McAleese: Ireland has immigrant
opportunity
PRESIDENT Mary McAleese has said she would not be happy with a “great
debate about multiculturalism versus integration” in Ireland.
She said what Irish people should do is make immigrants feel welcome with
an approach which combined “fáilte and curiosity”.
Mrs McAleese was speaking in a brief question and answer session after
delivering the keynote address at the Douglas Hyde conference at St. Nathy’s
College, Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon.
She said immigrants in Ireland should abide by the State’s laws
as Irish emigrants did in host countries abroad, but that the culture
of immigrants to Ireland should be allowed to flourish as well.
The most important thing was to make people feel welcome and allow them
to penetrate Irish culture as they wish.
She said: “We don’t want to build barriers. That is the opposite
of what we want to do.”
In her address, on the theme of Many Streams — One Broad River,
she said Ireland had the “chance to do properly and with pride what
so many other countries failed to do or did with ill-grace, to make good
neighbours of strangers and fully-committed, fully-contributing citizens
of all.”
She said there was “a feeling in Ireland that we are at the start
of something big and, importantly, something good — for ours is
a time when the best-fed, best-educated, most liberal and most liberated
generation of Irish men and women have come of age and are putting their
genius to work on their own soil for the first time.”
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