Migration must be a poll issue

Some of the most important people in this election campaign will not be able to vote because they are not Irish citizens. Many of them, indeed, have yet to set foot in Ireland. They are the migrants who already make up a tenth of the Irish population and the estimated 150,000 to 300,000 who will arrive over the next decade.

In 2002, there was a broad agreement, respected by all but the most craven of candidates, not to make immigration an election issue. The reasons were not entirely flattering: we could not trust ourselves to have a mature discussion on the issue without polluting the election with racism, xenophobia and misinformation. But this time migration has to be an election issue.

We have to talk about it because it is one of the big forces shaping contemporary Ireland. Its implications are profound and the way we handle it over the next five years will have a heavy bearing on the kind of society we become. The stakes are extremely high: experience in other European countries suggests that if you make a mess of the integration of migrants into society you do not get a second chance. Patterns of division are created and reinforced by prejudice on the one side and by resentment on the other. We know what those kinds of divisions look like because we have lived with them on this island for a very long time. What an ugly irony it would be if we begin to deal with the legacy of sectarianism just as we replace it with a new set of politically-generated animosities.

With migration, as with so much else, the stress is created by the failure of public provision to keep up with the pace of change. Look, for example, at the issue of primary school places in the burgeoning communities of west Dublin. This is a classic example of misgovernment, in which massive housing developments have been sanctioned, making a few developers very rich indeed, while the basic needs of the people who live in them have been neglected. As the kids born in these houses reach the age of four or five, their parents discover that there are no schools for them to go to. And, in this desperate situation, a train of thought is set in motion: all of these migrants have moved in, their children are taking places in schools, and my kid could have one of those places if they weren't here. A conflict is established in communities which have hitherto coped very decently with the changes around them.

And what do our biggest political parties do? They look for solutions based on division. In west Dublin, as Emma O'Kelly reported on Morning Ireland last week, the leading Fine Gael candidate, Leo Vardaker, is suggesting that since two of the local primary schools are Catholic, they should "give children who come from the Catholic faith an advantage in getting into the Catholic school". Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan hedged his bets by placing the responsibility on the schools' boards of management, but then agreed that they might indeed "have to adopt that policy". What is unstated but perfectly understood is that demanding Catholic baptismal certificates would quietly winnow out many of the children from immigrant families. And, since our laws permit schools to discriminate on the basis of religion, such a policy would be a perfectly lawful way of creating a rough ethnic division.

This is what is happening on the ground and it typifies a larger truth. The vast majority of Irish people have adapted very well to the challenge of living in a much more diverse society. They have shown that they are not racist or xenophobic. But political failure followed by political opportunism is perfectly capable of making them so. If it does, we have a disaster in the making.

We know that over the last 15 years migration has been a hugely positive force in the Irish economy. It increased both the overall size of the economy and average living standards. But if migration is badly managed so that migrants suffer social exclusion and economic exploitation, these positive impacts can quickly turn negative. The National Economic and Social Council has warned that "migration is unlikely to contribute to Ireland's economic and social strategy if it is driven by demand for labour at low levels of wages and conditions, or if migrants are confined to low-skilled, traded sectors that are highly cost-sensitive. These are among the conditions in which migration is likely to actually lower GNP per head in Ireland and widen inequality in incomes". The economic and social ghettoisation of migrants is not just a moral and civic problem, it's an economic problem too. One ESRI study has estimated, for example, that if immigrants were in jobs which fully utilised their educational abilities, immigration would have increased Irish GNP by 3.3 per cent in the five years to 2003, rather than by the actual 2.6 per cent.

Anyone who talks about the next five years and does not talk about migration is ignoring one of the things which will determine whether Ireland becomes a good or a bad place in which to live. And if we cannot trust ourselves to talk about this issue, we sure as hell cannot trust ourselves to deal with it.