IT’S BY NO means a given that Jeremy Clarkson will be sacked by the BBC even if he is found – as is alleged – to have punched and racially abused producer Oisin Tymon. There is even less of a chance that he will be charged with racially aggravated assault. Where Clarkson fans have dismissed his language as “banter”, Irish people in particular will shudder at his choice of words.
They will also know that the fact that Clarkson has previous form for using the N word and other racist language against other minorities is no guarantee that the charge of racism will stick. Astonishingly, the BBC has already ruled this week that the Top Gear frontman’s use of the word “pikey” was not racist, a finding vehemently contested by the Traveller Movement.
Lessons from the British experience of tackling hate crime
Britain today still exhibits a significant gap in understanding between minority experiences of racism and the rest of society’s acceptance of its full impact and seriousness. Nevertheless, it is to the lessons from the British experience of tackling hate crime that Irish and other European reformers are looking. In spite of its shortcomings, and there are many, the British have a criminal justice system that is among those better equipped than our own to give justice to minorities with some degree of equanimity.
To what can we attribute this relative progressiveness? The Clarkson and other experiences illustrate well the fact that institutions do not spontaneously dispense racial justice in a fit of post-colonial, anti-racist generosity. The degree to which Britain is a racially just society owes everything to the fact that black, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Irish, Traveller and other communities fought for, and continue to fight for, recognition in law of their identities and experiences.
A gap in understanding about racism in Ireland
In Ireland, the racial justice gap is wider still than Britain’s. State acknowledgement of racism as a significant problem is almost nil. CSO figures for racist crime reflect the Garda Inspectorate finding last year that no gardai recorded a racial or homophobic motive on the pulse system. In contrast, the latest report of the European Network Against Racism in Ireland’s racist incident recording system, iReport.ie, published today, confirms that racism is a consistent fact of life for all minorities in Ireland.
Racial violence, too, plays an unacceptably prominent role in shaping peoples everyday experiences of life here. Census figures published last month raise parallel concerns about the concentration of minority children in only a handful of schools.
The drive to introduce a hate crime bill
While we do not have a criminal justice system that is yet fit for the needs of our present intercultural reality, there is some of agitation in that area. The Minister of State for New Communities, Culture and Equality, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, has been consulting with a coalition of NGOs representing anti-racist, Traveller, migrant, LGBT and disability groups with a view to legislating for hate crime in Ireland.
With the help of the University of Limerick’s Hate and Hostility research group, we hope to have a hate crime bill that the Minister can present to Dail Eireann in the lifetime of this government. The Minister has also pledged to legislate for the recognition of Traveller ethnicity in the same timeframe.
Tackling racism and its root causes
Assuming the Minister is able to make good his intentions, these will be laudable steps in the right direction. But these alone will not redress the problem of racism. In Britain, hate crime provisions are flanked in law and policy by a raft of ant- racism and anti-discriminatory measures, built up by decades of pressure for positive change. Ireland,in contrast, has not had a National Action Plan Against Racism since 2008, the same year the government axed the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism.
What is needed is a new National Action Plan Against Racism, that is, a major reform programme across our institutions, laws, policies and practices for tackling racism and its root causes. This will help make our republic a truly egalitarian one, fit to meet the needs and value the contributions of the diverse society we are only now coming to acknowledge.
Our own struggle against injustice and domination
As we celebrate International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, we should take the time to count our assets. Unlike many of our European neighbours, Ireland looks unlikely at present to develop a significant chauvinistically nationalist or xenophobic political formation, like UKIP or the Front National. We owe this fact wholly to our strong tradition of solidarity and anti-racism, bound up with our own struggle against injustice and domination.
This tradition is exemplified in the multicultural definition of citizenship decreed by the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640s, and in the solidarity between Daniel O’Connell and African American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the 1840s. It can also be seen reflected in the famine relief sent by the Choctaw Nation to survivors of the Great Hunger, and finds example in James Connolly’s Yiddish election leaflet in Dublin in 1902. In more recent times it can be seen in the solidarity between the Irish and US Civil Rights movements in the 1960s, and by the leadership shown by the Trades Unionists at Dunnes stores in Dublin, whose strike in the 1980s pushed Ireland to become a major contributor to the global struggle to end the Apartheid regime.
If current government policy is out of step with the needs of the diverse society we live in today, let our tradition of anti-racism be our guarantee that we can make a republic that cherishes all the children equally.
Shane O’Curry is the director of Enar Ireland, the European Network Against Racism in Ireland. Enar Ireland manages iReport.ie, Ireland’s independent racist incident reporting mechanism on behalf of a national network of civil society organisations. Its latest report is published today. Follow on Twitter @ENARirL
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