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02/29/2008: "Ireland "transformed" by immigration, beset by problems"

For centuries, Ireland was a racially homogenous land of emigrants. Now it is a multicultural nation of immigrants, whose share of the population, 11 percent, is nearly as high as that in the United States.

Years of Irish prosperity have drawn Polish plumbers, Lithuanian nannies, Latvian farm workers, Filipino nurses, Chinese traders, and sub-Saharan asylum seekers. The town of Portlaoise, about 40 miles southwest of Dublin, has the country’s first African-born mayor. The Synge Street School, where George Dimbo says his Hail Marys beneath a plaster Virgin, is walking distance from the city’s first mosque and rents classroom space to two Chinese academies.

“I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one,” writes the Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle, in a collection of short stories called “The Deportees” (Viking, 2007). They depict characters as diverse as an African war survivor on his first day of class, and Fat Gandhi, a gay tandoori vendor who “quickly realized that his loud embrace of Christianity was very good for business.”

[ Culture is destroyed by multiculturalism, which creates monoculture everywhere it goes. ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/world/europe/25ireland.html?em&ex=1204088400&en=fa6626efeaf75228&ei=5087%0A