. The "sins" of the parents are being visited on the children. The only thing that differentiates them from other young Irish citizens is the colour of their skin.

If Ireland is to become a multicultural society, we will need to debate what it means to be Irish, because some of us, the new Irish, would really like to know. In February 2000, Channel Four broadcast a three-part documentary series, White Tribe. The author and presenter was Darcus Howe, a Trinidadian journalist and political commentator, who, for 40 days and 40 nights, travelled the length and breadth of England trying to establish what it means to be English. He concluded that the sun has set on the empire."Old England", he announced, "is dead". "The stiff upper lip and the early nights, the bland food, the bad skin, the 'please' and 'thank you' that I met when I first arrived in England at the age of 17 have been replaced by Big Mac, line-dancing, French wine, German cars and Italian coffee." One can imagine a similar programme declaring that old Ireland is dead. In other words, that the Ireland of John Hinde postcards, habitual tardiness ("Irish time") and disarming friendliness has passed away. But what has replaced it? Have we even begun to think about an Irishness that accommodates people of colour – not just the occasional doctor, football player or rock-star, but taxi drivers and postmen, secretaries and shop assistants? According to my people, a corpse that has been buried for three months is no longer a stranger in the graveyard. That proverb does not work in Ireland; irrespective of your citizenship, if you are a person of colour you will be a stranger in the graveyard; you will never belong no matter how hard you try. So it is more like the palm grove tree – it may dwell in the river but that does not make it a crocodile. You may have lived here for donkey's years, you may even be fluent in the Irish language, you may be an Irish citizen, but if you don't look it you can't be it. Ironically, then, Wellington's response to being described as Irish – "Being born in a stable does not make one a horse" – was prescient.

Theatre illuminates the working of the ideology of race in contemporary Ireland. To date, more than seven productions have addressed the issue of asylum seekers and their plight in Ireland. These productions were very similar. They all had one or two non-Irish characters, usually black people, who were either asylum-seekers trying to escape deportation or refugees trying to justify their presence here. In an article in the Irish Review, Spring 2005, Jason King, a lecturer in contemporary theatre at NUI Maynooth, remarked that the Irish theatre, more than any literary or performing art form, "has proven highly receptive to the experiences of immigrants in Ireland, and provided an impetus for expressions of intercultural contact between them and the collective self image of the Irish emigrant that is enshrined in historical memory." But if Irish theatre has highlighted the plight of asylum seekers, it has continued to perpetuate racial stereotypes, specifically the idea that all Africans living in Ireland are asylum seekers or refugees. Attitudes need to change. Until the theatre starts sending out the message that you can be black and Irish, all of us who are not white will always be regarded as JJCs (Johnny Just Come). No theatre production with black characters is simply art for art's sake; it is a commentary on the ongoing discourse of diversity in Ireland. That holds true for plays sourced outside Ireland which explore the issue of race. Some of these productions, if not handled carefully, can easily perpetuate racism by reinforcing stereotypes about black people. I look forward to seeing the presentation of a black man on an Irish stage as simply a man, without undue emphasis on the colour of his skin. As Bertolt Brecht, the German dramatist, wrote: "Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it".