Census Forms and Syria?

Did you fill in your Census 2016 form? They are being collected about now, and they are a mass of strange questions. How many men, like me, tired of reading arcane language, got to the question about "How many children ..." and automatically wrote "1", "2", "3" or "4" or however many, only to re-read the question properly and see the rest of it. You know, that bit that asked you how many children "have you given birth to" ... It leaves you feeling kind of foolish. But what can you get out of it? The information everyone gives, that is ...

Ireland, like most modern countries, has its fair share of people coming and going. Recently we've had a big change – our biggest export used to be people, but in 2003/2004, that changed in a big way. For the first time most people arriving in Ireland were foreigners – before then most had been returning emigrants!

What does that mean to those of us settled here for years? Well to start with we don’t have to go to the Gaeltacht to hear a foreign-sounding tongue. Over half a million speak a foreign language at home – and they aren't dotted about all over the country. Many live together in “hot spots” like Longford, so go to the local supermarket, or stand outside a primary school at 3 o'clock and you might hear Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Romanian and Latvian from European immigrants, Filipino (and Tagalog), Chinese (mostly Mandarin or Cantonese), Indian (mostly Malayalam or Hindi), or Urdu (Pakistan) from Asia, Yoruba or Igbo (Nigeria), French, Arabic, and Afrikaans from Africa with occasional Portuguese, Spanish, French, Polish and German from the Americas. This can be very unsettling as for many years we only ever heard English, with Gaelic in school or at the odd mass, Spanish or French from visiting students in the summer and of course all languages from the more affluent countries around the Shannon during the tourist season.

With this feeling of being displaced or threatened (try standing in a queue in your home town when you can’t understand anything being said around you!) it’s hard to invite in yet more people in with strange languages and customs, but we have a peaceful caring community and there are literally millions of Syrians (photo above) who have lost that, as well as family members, homes and any possessions they had. It is hard to see them and not feel sorry for them. I hope we have the courage and strength as a community to welcome them here – Longford is a wonderful, caring place to live, and we have to learn to share the good we have.

Despite all the foreign voices we hear around us we have about 500 refugees from the war in Syria in the whole country. That is 0.11 per thousand (most of us will never see a Syrian here). The EU as a whole has 510,000 - 1 per thousand, while Germany has 130,000 - 1.6 per thousand. Compare that with the poorer countries that surround Syria, with troubled Iraq taking a quarter million, or 7.6 per thousand, or Turkey, straddling the war zone and Europe: a similar size to Germany, they have around 2.5 million - 33 per thousand, or small Jordan taking 630,000, or 97 per thousand of its own population.

But none of these compare with Lebanon, a country with the same size population as Ireland which has 1.1 million Syrian refugees, or 240 per thousand Lebanese.