Welcoming Traditions not our own
Fr Kevin Hegarty

Ireland must be a place of welcome to otherness, and draw on our own extensive experience of emigration.

I believe that Catholic and Protestant Christians are called to create a rich cultural ecumenism on the island of Ireland today, of the kind John Dunlop outlined some time ago. Asked whether he saw himself as Irish or British he replied: “I think I suffer from the same identity crisis as all Northern Presbyterians; in some cases you’re Irish and in some cases you are British. I can identify myself with being Irish if the Irish identity is sufficiently wide to be inclusive of people like me. But if, on the other hand, Irishness is Catholic or Gaelic, it is hard to see where I fit into that. Even though I live in Ireland I feel I don’t have an enriching and appreciative understanding of Irish culture. Two things are required here – first that I move out across the frontiers to understand that and second that people in that culture move across the barriers to try and understand me.”

Today I believe we are also challenged to broaden our concerns beyond the traditional cultures that have shaped and are shaping our country. Ireland is becoming a multi-ethnic society as economic migrants and asylum seekers arrive here. We can deceive ourselves sometimes in Ireland about how friendly we are. You know the pious green guff about there being no strangers in Ireland but only friends you have not met yet? I sense our new arrivals are not getting a Fáilte Ireland, ‘céad mile fáilte’, but rather a hesitant, often-negative response. There have been outbreaks of racism. Pádraig J Daly evokes in graphic way what some have experienced, in his poem, ‘From a Vietnamese Takeaway’.

One might have hoped that our own experience of emigration would encourage us to be especially sensitive to the needs of those who have come to find a decent livelihood here. Can we forget that up to the 1990s emigration from Ireland was high?

A young man said to me at the time it is as if his generation was born with one-way air tickets in their pockets. Many who went to the USA in the last two decades still live in the precarious shadow land of illegality and hope for the green card. Is it not ironic that as we limit narrowly the numbers we allow in here, we long for the US government to be generous to our emigrants?

Our common Christian heritage as Catholics and Protestants can also shape our response. It is an axiom of Christian theology that love of God must be actualised practically in the love of others, especially the vulnerable and oppressed. In the book of Leviticus, read words whose imperative cannot be avoided: “If a stranger lives with you in our land, do not molest him. You must count him as one of your own and love him as yourself – for you once were strangers in Egypt.”

New ethnic groups can, of course, be a source of cultural enrichment here. Island communities always need the infusion of new blood. Patrick Kavanagh found during the second world war that ‘Ireland froze for want of Europe’. Perhaps we can learn from the multicultural example of Italy. Some time ago, in a review of several Etruscan exhibitions, a writer in the ‘New York Review of Books’ described the way in which Italy has always been a place where different cultures have met, mixed and ultimately created not only a workable society but also a vibrant, creative and stylish one.

At this time, we are called once again to renew our commitment to a great secular and sacred purpose – to echo Yeats again, with ‘the slow exciting work of creating institutions’, which reflects the exquisite diversity of Ireland. We are called to appreciate the otherness in traditions not our own, to celebrate variety and dialogue honestly with difference. In this lies not only secular progress but also elements of God’s Kingdom of Love, Justice and Peace.

Fr Kevin Hegarty is a priest of the diocese of Killala. This article is based on an address by Fr Hegarty to the Yeats Summer School.