World history might have taken a very different course if a deportation policy had been in place when the Holy Family fled into Egypt, President McAleese told a seminar on Refuge in Ireland yesterday.
She was speaking at the last in a series of six inter-disciplinary academic seminars in Kimmage Manor, Dublin. The seminars were jointly organised by the KMI Institute of Theology and Cultures and its Development Studies Centre, as part of undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses.
Mrs McAleese said it was appropriate to be discussing the subject of refugees on December 8th, the day on which preparations for Christmas traditionally started. "This year, historically accurate or not, we are celebrating two thousand years since the birth of Christ, that most famous refugee of all," she said. "The entire Judeo-Christian tradition is marked by the experience of exile, of being strangers in a foreign land."
She spoke of the traditional welcome given to visitors in Ireland, but added: "Yet the truth of the matter is that we have found it easy to welcome the stranger because so often he or she did not pose a challenge to our own sense of ourselves, our culture, our social structure, our economy."
Asking why there was hostility now towards refugees, she said: "We have remained largely cocooned from the challenges and opportunities of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society - until now. We have had few problems in accommodating diversity, because there has been relatively little diversity to accommodate."
That has now all changed with our growing prosperity, she said. "Now a changed and rapidly changing Ireland has to deal with the challenges, the crises, the conundrums and the obligations greater prosperity carries in precisely the same bag as its manifest benefits. You can't take one and discard the other."
Paul Cullen, development correspondent of The Irish Times, told the seminar that much of the inaccurate negative reporting on the refugee and asylum issue stemmed from "the journalism of impunity".
"Make mistakes when you're writing about the rich and powerful and you face censure, cutting off your supply of information and even costly libel suits. But misquote or criticise the poor and powerless and you're unlikely to face the same threat," he said.
"On top of this, most editors and established reporters, perhaps because of their age or lack of experience living in other cultures, tend to view the refugee issue as a `them and us' matter. In this respect, they're similar to civil servants and politicians."
Among the conclusions reached by the seminars are that international migration is a fact that cannot be changed or reversed, and that its causes are both political (including war) and economic.
Mr Philip Watt, of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Multiculturalism, stressed that policy should not be based on a view of refugees as a problem. Instead the issue should be part of a wider challenge to the development of a more inclusive and intercultural society in Ireland.
Father Tom Whelan said: "A society which is overly individualistic cannot easily aspire to the values of a Christian society which attempts to place community and `gathering' in first place, and therefore aspires to reach out to the refugee."