Rural Ireland has no Chinatowns. The very idea of one was the stuff of whimsical comedy in a 1998 episode of Father Ted. Yet not all of rural Ireland was homogenous, even then.
The small Co Mayo town of Ballyhaunis has had a Muslim population since the 1970s, when a Pakistani entrepreneur purchased a meat-processing plant to export halal products. The first purpose-built mosque in Ireland opened there in 1987. By the 1990s, the Muslim community there was up to 30 families of Pakistani and Middle Eastern origin. A 250-person asylum-seeker hostel was set up in the town centre in 2001. Five years later, the census recorded that almost 20% of the town’s population were Muslim. They variously spoke Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic at home. There were 32,529 Muslims in Ireland, with 9,761 holding Irish citizenship. Of these, 7,504 were born in Ireland.
Until the 1990s, the Muslim community in Ireland was composed mostly of educated professionals. Later, the Shia population expanded with the arrival of asylum seekers, particularly from Iraq, and labour migrants, particularly from Pakistan. By 2012 there were 49,204 Muslims living in Ireland, more than 90% Shia.
That year an article in The Mayo News proclaimed Ballyhaunis as Ireland’s most cosmopolitan town. It was certainly the most diverse, with 2,299 non-Irish nationals comprising 42% of its population. It had overtaken Gort in Co Galway, which had a non-Irish national population of 40.7%. Both towns contain a higher proportion of immigrants than urban areas such as Mulhuddart in Dublin 15.
All parts of Ireland have experienced immigration, but encounters with host communities are by no means all the same. Nine out of 17 girls who took part in Orla McGarry’s 2007-11 study of teenage Muslims in Ballyhaunis wore headscarves to school; three of these were Irish-born. One consequence of the rule of female modesty was they did not participate in extra-curricular activities with non-Muslim schoolfriends.
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McGarry’s recommendations to counter the social isolation of many female Muslims in Ballyhaunis included female-only leisure activities that allowed for the wearing of modest clothing and the provision of a supervised public space, such as a youth cafe, where they could socialise with parental permission outside of school hours.
Boys were less likely to have Irish friends, though some played hurling with the local GAA team and at school, and got on well with non-Muslim teammates. One Muslim hurler was given the nickname Setanta — perhaps a reference to Setanta Ó hAilpín, who played for Cork. The Ballyhaunis “Setanta” spoke Urdu on the pitch during games with another defender and the goalkeeper.
Off the pitch, Muslim teenage boys always socialised with one another, according to one female interviewee. “Setanta” was very friendly with non-Muslim children at primary school, but now hung out mostly with fellow Pakistanis and spoke mostly Urdu and Punjabi with them.
Muslim teenagers felt that an increasingly reduced social interaction with non-Muslims was partly due to the growing size of the Muslim population and the peer pressures boys, in particular, placed upon one another. Girls, kept under strict parental control, did not have the opportunity to socialise with Irish friends outside of school.
Muslim teenagers in Ballyhaunis were not a homogenous group. Urdu-speaking asylum-seeker teenage boys described being marginalised by members of the longer-established Punjabi-speaking — Pakistani — group.
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Many immigrants to Ireland possess comparatively high levels of human capital. The 2006 census showed that in Dublin, migrants were better educated on average than Irish nationals. For example, in the Liberties, an economically disadvantaged inner-city area where immigrants constituted 30% of the population, research has identified immigrant families with middle-class norms and relatively high levels of education. These were mostly Eastern Europeans.
Immigrant children in the Liberties exhibited better psychological well-being than Irish children. They were less likely to exhibit difficulties with peer relationships, emotional well-being and antisocial behaviour. They were better placed to do well in school and processed higher levels of cultural capital.
No great claim can be made arising from such findings except to note that, as in Ballyhaunis, Gort and Dublin, immigration has altered the dynamics of all such localities; that new emerging communities are likely to be somewhat different from one another; and that all this change has yet to be acknowledged by the Irish state.
Bryan Fanning is head of the School of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin. This is an edited extract from his essay in Are the Irish Different?, edited by Tom Inglis and published by Manchester University Press