Joining the Dots: Promoting Interculturalism Through Seed Funding and Strategic Engagement – Case Study of Immigrant Council of Ireland’s Partnership with Dublin City Council and Public Tr

This opinion piece focuses on a strategic partnership involving public transport companies operating in the greater Dublin area, a local authority (Dublin City Council), a transport regulator (National Transport Authority) and a civil society organisation (Immigrant Council of Ireland). Relationships that underpin the partnership developed as a result of the main actors’ involvement in the work of the Dublin City Council’s Office for Integration. As part of the implementation of the Towards Integration - A City Framework launched on May 29th, 2008, Dublin City Council launched the One City One People campaign in 2010 ‘to promote inclusion, integration and to combat racism and discrimination’. During the campaign, posters were displayed on many platforms, including buses, trams and suburban trains. The campaign has been rolled out on a number of occasions since. The trigger of the partnership this opinion piece covers was the publication of statistics of anti-social behaviour on the LUAS (Tram Service) in 2010. These figures were published on February 7th, 2011. They highlighted the fact that ‘DRIVERS and staff on the Luas network were threatened almost 100 times …, with racial taunts the most common form of abuse’. With a €3,000 grant from Dublin City Council, the Immigrant Council of Ireland commissioned a research project on racism and discrimination with particular emphasis on the public transport sector.

As part of the research, two focus group interviews with front line employees of migrant background were organised in partnership with Dublin Bus and the LUAS respectively. The research led to the publication of Taking Racism Seriously in 2011. The publication of the report was a key milestone and a reference point for follow up initiatives. Young people were identified in the report as one of the groups that public transport companies needed to engage with, in relation to anti-social behaviour in general and racism in particular. In 2012, with a grant from the Equality Authority (now part of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission) under the Equality Innovation Fund, the Immigrant Council of Ireland organised 5 workshops with young people across Dublin to explore the issues that emerged in the aforementioned report.

The feedback from these workshops was presented at a seminar hosted by the Immigrant Council of Ireland on September 24th, 2012. The seminar explored how to get young people involved in promoting anti-racism attitudes. On March 21st, 2013 the Immigrant Council of Ireland, in partnership with Dublin Bus, Dublin City Council, the National Transport Authority, Iarnród Eireann-Irish Rail and TRANSDEV Ireland (operator of the LUAS) launched the ‘Dublin’s Transport Links. Racism Divides’ campaign. The campaign had a number of objectives, including raising awareness on the issue of racism among public transport service users and the wider public; and demonstrating solidarity with frontline staff members in the public transport sector who had been victims of, or witnesses to, racist incidents. Case studies on the campaign featured on the website of cities of migration and in a publication of European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions - Eurofound published in 2013. The campaign was also shortlisted for a Chambers Ireland Corporate Social Responsibility Award and won a Metro Eireann Africa Day Award in 2013.