Labour’s Senate immigration spokesperson, Senator Alex White, talks to CATHERINE REILLY about Pat Rabbitte’s infamous ‘40 million Poles’ remark, why he believes Integration Minister Conor Lenihan needs to speed-up his integration proposals, and how RTÉ could reach out to immigrants
“Integration into what?” asks Sen-ator Alex White, a few minutes into our interview in a small but generously subsidised coffee dock at Leinster House. “People mean different things when they talk about integration.” Ireland’s escalating diversity-speak has left Labour’s Senate spokesperson on immigration a little bit perplexed – and chances are he’s far from alone.
“I actually heard the Minister [for Integration Conor Lenihan] on BBC Radio 4 last night and he said – and this is fair enough – that we want to try to come in somewhere in the middle between a multicultural model and an assimilationist model,” says White.
“I mean, I know broadly speaking what those concepts mean, but it’s not really getting me anywhere in terms of my understanding of what the Government actually means… what specifically does it mean?”
White, who was elected to the Senate in July, continues: “For me I’d be much more interested in an integration policy that explains practical things like language support. Is there anything more important to somebody who comes to Ireland from another country, whose first language isn’t English, than to assist them to learn English?”
A former producer of The Gay Byrne Show on RTÉ radio, where he worked in the early 1990s, it’s perhaps little wonder that White displays the journalist’s obsession with separating the tangible from the fudge.
Having unsuccessfully ran for a Dáil seat in Dublin South last May (he intends contesting again next time around), White is presently Labour’s group leader in the Senate as well as the party’s national spokesperson on children. His immigration brief is somewhat unceremoniously tagged on alongside a responsibility to speak on foreign affairs; Northern Ireland; enterprise, trade and employment; and equality.
Labour’s national immigration spokesperson is former leader Pat Rabbitte, and like White, his mandate is submerged within a more sizable portfolio (Justice). Meanwhile, the Government has a junior minister for integration, while Fine Gael has appointed a national immigration spokes-person. Is Labour really taking immigration and integration seriously enough?
“The fact that there isn’t a member of the frontbench dealing solely with immigration doesn’t for a minute suggest that we don’t regard it as an important and a vital issue for us,” contends White, who adds that the immigration issue was given particular prominence at the party’s conference in Wexford.
He insists that immigration, including the related integration issue, is seen as an “enormously important” issue within the party’s ranks, and adds: “Since I became leader of the Labour group in the Senate, I’ve raised immigration several times in the order of business, I mean, to the extent of beating people into submission at this stage in terms of trying to find out when the [Immigration, Residence and Protection] Bill, for example, is going to be brought forward. I raised it as late as this morning.” The Senate, he concedes, isn’t exactly the subject of popular focus.
Referring to the fact that there are 35 ministers in Government, as opposed to Labour’s 20 TDs, he concludes that the manpower simply isn’t sufficient to have one person within Labour dealing solely with immigration and integration.
Regarding the Government’s approach to the integration issue thus far, White takes issue with what he perceives as a slowness in devising policy: “Minister Conor Lenihan has been there – and I’m not criticising him personally, I’m not making this a personal issue against him – but he’s been there for six months. I think the time must be coming fairly quickly now when we should be expecting from him what are the pillars of his policy.
“It’s good that he’s consulting, and he’s had all these various different conferences and attended them and listened to people and that is right that he should do it. But, you know, it’s six months in; we should be expecting some response from Government as to what they regard as the major pillars of integration.”
With Minister Lenihan’s central plans for the New Year, aside from improving English language provision, being the establishment of a taskforce on integration (to help devise medium to long-term plans) and an advisory immigrant-led ministerial council for integration – which will both be consultative-driven – is there simply too much talk?
“It’s very hard to say that you have too much consultation, it’s almost an oxymoron, you can’t have too much consultation,” responds White, “but the Government is there to give leadership and to bring forward proposals and that’s what we expect the Govern-ment to do… consulting in a vacuum or consulting in an abstract, I think there’s a limit to the extent of the usefulness of that. If that’s going to continue on into next year, I think it would be a pity.”
Minister Lenihan is due in the Seanad this week for a debate on the Government’s integration policy, and White says he will be raising the timescale issue with him. He welcomes the Budget allocation of just over 9m euro for the Office of the Minister for Integration, but says he’s unhappy that there’s been no increase in the payment of 19.10 euro per week for adult asylum seekers (9.60 for children), which was introduced in 1999 and has not been increased since (asylum seekers do have free accommodation and food but are not permitted to work).
White emphasises that Labour’s standpoint is a “positive” one in relation to immigration generally. Back in January, though, Labour’s then leader Pat Rabbitte gave a slightly less positive version to The Irish Times, when he said: “The time may be coming when we will have to sit down and examine whether we would have to look at whether a work permit regime ought to be implemented in terms of some of this non-national labour, even for countries in the EU… There are 40 million or so Poles after all, so it is an issue we have to have a look at.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Rabbitte’s remarks, the tone is said to have caused disquiet even within the party itself. Does Labour now have a rebuilding job to do with immigrant communities?
“I don’t know. Maybe so,” comments White. “I think some of the things that were said definitely didn’t come across as I would have liked them to come across. I, in fairness to Pat Rabbitte, think the biggest emphasis that he always placed on this issue was standards and employment standards, and he made that point over and over again. Now, some people didn’t want to hear him saying that because they only wanted to hear the other thing that he said - which I thought was unfortunate - about the reference to 40 million Poles and so forth. That was unfortunate and it was not the emphasis I would be looking for.
“But I think, in absolute fairness to Pat, he pushed forward the notion that the best way to ensure protection of immigrant workers is to ensure the enforcement of decent labour standards.” He says anyone who wants “testimony of our good faith in relation to the issue” should speak to members of the party. “I’ll go anywhere to talk about this issue, I’ll speak to any group,” he says.
A number of Labour’s policies are immigrant friendly, but some seem to lack backbone. Labour is pro-family reunification, for example, but just where will the line be drawn when permitting immigrants’ relatives to live in Ireland: will it stop at spouses, children, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles? White admits that Labour’s family reunification policy “will need to be teased out in detail” but underlines that the system should be “transparent, fair and consistent”.
Labour is firmly against the Government’s continued bloc-king of the EU draft Temporary Agency Workers Directive, which would give temporary workers the same pay and conditions as full-time staff after a period of six weeks. At a meeting in Brussels last week, Ireland was one of four EU member states opposing the measure, with Labour Affairs Minister Billy Kelleher saying the directive could undermine competitiveness.
As a barrister who has specialised in labour law, White says the abuse of agency workers is top of the list in terms of exploitative practices affecting immigrants and indeed some Irish workers.
“People who come through agencies, even though in 1993 we changed the law [the Unfair Dismissals Amendment Act 1993] to ensure that generally it would be the client employer that would take responsibility as the employer, and that is only right, the fact is of course is that an awful lot of immigrants don’t know this, they don’t know the law.
“The only relationship they have is with the agency, who persuades them that they are the employer – ‘If you’ve any problems don’t be bringing it to your client or to the client employer, come to us’.” He says that, while not all agencies can be tarred with the same brush, the “semi-detached” employment arrangements that many immigrants are subjected to can only be exploitative.
“We are strongly in favour, and Willie Penrose, our [enterprise, trade and employment] spokesperson in the Dáil, has given an undertaking, and I have as well… that if the Government doesn’t introduce legislation to regulate agencies to deal with the issue, then we’ll introduce a private members bill.”
Another bone of contention is the long-awaited enactment of the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill. “ I was a bit mesmerised at Conor Lenihan being reported saying that we might need new legislation every year. I find that very odd. I mean we don’t have any legislation at the moment but he’s talking about bringing in different legislation every year. It just seems crazy to me.”
On the bill itself, he says: “I’ve had major problems with some aspects of the bill as it was published in the spring. It’s not good enough just to simply set out broad parameters in legislation and then leave it up to the Minister to decide on the policy just as he or she thinks from time to time – I think that’s wrong. I think people are entitled to clarity, people are entitled to consistency and certainty. And they’ve got none of them. There are big issues with regard to family reunification that need to be dealt with in this debate and I’m up for that discussion and looking forward to it.”
White cut his teeth in the media, working at RTÉ on current affairs programming. Does he think his old employer has been adequately representing immigrant voices?
“No, I don’t… but it’s not always that easy. Can I say that? It sounds like an excuse. But there’s a lot of people I know in public service broadcasting who’d be very committed to the idea of what you’re talking about. You can have programmes for immigrants and I think that’s very important, but what you really need is to see and hear the voices of people in the mainstream programmes. And that is where RTÉ – and other organisations – need to do a lot more. So when you go out to do a vox pop or when they’ve got a debate going on about whatever it is, they extend the net a bit more widely than they have.”
Closer to home, there is the small matter of parties representing immigrant voices themselves. Minister Lenihan has announced that a fund to encourage immigrant involvement in political parties is to be released early next year. But some wonder if parties should simply be going about the recruiting without such an obvious nudge in the back.
“They should be doing it themselves already, but [the parties] are not going to say no to getting money,” says White. “That’s the cynical answer to it. You want it to be a much more organic thing in politics, where people get involved in political parties because they admire and agree with what the party stands for and they want to be part of what the organisation stands for.”
It’s an area of increasing relevance in the context of the 2009 local elections, which immigrants can contest and vote in. So far, has Labour been attracting any potential non-Irish candidates?
“Some – and we’d love more,” he says. “If people are interested in politics and interested in what the Labour party is saying, and is interested in our message, please join us. We’re really keen on having new voices.”
