It’s all part of a changing Ireland, long a homogeneous place where the only foreign residents tended to be proprietors of Italian cafes (every town had one). In summer Dublin was packed with students from Spain who came in droves to learn English but hung out instead in large groups chattering in Spanish. Ireland was virtually an all-white country when I was a child, half a century ago. The first person of color I ever saw was a Pakistani door-to-door salesman selling ties and underwear from a suitcase. When Muhammad Ali came to Dublin in 1972 to fight Al (Blue) Lewis, he looked around the welcoming crowd and asked, “Where are all my soul sisters?” It was left to Michael Keane of the Irish Press to inform him that the only black people in the Irish capital were foreign medical students at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Today, Dublin boasts a “Little Africa” crowded with thousands of refugees from Nigeria and other African countries. Many towns have small populations of asylum-seekers from Romania to Rwanda. About 500 Brazilians have settled in the remote western town of Ballaghaderreen, working in the poultry industry; the County Mayo radio station broadcasts to them in Portuguese. Russian and Romanian news sheets publish in Dublin, and the Chinese have their own newspaper called Shining Emerald Isle. Thanks to the roaring “Celtic Tiger” economy, Ireland is now a place of immigration rather than emigration. How wonderful that Ireland can return the favor, after centuries when the huddled Irish masses went abroad seeking a better life.
It’s not easy for the new immigrants, of course. A Chinese man was recently beaten to death by hoodlums one night on a Dublin street. This summer I saw a bunch of teenagers laughing as they splashed soda over two Chinese students in the city center. Seamus Martin, a friend at The Irish Times, tells of walking along one cold day last winter wearing a Russian shapka. “Go back to Russia,” some drunk shouted. Pregnant asylum-seekers sometimes attract hostile stares from people who think they are trying to circumvent immigration laws and get European Union passports by having a child in Ireland.
There are also many heartwarming stories. Paul McGrath, a black youth whose mother was Irish, recalls having to fight for his rights in the Dublin orphanage where he grew up. He went on to become a much-loved star on the Irish national football team. (I watched him play–brilliantly when Ireland beat Italy in New York in 1994, and joined in the triumphal chant of “Ooo! Ah! Paul McGrath!”) And this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin was led by 20-year-old pop star Samantha Mumba, daughter of a Zambian refugee, who speaks English with a north Dublin accent and sings like an angel.
Ireland is still a long way from the multiculturalism of New York, where I now live, but it’s changing fast. After my American friends and I left that pub, we were driving through the heart of rural Ireland when we spotted a young man selling blackberries from a roadside stall. “Where are you from?” I asked conversationally, meaning which Irish county. “Lithuania,” he replied.
