EOGHAN HARRIS,
LAST Monday, as the Roma story caused increasing concern, I was aware that if my reactions were confided to the internet some anorak would soon quote Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.”
Mike Godwin’s lighthearted law is often invoked seriously by those who want to divert discussion away from the Holocaust. But that simply makes no sense. The Holocaust is the moral touchstone of our time, to which all discussion about race must return.
Certainly there was no avoiding it last week as I watched Alan Shatter, himself a Jew, agonise over the gardai taking their child from a Roma family. Hovering in the historical background was the spectre of what Roma call the Porajmos, the Devouring, when the Nazis sterilised, shot or gassed some two million gypsies.
The Devouring was at the end of a long chain of exclusion. The nomadic migrant Roma or Sinti tribes from Northern India, who collectively call themselves gypsies, were not Christians and had their own language and customs. In Europe, from the start, they aroused the atavistic feelings we call racism.
But when it comes to racism we in Ireland have nothing to relax about. Shane Phelan in the Irish Independent last week reported findings by Dr Patricia Kennedy of the School of Applied Social Science in UCD. Her cold conclusion: “There seems to be no place free of racism, public or private.”
Among those surveyed, a worrying six in 10 had either suffered or witnessed racist acts. Many incidents took place in garda stations, schools, hospitals and social welfare offices. But anyone who takes a taxi in Ireland will soon come across attitudes which confirm the following statements.
“You feel it every day. In the bus no one sits next to you if you are black. They stare at you. If you are black and you ask directions or information they just pass you. In the the church, when you should greet each other, you give your hand and they don’t take it.”
Alas, there is nothing new about exclusionary prejudice in Ireland. It is first cousin to the exclusionary class prejudice, which was common in Irish churches in pre-famine times. Fr Michael Collins of Skibbereen told a Poor Law Commission in the 1830s that “a certain description of the poor” never went inside the church. If they did the strong farmers would hunt them out of it.
But a word of warning. Any ham-fisted campaign against racism will cause the same counter-reaction from a confused majority that in France has led to the meteoric rise of Marie Le Pen. The root of that resentment is not so much racism as a rejection of multi-culturalism based on the perceived refusal of immigrants, particularly Muslims or Roma, to integrate with the host society.
Many people who are not racists believe multiculturalism makes no sense in a modern society. My late friend Patricia Redlich, a progressive liberal, said that to the settled community it seemed that Traveller culture far too often meant women and children suffering from “the culture of the iron bar and the barring order”.
Racism will not retreat before a wagging forefinger. What we need is a twopronged attack. First, we must tap into the radical reflexes and common decency of most Irish people. Second, we must decide between the multicultural experiment which is breaking down in Europe and full integration, as favoured by the USA.
The choice between multiculturalism and integration is not new. At bottom it is a clash between the values of national, ethnic or religious cultures and those of Western civilisation. And I recall reading the 19th-Century diary of an Irish officer in the British colonial service in India who came face to face with what that clash meant in practice.
The Irish officer met an Indian mob carrying a drugged young widow to be burned on her dead husband's funeral pyre in the old Indian cultural custom of “suttee”. What was he to do? Respect local culture in accordance with the laizzez faire “leave the wogs at it” instructions of his superiors or draw his revolver in the name of Western values and save the girl's life?
There was no perfect answer to his dilemma. At some cost to his career he decided that Western civilisation had a higher claim on his conscience than local culture and he drew his revolver. We are faced with the same hard choices.
*** Irish politicians must lead the struggle against racism. But last Monday too, RTE’s documentary Looking After No 1 reminded us how vulnerable TDs are to local pressures — and how slowly things change. Following a few colourful local TDs around was a staple of RTE current affairs in the 1960s. Yet the issues still seemed familiar.
Back in the 1960s, most Irish lefties and liberals had no time for localist politics holding back national progress. Asked whether a TD’s duty was to his local constituents or the larger society, we found ourselves, for once, in agreement with the great conservative statesman Edmund Burke.
In his famous rebuke to the Electors of Bristol in 1784, Burke loftily informed his constituents that his first duty was to the general polity, “not local purposes, local prejudices”. But Burke’s great biographer, Conor Cruise O’Brien, sardonically noted his constituents thought his main purpose, as Minster for Posts and Telegraphs, was not Northern Ireland but to get them a phone.
So how have things changed since 1963 when Professor Basil Chubb deplored the fact that TDs saw their role as “going around persecuting civil servants” and the Irish Times never lacked for letters deploring what was generally described as “clientilism”?
Not much, judging by the diligence with which the five deputies in Looking After No 1 dealt with complaints from their constituents. Here let me say with sincerity that these five TDs earn every penny they make. Listening to people’s problems is hard work.
That said, Willie O’Dea was wasting his time when he told us he could have made more money in law or accountancy. Mentally we chorused: “Go away and do it so.” This recession rules out even the most rational pleadings.
One of the disadvantages of the documentary was that it depended for its effect on colourful characters. So we got no serious challenge to conventional wisdoms. But studies show that the public and TDs are both wrong to believe that clientilism is what gets politicians elected.
The most interesting study is Dr Lee Komito’s Irish Clientilism, A Reappraisal. After anthropological field work in both Dublin and rural constituencies, Komito concluded that there was no true clientilism in Ireland in the sense of constituents permanently dependent on some powerful personage.
What we have instead is “brokerage”, the peddling of influence, even if that influence is more apparent than real. By holding clinics, writing letters, making phone calls, politicians created a reputation for themselves. “But there was no hard evidence that gratitude extended to giving them a vote on election day.”
Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Komito did not believe that brokerage would disappear “as the country modernises or as its citizens become educated”. In an increasingly complex society, constituents value any conduit to a faceless bureaucracy.
But you don’t have to tell Willie O’Dea that.