Not ready for

The makeup of the population living on the island of Ireland will change rapidly over the next 25 years. By 2030 about 1.5 million people in Ireland will be foreign-born. This new population is being ignored by media and advertisers. Is this not a missed opportunity, asks Conor Brady

Smart news media executives and planners will have sent for full-text copies of a paper delivered earlier this month by Aidan Punch, Head of Census at the Central Statistics Office, to the annual conference of CORI, the Conference of Religious in Ireland.

Because Aidan Punch set out a picture of an Ireland that will be with us (well, some of us!) in 25 years time and which will be profoundly different from anything we have experienced heretofore. It will be an Ireland in which news media will be faced with huge challenges but also presented with wonderful opportunities. I find myself wondering if they are in any way attuned to what lies ahead – either negatively or positively.

By 2030, according to Punch, the State will have a population of about 5.5 million. Add another 1.5 million in Northern Ireland and one is getting on for a population on the island broadly comparable with pre-famine demographics. It will still leave us as one of the more sparsely-populated states of western Europe. But it will be a crowded island by comparison with what we have experienced so far in our lifetime.

About 1.5 million of the people in this State will be foreign-born. There will be more than two million households. Seventy five per cent of the population will live in urban areas. There will be more than half a million one-person households and half of these will be persons of 55 years or over.

In this paper, Punch did not expand on where the huge population growth will be. But we believe, from previous analyses, that it will be in the greater Dublin area and in the main regional towns. We know that the farming population will drop, that the smaller towns and villages will become effectively dormitory suburbs of the larger towns. We will be a land of "hubs" and "gateways" as described in the National Spatial Strategy.

The logistical and infrastructural implications of this are significant. But much more far-reaching, in my view, will be the cultural and social effects. The very notion of what it means to be Irish will have to be redefined. To be "Irish" may just as easily mean that one's people come from Cracow as from Cork, from Beijing as from Ballydehob, from Lagos as from Laois. One's skin may be black or yellow or sallow as much as Celtic pink. And one's religion may be Muslim or Buddhist as much as Christian.

Some organisations and institutions are starting to gear up for these approaching realities. Many schools are adapting their curricula and their facilities to cope with a new multi-ethnic intake. An Garda Síochána has taken away the barriers to recruitment that effectively meant immigrants need not apply. But what of the media?

I see little enough sign of adaptation or preparation. One would have thought that by now the newspapers would be running news and comment columns in Polish and other languages. Some newspapers make a commitment to publishing a certain amount of material in Irish. But there may be as many people speaking Polish as Irish on the island on any given day now.

One would have thought that minority-ethnic programming would by now be a regular element in the main broadcasting channels, both radio and TV. But if there are dedicated slots they are scarcely highlighted. One would have thought that the local newspapers in some of the towns that now host large immigrant populations would carry sections in their native languages. If there was never an editorial benefit in this there would be an advertising/commercial dimension to it. Perhaps there are some that I do not know of. One of the few exceptions to the rule has been the Portadown newspapers of the Alpha group, which regularly publish material in the Portuguese language, catering from more then 1,000 Portuguese families that are new settled in that area of Northern Ireland.

I am not conscious of any positive efforts by the main national media to incorporate a cadre of ethnic minority writers among their editorial staff. I do not see Polish or Nigerian or Romanian by-lines in the Dublin or Cork-based daily newspapers. I do not see immigrant journalists or presenters on the TV channels. The argument will be made, of course, that the vast majority of immigrants have different skills to those required for media work. I am old enough to remember the same arguments being made to defend and explain the absence of Africans, Asians and Carribbeans in the British media, in the British police services and in the Westminster parliament.

Perhaps steps are being taken that I am not aware of. In which case, I will stand happily corrected. I can only describe the situation that I see before me when I open my newspapers or turn on my television or radio, almost a decade after we first started receiving ethnic-minority workers into our midst.

The loss of opportunity in all of this must be enormous. There are readers to be gained and viewers/listeners to be wooed. There are issues to be explored and fresh perspectives and attitudes to be tapped. Put it in advertising language – there are consumers to be won over.

But most of them, right now, are not at the top of the agenda as far as the advertisers are concerned. They are relatively poor, working in menial jobs and not great spenders. Neither the advertising industry nor news media managers – for the most part – have either the patience or the forward vision to realise that, in a few short years, these hardworking, industrious and ambitious people will be economically secure.

The late Jack Young, who ran Young Advertising in Dublin (long gone), was fond of saying that the most conservative people on earth were in advertising and that the second most conservative people were in journalism. I often think how right he was.

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the UCD Graduate Business School where he lectures in modern media