NI Equality commission.The changing faces of prejudice

Sceala Clann T.D. Location: Wicklow

The NI Equality commission have released a report on their latest equality survey.

Basic summary of the NI Equality commission key findings.
The Changing Faces of Prejudice
Equality Awareness Survey
Irish Community Images

You don’t get to choose your neighbours or in-laws but if you could, who might they be and, more to the point who would be excluded? The Equality Commission has launched new research which shows a notable rise in the north of Ireland of negative views towards a range of people as neighbours, work colleagues and family members.

*Nearly half of people questioned (51%) would mind a little or a lot having a Traveller as a neighbour, ten percentage points more than in 2005.

* More than one in five people (23%) say they would mind a gay, lesbian or bisexual person living next door, compared to 14% three years ago.

* The same number (23%) say they would have the same problem with a migrant worker.

* Almost one-in-six of those surveyed (16%) said they would not want a person with mental ill-health as a neighbour. In comparison, 6% felt the same about those with a physical disability.

* Having a neighbour of a different religion was a difficulty for only 6% of respondents.

These key findings suggest a ....sea change in the society of NI of today from that of very recent memory.
I look forward to reading the responses and views ....especially those members ...from or living in NI.

Our past is a foreign country, we treat immigrants differently now
By Malachi O'Doherty
My father grew up in a white Ireland in which all speech he heard, other than on the wireless, was in the local accent of south-east Donegal and Derry city.

A good plain earthy accent it is, too, with a touch of musicality but without extravagance. When you know only one accent, the outsider's voice sounds like an affectation. I can still not quite believe that people with English Home Counties accent aren't putting them on.

He would have been 27-years-old when voices he had known from the cinema came here and surrounded him. The Yanks in Derry gave him a job. I know nothing of what he actually did for them. I know just that this was a time in his life when his hopes for himself grew.

I wonder if he acquired an American accent for a time back then, the way I did myself as a little boy watching cowboy films. I'd say he shook it off quickly when they all went home after the war.

I suppose if there was a period which would have acquainted his generation with sudden cultural change and an ethnic spread it was the early 1940s. He would have been friendly with boys with Texan drawls, New York Jews and black African Americans. I'm guessing that is why I never heard him use racist words of the kind that still come easily to many.

Black journalists and soldiers in Belfast were called ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nigger’, at least when their backs were turned. Barney never left Ireland in his life, was never on a plane, but never had that reflexive bemusement at the foreigner.

Yet he was naive. He bought my sisters ‘nigger' dolls for Christmas. “The proper word is ‘Negro’,” he would say.

When his friend worked for a time in Germany, Barney explained to me: “It is different out foreign.” You have to take particular care of your tools. The whole world beyond the shore was “out foreign”, a uniformly dangerous place.

It would have been instructive to unpick the concept of ‘foreign' with him. Did it include the Yanks?

The jokes that I learned from boys at school were largely aimed at blacks and Jews. I cannot explain this. None of us knew any. Yet the routine characters were ‘Sambo’ and ‘Lulubelle’.

“You is the second pregnant woman I has left home this week, Lulubelle.”

“But I ain’t pregnant, Sambo.”

“You ain’t home yet, Lulubelle.”

Nothing in the joke itself dictates that the characters be black, other than the names and the fake accent in which it is told.

Would it work with Seamus and Mary?

Perhaps not, for it requires the assumption that he is a bit stupid but highly virile, a stereotype that only half applies to the Irish. Guiseppe and Rosalina? Maybe.

The jokes about Jews all emphasised how stingy they were understood to be.

“How do you know you have Jews living next door?”

I knew the answer to that one when I was 10. Our easy racism had nothing to do with our own experience. At the same time we lived in a divided sectarian society and had no jokes about Protestants. They were too close. We would have to get on with them somehow. Or the wounds were too fresh to be funny. Maybe we only laugh at those we don't have to take seriously.

There is some vicious sectarian humour but it isn't funny. You aren't expected to laugh at it, just to be implicated in its nastiness by agreeing.

If Barney could come back for a day, the thing that would strike him most about Belfast would be the number of foreigners. His son has a cleaning woman from Lithuania whose daughter goes to a Catholic school on Belfast’s Falls Road. You stop a stranger for a directions even in the smaller outlying towns like Lurgan or Tandragee and he'll as likely say, “Sorry, no speak English”.

I can imagine how he would have dealt with that. He would have shouted his question louder, insisting on being understood.

I cannot anticipate what prejudices he would have had, if any.

But it would surely look like the past to him, breaking in on the present. He knew rural Ireland when it was poor.

And he would have wondered if the man selling papers at traffic lights was doing what he would have been doing himself by 1947, if he had followed the Yanks home to a land of promise and opportunity.

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NI Equality commission.The changing faces of prejudice