WOMEN'S DAY DEBATE:THE GREEN Party has been urged to challenge the "them and us" public attitude that was emerging in the debate on migration in Ireland.
Denise Charlton, chief executive of the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI), told the party’s national conference in Wexford that with the recession, the public debate on migration had “very strongly and very quickly shifted to ‘them and us’, the deserving and the undeserving, those who belong and those who don’t, who is truly Irish and who isn’t”.
Speaking during a debate to mark International Women’s Day tomorrow, Ms Charlton said that in the decade from 1997, Ireland experienced “one of the greatest proportional migrations of modern history. More than 700,000 people moved to Ireland, amongst them perhaps 200,000 Irish who had earlier left.”
At least 420,000 foreign-born people arrived in Ireland and “nobody knows how many of those who came have stayed and will stay now as the country faces a new economic crisis”.
While the numbers of migrants were falling, the percentage of female migrants had increased from 42 per cent to 68 per cent of the total.
The ICI chief executive highlighted the experience by many migrant women of “exploitation, disadvantage and racism”, and said “one of our main concerns at this time is to ensure that there is no increase in racism or xenophobia and no scapegoating of migrants during the recession”.
Recently “a number of Fianna Fáil backbenchers have made ill-informed comments and called for restrictions in our immigration system.
“This implies that there are no restrictions there now. In fact there are already stringent restrictions in place.”
She added that “it also implies that there is no need for nurses, students – worth €8 billion to the exchequer – families’ members. More worryingly, in a response the Government stated it will put restrictions in place to curb migration – again, restrictions that already exist.”
Earlier, Elizabeth Davidson of the Green Party’s equality committee highlighted that 29 per cent of the party’s candidates in the local elections are women and “this falls short of our 40 per cent target”.
Joanna McMinn, outgoing director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, pointed out that for women to be influencing decisions they had to be involved in the political process, and in fact “women’s participation is dropping across all political parties”.
The main reasons given were “time, money and caring issues”.