It’ll do us no harm and it might do us a world of good. That’s the baseline on refugees arriving here to make new lives – for them, and if enough arrive over time, for us. Inward-looking inbred shower that we are, the Syrians deposited here over the next months and years deserve better.
But then, every single one of the thousands who trek and die to get to the west, deserve and deserved better. Think, if you can bear it, of the obsessive memorialising, sentimentality, and rightful emotion, lavished on our brave emigrants to America, England, Scotland. In today’s term of near-abuse, all of them were economic migrants; exploited, homesick, and also liberated, enterprising, grabbing at new lives in bigger places. Yet some descendants of our migrant culture deny equal right, or even a smidgen of respect, to people fleeing bombs from the air, massacre on the ground, hellholes often made more hellish by western foreign policy. A quarter of a million are estimated dead in Syria, to our Troubles death toll of almost 4,000.
In support of that weekend anti-refugee rally Willie Frazer said the last thing this place needs was people ‘who do not integrate into our community, who do not believe in Christianity.’ The Protestant Coalition believes in integration? But after Churches and politicians both said stop, fewer attended their rally than are due to arrive, proof, perhaps, that when the supposed leaders of the Protestant community stand together against the worst instincts of their people, it has a good effect.
May this place be good to the newcomers as it has been already to some, though not others. The tiny percentage from other races than our mono-cultural populace has already made visible difference. In Belfast, courtesy of the aggression brewed in less wealthy districts, the comfortable cultural wastelands of Gilnahirk and Knock will stay off-white and monoglot. But the benefits of new immigration are unmissable, in motivation, character and talent: often over-qualified and under-paid workers in care homes and food production, cafe and restaurant staff speaking fine English, doctors.
As this newspaper has said, the resettlement blueprint implicitly slurs east Belfast. Are the residents of Cyprus Avenue, say, embarrassed that their neighbourhood is deemed unsafe for refugees? It’s their loss. In places more varied than Stormont’s surroundings, the small change of everyday life now includes children calling out to adults on footpaths and in parks in languages new to ears accustomed to English only, plus Irish if they’re lucky; ‘ethnic’ food-shops, unfamiliar jars and tins on supermarket shelves, sauerkraut and Kielbasa now standard like‘African’ vegetables and spices as well as long-established Asian foods on cosmopolitan Ormeau Road.
What is so special and precious about this place without new people that anyone would want to block them? Even before we fell into those decades of killing and maiming each other, the locked-in syndrome each community imposed on the others and themselves was a blight, imprisonment. The old regime was bad for Catholics and bad for Protestants too. Anyone old enough to remember before the Troubles can recall that.
Mutual suspicion, anxiety to stay within the tribe, say your prayers out loud so your own knew you kept the faith, stay away from ‘their’ merry-making. No Protestant dance halls for young Catholics, not if their parents could stop them. No soccer-players running out on Gaelic pitches, no playing tennis in ‘their’ clubs. You couldn’t go to concerts or plays if there might be singing of the Queen, as there surely would be. That would have weakened your own. It would have encouraged ‘them’ to think they had worn you down, that exclusion and discrimination had wrought the miracle, made Irish into British, nationalist into unionist. True: it would have encouraged that assimilationist thought, sure enough.
Even should Protestant Coalitions shrink still further, shifting basic thinking will take more immigration than is likely. You’d think that watching the Isle of Bute rolling out the welcome mat might encourage warmth here. Though, as son and grandson of refugees Mark Langhammer said last weekend in a radio discussion, as he encouraged genuine local hospitality, behind the Scottish welcome lies self-interest, demographics, a shortage of young people to staff hospitals and schools. Unlike the Scots, we don’t overall have a predominantly old and ageing population. But it is true of loyalist districts, precisely where anti-refugee passion is whipped up, and where Langhammer’s socialism long ago brought him trouble.
We could swap Willie Frazer for the refugees. Willie couldn’t make Syria any worse.
