WHEN ANETA KUBAS came to Ireland from Poland in 2005, there wasn’t a whole lot of Polish language to be found here — outside of church services.
She had worked as deputy editor-in-chief at a local paper in Ostrów Wielkopolski (a city in Poland). She’s now, among other roles, the chair of Biblary, a Polish-language library which runs every week in Dublin’s Inchicore Library Square. For 15 years, it’s been a lending library and has run regular events including author readings, flea markets, workshops and dance classes. Due to an ongoing renovation of the building — and before that, the pandemic — right now Biblary is not running its usual service, though the first weekend of June it’ll hold the second annual “O’Czytani” literature festival.
According to the Central Statistics Office, Polish nationals increased by 93.7% since 2006 from 63,276 to 122,585 in 2011, making them Ireland’s largest migrant group ahead of UK nationals.
When she first came to Ireland, Kubas said that what she was looking for most of all was contact with other Polish people. “The main occasions to meet others were generally Polish church services,” she said. There was also the “Polish House” (aka the Irish-Polish Society on Fitzwilliam Place), where people could come every week to watch Polish television, read the papers and talk to others.
Since those days, many Polish shops, schools and online portals have sprung up throughout the country.
According to the 2016 census, Polish was the most widely spoken non-English language among non-Irish European nationals living in Ireland at the time with 112,676 speakers. That’s ahead of Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese — the number-one non-English languages among non-Irish Asian, African and American nationals living in Ireland at the time.
Kubas also works for the Barka for Mutual Help Ireland foundation, which provides access to information and emergency accommodation for people from Eastern European countries who have become homeless overseas.
When it comes to important services, like access to information on social housing, social insurance, medical information and childcare, Kubas said that Polish people don’t face discrimination — but many do face a language barrier.
“One problem that comes up is the need to produce an original birth certificate, which doesn’t apply to Irish people,” she said.
Another problem is the lack of translators and interpreters in government bodies and information translated into Polish — like leaflets, information materials and online content. Employing more government translators and interpreters and translating materials into Polish would help a lot, especially for more vulnerable or older Polish people who struggle more with English, she said.
At a more fundamental level, Kubas said she’d like to see widespread teaching of Polish and other minority languages in Irish schools within the curriculum.
Currently, this process is beginning and I hope that it continues to develop more dynamically so that the children of immigrants have the opportunity to get to know and nurture their roots.
Saturday school
Agnieszka Matys-Foley realised her childhood dream of living in an English-speaking country 16 years ago when she moved to Ireland. Now she’s the principal of the Polish Saturday School of the Polish Teachers Association on Ratoath Road, Dublin 7.
When she first moved to Ireland, a job teaching English to adults from Poland, Slovakia and many other countries was her only contact with the Polish community.
“I remember I got the task of placing an ad for the school in a Polish magazine, which I think was the only one available on the market at the time,” she said.
“Four years after coming here I started looking for a way to maintain the native language of my two children who were 6 and 8 at the time. We spoke Polish at home and they had a Polish minder as I was working full time but I wanted them to also be able to read and write.”
Being a teacher probably made her more aware of the importance of giving them the opportunity to become bilingual, she said.
“This is how I got involved in one of the Polish Saturday schools where I’ve been working for the last 11 years. Initially as a teacher, then HR and Education manager. Last year I was promoted to the position of Principal.”
The school has grown from 160 students in 2010 to 650 now.
Polish-language weekend schools across the country have also welcomed a revamped Polish exam for the Leaving Cert this year. It was already available as a non-curricular subject consisting of a written exam and only at higher level. From now on, it also contains an oral and aural element and can be taken at higher and pass levels.
Matys-Foley said:
I believe it is a positive change which will encourage more students to take up Polish as one of the subjects which will help to maintain the native language among young Poles in Ireland.
Initially, according to Matys-Foley, the main reason most parents wanted their children to attend Saturday school was to prepare them to join the Polish school system when they decided to return home. A few years later this trend changed significantly.
“Most of our pupils were already born in Ireland, their parents saw themselves staying in Ireland permanently and they mainly sent children to the Polish school to make sure they have the chance to learn basic reading and writing and learn a little about the culture and history of our country without going into much detail,” she said.
In the last three years, the situation changed again, with many Polish families planning to return again to Poland — however, the war in Ukraine has put a stop to many of those plans as the world watches the situation develop.
A Department of Education spokesperson told The Good Information Project that in summer 2021, primary schools around the country were invited to express an interest in participating in a six-week language sampler programme for 3rd to 6th class primary school students.
About 500 schools applied, and the programme has been running in three phases across the country since last November, according to the spokesperson. Schools were provided with a grant of up to €1,000 depending on the number of classes participating, and the programme was available in 11 languages, including Polish.
“The Department provides material and guidance in languages other than English and Irish on a case by case basis,” the spokesperson said. “During the pandemic, public health guidance for schools was regularly provided to parents in Polish and a wide range of other languages.”
Integration needs for ‘invisible’ minority
“The Polish minority is the biggest in Ireland with 125,000 people, but our community is quite invisible when it comes to integration,” said Teresa Buczkowska, integration manager at the Immigrant Council of Ireland.
We kind of blend in with Irish people. We’re also EU migrants, and the funding that is available for supporting integration and migrants usually is limited to only third-country nationals — so anyone who’s from outside the European Union.
These factors combined mean that Polish people are often underrepresented when it comes to inclusion and diversity initiatives in Ireland, she said. “When it comes to Polish-language initiatives, they’re not very well supported. It’s almost entirely on the back of Polish communities trying to do something about preserving the language.”
As a result, language can be a barrier for many people. “After all, if you don’t know the language how can you access services? (Or) if you don’t have access to translators, interpreters or translated materials?” Buczkowska said.
Another barrier, tied to language, is the underrecognition of qualifications, according to Buczkowska.
“As EU migrants, we don’t necessarily need to go through the whole process of recognition of qualifications (like) third country nationals, but … it depends entirely on the employer if they recognise those qualifications that we have from Poland.”
As a result, she said, “Polish migrants usually work below the level of education they have because they struggle with language and qualification recognition.”
Ultimately, Buczkowska said, there needs to be more collaboration between the government and Polish NGOs.
Under-resourced but growing demand
“They need to be invited to stakeholder meetings about integration, they need to be part of those conversations.”
Polish volunteer organisations, like Cork’s Together Razem, are often the first point of contact for Polish migrants, but don’t receive funding because they deal with EU migrants — considered “mobile citizens” (EU citizens living in another member state).
This definition doesn’t recognise the integration needs of Polish people, according to Buczkowska. Together Razem, she added, often has to turn away those seeking help because it’s so under-resourced. It was also one of the first organisations Ukrainian refugees turned to when they began coming to Ireland in the wake of the war, she said.
The government’s outgoing Migrant Integration Strategy, under the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, included “the provision of information to migrants in an accessible and language-appropriate format”, according to a department spokesperson.
The strategy has now concluded, but a lot of its actions are still in place, and work to “develop a successor strategic policy on integration will begin in 2022 with a stakeholder consultation process”, said the spokesperson. “This work will examine the needs of all migrants in Ireland including linguistic and language needs.”
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
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