My Reflections On Racism
An Irish Approach
At the end of 2022, I retired from teaching and a few months later left Ireland, where I’d lived for six years, and moved back to Germany, where I’d previously lived for over forty years. My mother was Irish and my father was from Nigeria, where I was born. In the late 1960s, my parents sent me to school in Cork, Ireland. Cork — the real capital of Ireland, by the way, according to the locals — is my mother’s birthplace.
As a retiree in Germany, I expected I’d settle down and concentrate on my writing, and my family and friends. But as it happened, I was asked by the Nano Nagle Place’s Cork Migrant Centre (CMC), the organisation I volunteered with when I lived in Cork, to work with them on a nine-month government-funded anti-racism project.
Currently, the Irish Government plans to support actions to help make Ireland a place in which the impacts of racism are fully acknowledged and actively addressed, and sets out actions and objectives to create a fair, equal, and inclusive society, free of racial discrimination.
Its National Action Plan Against Racism (NAPAR) was launched in 2023. It recognises the importance of meaningful efforts to address racism and its impacts in Ireland. Further, it has recognised that a whole-of-government approach is required to achieve this as racism is a cross-cutting…
