Inward migration is forcing us increasingly to take a good hard look at some of our sacred cows, writes Mary Minihan.
I recall once, years ago, asking the shopkeeper near my grandparents' house outside Omagh if he kept The Irish Times. "No, just the normal one," says he, nodding in the direction of a neat stack of The Times. Of London.
In the course of that short exchange - one simple question from me, one courteous answer from him - we had traded a huge amount of information about each other.
Yesterday an annual journalism conference, which alternates between Belfast and Dublin (the latter city's turn this year), looked at the role of the media in portraying different national identities. It would be wrong to say that the mainstream media has ignored the growth of the new communities from other countries.
Presumably the change has been too gradual to satisfy the demands of the new communities from other countries, who have been busily setting-up their own newspapers, radio programmes and websites.
As this was the year we learned that a total of 167 languages are spoken in the Republic, it is hardly surprising that the mainstream media has so far proved unable to accommodate all newcomers - despite significant alterations to content and coverage in an attempt to reflect our evolving society.
But the question of whether or not the media actually has a role in promoting integration is a much more difficult one to answer.
That would be to consider all media outlets together as some amophormous mass, all thinking and acting as one. Different outlets are driven by different agendas, but primarily they remain motivated by plain, old-fashioned news values.
And because good news is so often no news, immigrants frequently figure solely as the victims of racist incidents and sometimes the perpetrators of crimes. Exceptions include the "feelgood" coverage of a Brazilian man's lottery win.
Ivanilda Duarte, a truck driver living in Gort, Co Galway, told reporters he would be returning to Brazil with his wife and their two Irish-born children. There, they would be re-united with their two older children and he would fulfil his dream of establishing a trucking business. What made this story particularly poignant was that it was reported shortly after the company behind the lottery claimed Irish people no longer felt that winning the €1.3 million jackpot would change their lives. The Brazilian man had won €116,406.
In the North there was widespread "positive" reporting of the first mixed community council estate in some 40 years, when the Northern Ireland Housing Executive opened Carran Crescent on the outskirts of Enniskillen. These heartwarming examples also happen to make fine human interest news stories.
There remains some apprehension about the speed with which our society is changing. In this context, how far should the media go in identifying and reflecting the fears and concerns of the indigenous population? While all the worthy opinion pieces in the world will not alter the xenophobic tendencies of some, restricting this debate could be dangerous. Consider the story of the Ukranian woman who had to have both legs amputated when she developed frostbite after losing her job and becoming homeless in Coleraine almost two years ago.
But still they come. In the Republic, and to a lesser extent in the North, economic success has fuelled inward migration in an almost magnetic way. And there's nothing like economics to shatter sacred cows. Remember the glee with which it was reported that, at the height of the BSE crisis, the Rev Ian Paisley proclaimed the Ulster beef from the bovine beasts of the North as "Irish"?
Mary Minihan was the winner of the first Anne Maguire Student Journalism Award. She is press officer for the Progressive Democrats but writes here in a personal capacity. This article was commissioned by Co-operation Ireland and the British Council for the 2006 Anne Maguire Journalism Conference which took place yesterday at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. The theme for this year's conference was New National Identities and the Role of the Media. Further details are available at www.cooperationireland.ie www.britishcouncil.org/ireland www.britishcouncil.org/northernireland