Ireland’s “dash to diversity”
The battle over the “IBC’s” — Irish-born children — stems from a decade of head-turning change that has brought this island of red-haired Marys and blue-eyed Seans the demographic version of an extreme makeover.
For centuries, Ireland was a racially homogenous land of emigrants. Now it is a multicultural nation of immigrants, whose share of the population, 11 percent, is nearly as high as that in the United States.
Years of Irish prosperity* have drawn Polish plumbers, Lithuanian nannies, Latvian farm workers, Filipino nurses, Chinese traders, and sub-Saharan asylum seekers. Portlaoise, a town south of Dublin, has the country’s first African-born mayor. The Synge Street School, where George Dimbo says his Hail Marys beneath a plaster Virgin, is walking distance from the city’s first mosque and rents classroom space to two Chinese academies.
As recently as the 1980s, young Irish were fleeing unemployment in droves, many to work illegally in the United States. By the late 1990s, an economic boom called the Celtic Tiger was luring them home, along with droves of foreign construction workers, farm hands, waitresses and nannies. A wave of asylum seekers joined them, many from Africa.
Some had escaped harrowing wars or genital mutilation. But officials grew skeptical of their claims as their numbers surged to about 12,000 in 2002 from a trickle a decade before.
Ireland not only offered citizenship to children born upon arrival; until 2003 it also allowed their illegal-immigrant parents to stay, a shortcut many asylum seekers used to win residency. Word got out: with a visa to Britain, a pregnant woman could reach Northern Ireland, take a cab across the border, and gain residency by giving birth.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Chances are the business leaders of the Celtic Tiger have worked around the clock to ensure cheap labor. Ireland has always been a caucasian country and we believe it should remain as such, just as Japan or China ought to remain Oriental. Additionally, according to message boards and correspondence, Eastern Europeans who migrate to Ireland — thanks in large part to the ravages of Bolshevik communisn– are at least more inclined to go back home after an extended stay.