MERRIMAN SUMMER SCHOOLTHE EXPERIENCES of Hungarian refugees who went on hunger strike at their quarters in a Co Clare army camp in the 1950s offered more than a metaphor for the contemporary challenge of integrating immigrants, Dr Bryan Fanning of UCD's school of applied social studies said at the Merriman Summer School yesterday.
Dr Fanning, who spoke on the theme of "making sense of 21st century Irish diversity", said following the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the people of Clare received the refugees at Knockalisheen with open arms "but came to reject them in the flesh".
The hunger strike among adults in the camp over conditions and the enforced idleness resulted in it being shut down and most of the refugees moving to Canada and the US.
He said over the last decade Irish society had experienced its greatest transformation since the Famine, when immigrants had been accepted into Irish cities, towns and villages "with a degree of nonchalance at odds with old ingrained habits of making heavy weather of religious differences".
However, for while Ireland had welcomed large numbers of immigrants "there are lessons to be learnt from Knockalisheen".
"Our debates about integration are actually quite simplistic.
"If you neglect groups at the beginning, and do not come to terms with some of the issues, they will continue to fester."
Dr Fanning added that Knockalisheen was subsequently proposed as a place to accommodate all the Travellers in the region.
He said this was an unworkable proposal because it required an unprecedented level of co-operation between local authorities who subsequently pursued "a minimalist policy of maintaining existing sites and, at the same time, sought to evict unsettled Travellers".
"A pattern of 'go, move, shift' had been set by the early 1970s that persisted into the 21st century.
"Assimilation failed because of the unwillingness of the dominant community to accept the presence of Travellers.
"This social distance was relatively new in the 1960s. It has deepened since."