FINTAN O'TOOLE: It is, apparently, my fault that Dublin's maternity hospitals have been struggling to cope with the large numbers of non-national women giving birth here.
In an interview with Gemma O'Doherty in the Irish Independent on Saturday, the distinguished obstetrician and former master of the Rotunda, Peter McKenna, gets to the root of the problem:
"There has been no debate, no acknowledgement of the fact that 10 per cent of children being born here are to non-nationals. No-one has ever even asked how we should be planning for the future. Politicians have known about this situation for a long time but they've been afraid to touch it because they don't want to be seen to be politically incorrect. It's typical of the way the country's run. They're terrified of Fintan O'Toole . . ."
If this is the real reason why those in power have failed to plan for a future which includes at least some level of immigration, it is rather pitiful. Politicians who are so scared of criticism that they prefer to do nothing have no place in public life.
It is, however, simply untrue that I have ever criticised anyone for raising genuine issues, much less accused anyone of racism because they tried to draw attention to the difficulties that are an inevitable part of any sudden social change. In this particular case, Peter McKenna has given vivid and compelling accounts of the pressure the surge of non-national births has placed on the Rotunda's staff. Neither I, nor to my knowledge anyone else, have ever criticised him for doing so.
If, indeed, people trying to cope with some of the problems that arise from immigration are sometimes reluctant to raise the issues in public, it is not just because they are afraid of being, in that lazy cliché, "politically incorrect", it is often because of the opposite fear: that specific problems will be distorted into crude xenophobic propaganda by cynical journalists and politicians.
Peter McKenna does, however, have a point. An alleged fear of being labelled racist does offer a convenient excuse to those in power who have neither the will nor the imagination to develop a coherent public policy approach to a major social change. Our society has shifted, in a very short time, from being a nursery of emigrants to being a magnet for immigrants. This shift may well turn out to be temporary, but its effects will be long-lasting. The immigration of the last six years has created, once and for all, a multicultural society. There is a danger that the majority of decent people trying to cope in a positive way with these changes can feel trapped between two extremes. On the one side there is a small, hard core of racists, xenophobes and, perhaps more dangerous, cynical politicians, who are willing to exploit this minority for their own ends. On the other, there is a tendency to pretend that uniquely among all social changes immigration is not a complex business, with many benefits and some problems.
Clearly, if you run a maternity hospital, there is a problem with large numbers of previously unknown women arriving on your doorstep in the very late stages of pregnancy. If you are running a local school in an area where immigration is concentrated, it is not easy to cope with large numbers of pupils who have trouble with the English language. If you are responsible for public health, you have a duty to deal with the simple fact that people coming from Africa may carry diseases that are relatively new to Ireland, just as Europeans carried their diseases to Africa and America.
If you are a garda, you have to deal with the obvious fact that a small minority of immigrants have criminal tendencies, just as there are a few criminals in the ranks of every group of people, including the Garda itself. If you are responsible for national security, you have to be aware of the reality that a lunatic fringe within the broad church of Islam will try to exploit the asylum system for its own purposes.
One of the many problems with racism, however, is that it pollutes the normal policy discourse that ought to surround any of these issues. Doctors, teachers, police officers, and others involved in these areas often feel trapped. If they try to raise an issue responsibly, they can find what they say twisted by hysterical prejudice. If they stay silent, they are left to cope on their own by an administrative system that is all too happy to pretend that problems don't exist.
Yet there are genuine and urgent issues that we need to debate. To take just one example, the emergence of a multicultural society has huge implications for an education system that has been largely based on religion. Dozens of schools are already trying to cope with those implications every day, but they are getting little help from a genuine national engagement with the issue.
If we can remove racist assumptions from the equation, we can begin that process of engagement. We badly need to hear the experiences, both good and bad, of people who are dealing with this profound transition in their daily lives. And at least those who are willing to speak in good faith can no longer be fobbed off with the feeble excuse that the authorities can't respond because they are terrified of me.