Polish people ‘go home’

My dearest readers. Lately I’m getting a lot of emails from readers, which I really appreciate. But the problem is that you want me to start writing about something serious. You want me to start writing about problems and discrimination. So, I have to confess that I am a little scared to write about these kind of problems. These topics are delicate and it’s really easy to hurt someone. The fact is that the problem exists and I think that it will exist forever. It exists because of human nature. When I visit websites, very often in many contexts, I read ‘Polish people go home’. Of course, this is written by Irish people and actually it’s written by Irish people who blame us for their bad luck, especially in relation to work. When the borders opened up, a lot of Polish workers came to Ireland. They found jobs that Irish people didn’t want to do, or that Irish people wanted a lot of money to do. The Irish economy has grown and grown. Irish people started to change their cars and Polish people were building the roads. Life was great, without any problems. The problems come later. When the planned buildings were completed, when the English student had mastered the language, it was time for natural selection. The ones that had to go went and those who decided to stay started to organise their lives in Ireland. Now, we have a problem. Polish and other nationalities stopped being guests in Ireland and started to be citizens. They started to bring up families here, got promoted in work, opened Polish shops, Polish radio and press, they just started to engage with normal life. The problem is that they started to seek equality. Equality is of course really healthy, but the problem is when we start speaking about the losers. Then we try to find a lot of arguments to explain our bad luck and the easiest target is a person’s roots. Of course it’s like that for both sides. ‘I didn’t get this job because I am Polish’, ‘I didn’t it because I am Catholic’, ‘I didn’t get it because I am an atheist’. Hey, maybe you didn’t get the job because your qualifications aren’t good enough, or you have to speak better English or have to be more specialised. The fact is that we have more and more acts of vandalism. Drunk Polish people upset motorists on the street, Irish teenagers destroy houses of immigrants with stones, I think that it’s not like that because we are Irish or Polish. It depends what kind of people we are. Stupid humans don’t understand any borders. We say ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’ so we can’t say that all Irish people are racist and all Polish people are drunkards. Some scientists claim that the difference between people and animals is that we have intelligence and this means that we have the ability to think. Many years ago our forefathers saw fit to establish national identifies for certain units of people. Now, we think we’re even smarter, so we decided to break down those barriers. So goddam it, we have to take the consequences! PS. I know that sometimes my columns are extremely idealistic, but I don’t apologise for this.