The Archbishop's Beard

Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a speech recently in which he suggested that multiculturalism has failed. He implied that this failure was responsible for the emergence of home-grown terrorism in the UK. He is not an unintelligent man but he comes from a very privileged background and his experience of the diversity of life is sadly limited.

Multiculturalism has been a great success in this country. Compare the relations between different ethnic groups in this country with that in the countries of mainland Europe, such as France where far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who described the Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail of history’, came second in the presidential election in 2002; or Italy where the grand-daughter of Mussolini, who has her own quasi-fascist party, declared in 2007 that all Romanians were criminals.

Of course, there are racial tensions in Britain, and there are people who make a living out of the culture of grievance. But you get people like that in every sphere. However, to make a link between these sorts of tensions and the growth of terrorism is quite unreasonable. Particularly when Mr Cameron makes absolutely no mention of our foreign policy, or the wars in which we have spent so much money and lost so many young men trying to arrange the political affairs of other countries to our liking.

The trouble is that David Cameron doesn’t have the kind of complex set of identities that many people experience in contemporary Britain. Consequently he feels threatened by them. Well I suggest there is nothing to be frightened about.

In my own way I am a product of multiculturalism. I was born in this country to fiercely republican Irish parents. I was brought up as a fervent Catholic who was taught by nuns that the best thing that could happen to England would be that it would be re-converted to Catholicism. In assembly we sang hymns like Faith Of Our Fathers, the final verse of which goes like this:

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free
How sweet would be their children’s fate,
If we, like them, could die for thee

Now if that isn’t an incitement to martyrdom, what is?

Nowadays I see myself as more of a cultural Catholic. I like to think of it like this: if the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury were having a boxing match, I’d be shouting for the Pope. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. Unless the Pope started cheating and pulled the Archbishop’s beard. Now that I would pay to see.

In the same way, if Ireland were playing England at football I would be cheering for Ireland. Why? Because that’s my parents’ culture and I will never turn my back on it. Of course if England were playing France or Italy, it would be a different matter.

Identity is a complex and shifting arena. It is at the heart of so much of our art, literature, music, fashion and cuisine. For centuries this country has been fashioned from multiculturalism. That’s one of the reasons I love it and it’s why I would not want to live anywhere else.

Who Do You Write For?

I’ve just come back from a funeral. All around me were white headed men with Kerry accents, the last stragglers of a generation who came over to the UK from Ireland in the nineteen fifties. They brought precious little with them other than their religion and the ability to work hard. Many of them took jobs in the construction industry and in health care, got married, bought houses and brought up children who spoke with a different accent to their own, children who got office jobs doing things their parents didn’t always completely understand.

You may not know the Kerry accent. It’s very distinctive and, to my ears, very beautiful. It’s close to the West Cork accent, with which my mother spoke. A few years ago I changed my electricity and gas supplier purely because the saleswoman who cold-called had a West Cork accent. Half a dozen other companies had previously tried to get me to switch and I’d given them the brush off, pointing out that any money I saved would be as nothing compared to the inconvenience. But when I picked up the telephone and heard a woman speaking with a voice like my mother’s when she was young, I was putty in her hands.

As I came out of the church this morning I heard one mourner say to his fellow, ‘How’s yourself, Sean?’ The reply came with a shake of the head, ‘Falling away, Michael, falling away.’ And indeed they were. I saw an elderly woman, as fragile as a bird, weeping quietly in a corner, unnoticed. When someone asked her whether she was all right she replied, ‘My heart is broken.’ When you are young you don’t think of old people as having breakable hearts. But human hearts retain the capacity to break all the way to the grave.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that many people there. I only went for my mother, because if she had been still alive she would have gone. And as I sit at home this afternoon listening to a mournful string quartet and confronting the blank computer screen before me, I realise that it is for her, too, that I write, even though she is no longer around to be impressed.

My Parents Were Immigrants

There is a lot of fuss in the UK about immigrants at the moment. This is because (a) we are in a recession and people are looking for a handy scapegoat and (b) there is a general election coming up and it’s a useful lever for manipulating public opinion.

The general feeling seems to be that there are too many immigrants in Britain and the government needs to place more restrictions on them. In this one-sided debate very little mention is made of the fact that our public services are being held together by immigrants, or that immigrants are doing many of the jobs that indigenous British people don’t want to do, like working in the food-processing industry.

My parents were immigrants. They came to Britain because there was no work in their own country. They were not warmly received. My mother told me that when she went looking for accommodation she repeatedly came across signs that read, ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.’

As the child of immigrants I was always conscious of how my parents saw a different reality to other people. The world around them was less real than it was for me. Beneath the thin and shabby world in which they earned their money, glittered the more substantial geography of Home, just out of reach.

I grew up listening to sentimental songs about people leaving home, dreaming of home, returning home. But for me there was no such thing as home. My parents’ country wasn’t home but neither was England. Home was something I had to carve for myself out of my imagination. It’s a project I’m still working on.

Whenever the voices of those who feel with complete certainty that this is their country begin to be raised in righteous indignation, I always think of my parents, keeping their heads down, working hard. My father, whose name was Jack, putting up with being called Paddy by everyone he worked with. My mother cleaning the altar in her local church, taking her troubles to God.