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thanks patti and thanks neal and thanksjessica so when i were going to the main address of the evening which is going tobe delivered by dr. brian mcmahon after taking law degrees at university collegedublin and at harvard law school where he was one of the first irish studentsto attend doctormick mahon joined the department of law and university collegecork where he became professor and head of the department he subsequently held apart-time chair of law at this universitywhile practicing as a senior partner with the hoolihan & mac mahon law firm afounding member of the irish association of law teachers he has authored severallegal textbooks and also been chair of
the governing body of ucc having becomea judge of the circuit court in 1999 he was promoted to the high court in 2007and 2012 he was made an honorary doctor of laws by ucd since retiring from thebench in 2011 dr. mcmahon has extended his record of civic engagement whichincludes services chair of the irish university's quality board of thenational archives advisory council and of the abbey theatre as well as leadingadvisory groups on crime and the constitutional referendum on judges paymost recently he led a government-appointed working group toproduce the mac mahon report 2015 on improvements to the protection processincluding direct provision and supports
to asylum seekers since that report wassubmitted dr. mcmahon has remained actively involved in the publicdiscussion of progress and shortfalls in the state's response to that reportsrecommendations so will you give a big welcome please to dr. brian mcmahon i dtosach bã¡ire, ba mhaith liom comhghairdeachas a dhã©anamh le muintir na gaillimhe agus lucht iomã¡naãochta na gaillimh, go hã¡irithe, as ucht an gaisce mã³r a dhã©anadar an mã seo caite i bpã¡irc an chrã³caigh. to win the all ireland for the first time in 29 years and notonly that the windell enter title in the
league and for the miners to win theoralin title in the same year you must be bursting there's anextraordinary achievement after such a long wait i was at croke park in the 29years ago in the company of one of the great called we're whores who never wantto know and enjoy salmon and on that occasion he did a jig and since then hehas moved on but i have no doubt he did several jigs last month you know inhonor of the occasion when i was approached by steven rae to give thislecture steven in his low-key subtle way might have be accused of selling me apop in the sense that he said you'll say a couple of words that you think we'rehaving in galway very low-key stuff you
won't have to do much preparations isalright and of course i suddenly woke up that i was going to be filled as i knewsheamus dean lecture lecture earth for the night and of course ray was not tobe seen it reminds me of the story of aubry war the war the famous literaryfamily in in england who was a well-known lecturerjournalist writer and he was asleep in his apartment in park lane and in themiddle of the night he got a phone call and he struggled in the dark and hepulled his eye mask off and he grabbed the phone and clearly from the voice atthe other end it was an african voice and it said you will lecture to ourstudents and he robbed the sleep from
his eyes and set up you will lecture toour students in lagos university and he set up further and what do you want meto speak on and he said i would like you to speak on breath freedom in africa sohe made a note of this and went back to sleep but three days later an envelopecame with a first-class ticket for two weeks time to lagos so this was seriousbusiness first class he wasn't used to flying first class so he decided that hebetter get himself in shape so he spent the next two weeks writing his lectureand he's been a lot of a time and detail with it and the time came for him todepart he went to heathrow and he checked his bag four times to see thathe didn't leave his lecture he didn't
worry about his passport but had he hislecture he got on board and he wasn't used as i said first-class travel andyou overindulge it a little bit in the bubbly but it didn't matter becausethere was a day between his landing and the lecture but when he was some hoursout the air hostess came to me said there's been a little error in thetiming you won't have time to go to your hotel the table will be on the tarmacitem and you've got to go straight to the university because they're allgathered there when you come so he rushed in panic to the washroom sprucedhimself up as best he could felt his lecture bag againenough he got great consolation from
that when the plane landed he was forcedoff and there was a limousine on the tarmac adam and a gentlemenmagnificently dressed in african garb approached him introduced himself as thepresident and ushered him into the limousine and they drove in 20 minutesthey were in the university and this magnificent theater 500 people allgathered and a hush felt when he came in he sat down the president began tointroduce him and while he was getting his lecture out of his bag he looked atthe blackboard behind him and they're written on the blackboard was a subjectof the lecturer breastfeeding in africa and someone saidwhat did you do well he said i took my
lecture out of my bag i put it on thepodium and i read it word for word as i had written it except for the worldpress freedom i substituted breastfeeding every time it came try itsometime the moral of the story of course is whenyou're invited to give a lecture get it in writing so you know what you're infor that's the last laugh you will havetonight and might as well tell you i'd like to start this lecture with astatistic i the minister for justice invited me to preside over the newceremonies for new citizens in 2006 and since sorry 2011 and since that date thestate has conferred citizenship 107
thousand new citizens a hundred andseven thousand and six years from a hundred and eighty countriesit's a sobering figure when you look at it and suddenly in a period of ten orfifteen years we have become multicultural from a mana culturalsociety to a multicultural society and your way i notice is the mostmulticolored city in ireland so i'm not telling you anything newi was asked at a conference lately by a professor of refugee studies when sheheard this figure and what do you say to these people she was interested in thetone of the welcome and what we were saying to these new people when they gottheir degrees and i said well i'll tell
you what i say to them i say to themfirst of all when the state honors you today by granting you citizenship itdoes not require that you forget the country you camefrom it does not ask you to erase your memories or your personal and uniquehistory when you make your declaration of fidelity to the state in a moment donot forget the country your own country your own people your own traditions suchmemories are not contraband bring with you your songs your music and yourstories someday your children or your children's children will ask you abouttheir grandparents and will inquire about the old country do not deny themtheir legacy it is your duty and your
responsibility to remind them of thatpart of their story that is to be found in another land towards the end of theremarks i conclude by saying my parents and my grandparents back to generationswere born in this country and for the most part my family has lived in thiscountry for centuries but after this ceremony i will have no greater legalrights in this country then you will have because under our constitutionunder your constitution now all citizens are equal the new are equal to the oldthere are no second-class or half citizens you are as well as i amentitled to the full protection of the constitution and the personal guaranteescontained therein
in view of what i'm going to say lateron about the supreme court decision those are important words and what i tryto do in delivering these marks remarks is to encourage the new citizens tointegrate not to change themselves but to bring their diversity with them andto enrich our society we're not afraid of what they have to bring in fact weembrace it we are an island people we are insular in fact it might besuggested dna ways that we're incestuous so a good dollop of external infusionmight not be a bad thing for this country maybe it would help our athletesto perform better in the olympic games and i tell them that i look forward tothe day from one of their children or
one of their children's children leadthe rl and football team on to crawl park or the rl or holding team in thechrome park and that's not so far-fetched last year there was agentleman left forward for male who had a pakistani parents there was a forwardcame on for kerry minors this year in the other a fella whose parents werefrom nigeria originally so this is to be welcomed i'll tell you a story a simplestory because the story is everything and everything is a story i was drivingfrom my home in cara's last november to dublin on a sunday morning about half10:00 the roads were quiet as you would expect
the weather was dull heavy-ladengunmetal gray big cumulus bags of water threatening overhead and i turned thecorner they were going into navin and suddenly my spirits lifted there was amagnificent african woman dressed in half african costume she was about wellsix foot she had a wonderful headdress beautiful dress and a bustle brightyellow and black slashes on it she had a little boy in a blue suit on her righthand and a little girl with pigtails and balls on her left and dutifully marchingbehind her husband in a blue suit as well and they were heading to thebaptist church outside navin and my spirits rose and it figuratively itseemed to me that this is what we would
get from the diversity of these peoplethey will brighten our lives the stable bring the sunshine with them color wiseattitude wise and in every sense that we care for i fancy i mean intrigue to someextent by what i've seen in the last two days i went to john behan show lastnight and i was struck by his beautiful sculptures sculptures many of which wereof the famine and some of which were of the refugeesi hear jessica with her poem on mosely i heard patti glackin playing loaning outi grew up not far from loaning out it's a place i would say truly on the way thedingle trophy you don't know it i wasn't kept there so there's hugeresonances in our art form to these
things if you look for it and to someextent why shouldn't we welcome these people we are a nation of immigrantsthe president yesterday told us there was over 90,000 irish born people inaustralia at the moment there are over 50,000 undocumented hanging aroundboston somewhere and we have been all over the world our missionaries havebeen all over the world and some of you may say that kind of exercise isintrusive but my own experience and i had an aunt who spent 25 years innigeria and i think she did mostly building houses teaching and running ahospital i don't think there was a lot of proselytizing going on directly andhow can we now look at people from these
countries who said yes your message wasvery good we'd like to come to ireland well welcome bring him onthat's what i would say the we are a country as i say of immigrants weunderstand dislocation i'm reminded of that wonderful book by sean or tumor andtom kinsella the dispossessed and i don't have to say much more referring toour history we were all dispossessed this heller - cannot you know emigratethe immigration boards so we don't have to be told about the pain or weshouldn't have to be told about the pain of people in direct provision or peoplecome into this country from lesser wear off countries and might put it that way
some people say that the irish areracist i'd like to address that i don't believe it for a minuteif you look at the crime statistics the garda sadistic no i know i'm on trickyground courting guards mystics but the devil cited scripture for his ownpurposes but it's all we have and do you know howmany crime hate incidents there were in countries in in the country in 2016 198 crime and such hate incidents recentevents it could be a bad poke fear that you wouldn't get that on a mondaymorning in the district court after 168 no i'm not for a moment suggesting thatany of these should be trivial yet
trivialized trivialized each of these isa serious matter but we don't have the hate race thing in this country in myexperience i have interviewed many of the asylum seekers and the directorvision when we went around doing our research i asked them pointedly thatquestion most of them said they didn't see it they said there's some bit of ithere there was a bit of it there some for a shelter and a boss but by andlarge if you look at that series in the irish times new to our parish and i haveno doubt the irish times would publish it if it were otherwisebut i don't see any of them they were saying that they were discriminated onthe basis of race i have no doubt some
of it goes on i'm not naivei have a legal career i'm not naive but in terms of being bad racist in in thebig sense i don't think we are interfere but the same statistics by the way saidthat there were six times more racial incident eight incidents in the north ofireland and there isn't the south and that's not always against pakistanisand and and africans it's probably protestant against catholic catholicagainst protestant so let's not get exaggerated in these mattersthere are ignorant people there are juvenile people there are uneducatedpeople who will throw floors sometimes but as i say when the male people go upto dublin for an island there's many of
them jeered as being cultures as forthand so on and that's not about race or about color it's it's something else andi think that a lot of that is trivial it's not terribly important in terms ofa deep characteristic in the race direct provision now i want to contrast what ijust said about 170,000 these are 107 thousand people who came lawfully tothis country took up jobs worked for five years and more and then applied forcitizenship they paid their taxes and they were visible people who werecontributing to the economy contrast that spirit of generosity with directprovision where we're talking about perhaps 8,000 moving up and downindirect path here now let me define the
reg provision because some of you laypeople might not appreciate what it means and there's a lot of confusion onit it's made it the direct provision is used in two sentences through two sensesfirst of all we talk about direct provision as a system of payment andsecond of all we talk about direct provision has the centres buildingswhere people stay so if you keep that distinction in your mind some of theconfusion will fall away let's talk about direct provision as a system whenireland as a member of the community of nations signeda convention in 1951 written out to asylum and refugees they undertook todeal with asylum seekers who were
fetched up on our shores in a certainway they were assessed they were details were taken and they were subjected to anapplication process now a person coming into the country as an asylum seekermight look for three different kinds of status he or she might say he wants tobe classified as a refugee that's the highest standard you can getbecause there are a lot of protections going at international law for peoplewho are refugees and there's a definition of what a refugee is who isin fear of returning home to some country because of persecution eitherracial cultural or otherwise if he or she fails in that he then can apply fora different category what we call
subsidiary protection and this is astatus that the european union has adopted it's lower down it's more it'smore easier to get into subsidiary protection if you can't get interestedyou still have get in there and the third category is if you fail in thefirst two you can apply for leave to remain apply to the government say we'dlike to stay and the government has a certain course of discretion to allow itor not now the problem with our system is that when people 10 years ago came inand more 15 years ago 2000 they applied in this byzantine fashion system andthey were involved in 3 separate legal cases successively they weren't all dellput together they were dealt with
successively so he applied for refugeestatus if you failed you could appeal that that took anotheryear and after that if you did you might challenge they didn't go to the courtsand if you fail there you could snap together at the next session subsidiaryprotection if you refused appeal it if you hold so it was inevitable that theprocess was going to be long and drawn-outnow one of the improvements that have been recently made is that thegovernment introduced the international protection act in 2016 which telescopesall these three hearings into one hearing and the theory is that it shouldnow take about one third at the time
that it used to take in processing thesepeople the process meant that people had to continually stay in direct provisionwhile the process was ongoing they couldn't take up work they couldn'ttravel they had no status so they had to wait and this meant that some of thepeople in the direct provision centers were there for seven eight ten yearswaiting for a result and for that delay in my view our government wasresponsible and culpable they made an international convention that they woulddeal and process people and implicit in that is that they would deal and processthem prompt properly and in a timely fashion and if they don't and didn'tthen in my view that's a fault
now the government was aware of thiscriticism and in 2014 they asked me to chair a working group and a workinggroup was a very interesting body it had about 34 35 people compose and comprisedof many civil servants which was a new interesting thing there was many peoplefrom the civil service on the various departments on it there was inoutstanding in the giuls former secretary of the departmentoutstanding trade unionists and there was all the ngos were represented thenon-governmental agencies were interested in refugees was there sowe're about thirty four fifty five on the group we worked quite hard and quitequickly and by june 2015 we had a report
we made a hundred and seventy threerecommendations and the two important and outstanding recommendations thatconcerned us was the length of time that people stayed in direct review andsecondly that people did not have the right to work there's a whole lot ofother things were concerned but those are the two big issues with regard tothe length of time i don't have to elaborate what damage it will do topeople if they are kept in places where they have to say for ten years thedamage it does to their dignity to their self-esteem and to their very whatshould i say personality this huge and it makers in my view irreversible thehope was we recommended that the
government would bring in the new systemthree one instead of three in the hope that if they put in the resources youwould clear clear the system quicker and the people who get a decision withintwelve months or 18 months at most we also realized however that unless thegovernment invested in the new system you would get a backlog again a secondproblem that we found was that there was already a backlog in the system sobefore you could go to a tabula rasa of a new system you had to get rid of thebacklog of five four or five thousand people many of whom were there for fiveyears or more so we suggested that the five-year closed what we call the longstare
should be dealt with quickly and swiftlyand given leave to remain so that that would be cleared out of the system andthe new system would deal with people as they're coming in the government did notaccept that provision in principle they said it was too dangerous etceterathey'd be a pool factor as forth wrong but i will say this in to the governmentthat find that didn't accept it in principle or explicitly behind thescenes they did work to reduce the number of five years people and thatnumber now has shrunk to about five or six hundred i think at the moment so thegovernment must get credit for that with regard to the physical center the directprovision centers we have 34 laws in the
country and they're a disparate group ofbuildings and properties some of them are old secondary schools some of themlike mosley is a farmer holiday camp some of them are institutional farmer inresidential institutions so there's a variety of them around the place andthey differ and they're not all even in the sense that they're not a model oneso that some people will say i was in i sloane and it's terrible i'd like to bein hatch hall or i was in in hatch hall and there's a honduran it's terrible wevisited all the direct revision centers when we made our report and we foundpointed out the flaws and the difficulties in the problems theyrepresented crowded conditions number
one many of the women and husbands andwomen but children were in one office formerly a hotel bedroom living in thatkind of situation no specific place to the children to do their homeworkmama told me she had to shout at her son to get out at the toilet sir if herlittle sister could do his/her homework on the toilet seat you have lack of privacy many of thecouples the women in particular complained about the lack of privacy notthat they were exposed but there too even with the familyif teenage sons teenage daughters taking a shower having relationships with theirhusband and wife not easy stressful also
a disparate group of differentnationalities in these places and we think you know in our innocence butthey're all the same all these asylum seekers are the same they're not usthere for them it must be the same but i questioned the manager who had to say hewho tried to be helpful and he put four nigerians in the one room in a centerand the nigerians nearly killed each other and i don't mean that but theywere not aware that some not nigeria's so differ from south nigeria our eastnigeria and west nigeria very very different and to be insensitive thatthat kind of thing was a complaint that was made to usthere was no Cooking, Recipes facilities this has
got a lot of publicity latelythey couldn't cook a meal everything was handed to them you had to be down atbreakfast you got the breakfast what it was bassy edible no doubt you came in atlunch and you got a basic meal edible i've eaten in many of these places i'vecome into these places unannounced and lined up with the residents and had ameal and i could quite easily eat it whether i could eat it day after dayyear after year for eight years i don't so they were there's a variety of ofcenters the conflict of different nationalities we came across a room onetime where there was a fellow for morocco open a double bed and there wastwo beds upstairs and he was looking at
manchester united vs. you know someoneand the muslim was trying to say his prayers in between the beds so you hadthat kind of conflict in a confined space very very difficult to say atleast and all of this monotony was lived in with no end in sight no certainty nohope no knowledge of where and when it was going to endcasca ask is the word i would have used in describing some of them and many ofthese people these residents were damaged their self-esteem esteem wasbroken their self-respect and their dignity was lost i'm not going to go onanymore that because in a moment after this lecture i will be talking to ithink who has will give her own
testimony of living for seven or eightyears in a direct provision center and it's better and more powerful if herstory is told in her own voice the length of the legal process was notsolved immediately by the new system and that was partly because the backlog camein prevented the transition smoothly through the new system i will focus nowif i might on one particular problem that i personally saw abeing very very acute when we visited the centers and that was they had notwho got the right to work and this with the boredom the ennui the monotony meantthat these people were dehumanized you go into a center in your cities youngmen and they're going around almost
hollowed-out as the board i use facelessthe sparkle had gone from their eyes the about dull they were dehumanized andi spoke to one man i remember vividly at one of the centers and i said how areyou getting on today i was referring to his legal position what stage in theprocess was he and he said forget about my papers forget about my legally all iwant to do is get up in the morning put on my clothes have my breakfast with mywife and children and go to work i will work for nothing and i want to come homein the evening and sit down with my wife and children and say to mychildren today i worked now that kind of testimony is huge and it's it's verycommon and when people were driven to
that kind of isolation their self-esteemis gone they become depressed they become d skilled and is skilled thereand many of the people here certainly are skilled people different skills butafter eight years without using their skills they are not skilled anymore andwhen if they are fortunate to be in the fifteen percent that wins the rafflethat gets permission to stay in one status or another they are now notsuitable to integrate the skills have gone there social i sayif they're institutionalized many of them are on medication valium the womenwill tell you that in particular so the combination therefore of thelength of time that you're to stay here
with the right of or the condition ofidleness is a powerful cocktail which can dehumanize all these people it'sshown by international research that there's the benefits of employment areundeniable for instance if these people were givenif the residents were given the right to work let's say after six months ninemonths we're the only country by the way with a with let fear in europe who doesnot give the right to work to asylum seekers after nine months all the restof europe dude why we don't do it i don't know and contrast what is open toour generous approach the new citizens who have a bit of paper when they camein maybe so if you give the people in
direct provision the right to work wewould be harmonized with the other european countries it has beenundeniably recognized that working promotes health and well-being itfacilitates integration when they get the right to stay they are much betterable to integrate because they've had a job they've been in society they havebeen mixing it promotes self-sufficiency and independence whereas to deny itpromotes dependency and institutionalized thinking andfurthermore it enhances the dignity of the individual these are undeniablebenefits to the right to work and do our report unequivocally suggested thatanyone who has not got a decision first
instance decision but in nine monthsshould be allowed to work immediately that was not done the government did notallow that interestingly enough then what happened the matter was taken tothe supreme court by one resident gentleman from burma who decided that hewould sue the state and base an argument not on the immigration act of thelegislation the local legislation but on human rights we heard petty glackin andnapoleons the rights of men and he decided that he would make an argumentto our supreme court on a human rights basis he pleaded the chapter of theeuropean union he pleaded the convention on human rights the strasbourgconvention but he also based his
argument on the irish constitution onerotten him and he succeeded and it's interesting because the title of this isthe right to right and the supreme court to its credit held that an asylum seekerin his position had a right to work not at the bottom line it first of all heldthat they would continue to hear it even though the applicant had got his papershalfway through the case and the case had become moot in the sense that it wasnot on an issue for this man so the courts in many cases in that type ofsituation will say well he has no more complaints he's got his paper he canwork away we will stop hearing it but theyconsidered in this case that there was
an important point of law of generalempire dunce that they would continue to hearit even though his case resolved the second thing that the supreme court heldwas that there is a right to work in the constitution now there was a seriousjurisprudence on that but the jurisprudence that existed was not verywell defined or clarified and so the right to work was rotted out sometimeswithout any inquisition as to what exactly the right to work meant but andthe supreme court referred to that that the right work is a bit vague butnevertheless there is a right to work in this situationthey also related to the section 41 of
the constitution the equality sectionwhich says that all citizens shall as human persons be held equal before thelaw all citizens were held equal question then was i say i'm seekerscertain citizens and how are they going to benefit from this but the court heldthat an asylum seeker might benefit from that even though they are not citizens ijust caught one bit from the supreme court which is telling it said a rightto work at least in the sense of freedom to work or seek employment is a part ofthe human personality and accordingly the article 40.1 requirements thatindividuals as human persons are required to be held equal before the lawmeans that those aspects of the right
which are part of human personalitycannot be withheld absolutely from citizens it goes on and it saysaccordingly in principle mr. justice our donna mcdonough say it said i would beprepared to hold that in the circumstances where there is no temporallimit on asylum process and there is an absolute prohibition on seekingemployment contained in the act is country to the constitutional rightto seek employment now that was very strong language and a strong recognitionit in fact mirrored what we said in our report that we felt from a moral pointof view not we didn't argue on constitutional rights or legal rights wejust argue the moral position was that
people like this should be allowed towork the supreme court however paid respect to the other sections in theconstitution the separation of powers section which says it's not for us thesupreme court to make the laws on when they write a mark but we are telling youthe absolute banned that you have on the right work is wrong and you better comeup with an alternative so they sent the government away and the government isdue to come back to the supreme court in a next month with their solution as tohow they do it and i only hope that the government's response is generous andthat they don't take a mean narrow view of what they might do the like thesupreme court did not say you cannot
distinguish between asylum seekers andcitizens they didn't say that they said in some cases you might be able to makeit a sanction but not in this one so it's up to the government now andhopefully the government will adopt the european position which is the right towork after nine months which is what we had recommended you know it would seemto be contradictory to their position and the generous position they have ingranting new citizens i'm coming to the end but someone is citing poetry earlyon and someone asked me recently was writing the report work well because thegovernment didn't embrace it and remember the government set it up andthe government had their people on it so
that every recommendation wemade was passed by the civil servants who had got the clearance from thesecretary-general evade their departments and yet when he came togovernment they dragged their feet on it am i the pessimistic should we neverhave done it we should have done it there are many reasons why i am proudthat we did it and that the people involved did such a good work andrecommended first of all he was well received by the government by doctorsbut it all in the senate it was complemented etcetera etc secondly itbrought all the stakeholders i hate that what stakeholders but it's handytogether all the people who are
interested in representing the ngos thegovernment and the interested individuals and asylum seekersthemselves from direct provision it brought them together and they'respeaking to each other and that can't be bad it should be emphasized that we wereasked to look at the current system we were not asked to invent a new systemour terms of reference can't find us to the direct provision as it was to makeimprovements in that fort lee this our working group report sets out a programand the government are following the program text sheet and all as theirefforts are but there's a program there they can't say there's no program therethey can say we can't do that or we're
trying our best okay but the program issaid andy and the report keeps an agenda alive and this is very important that'swhy this lecture and this kind of discussion is so important theseresidents must not be forgotten we cannot brush them aside we haveenough stains on our history in relation to residential institutions and otherinstitutions recently to let this continuethere has been some positive gains to the government did agree that theombudsman could take complaints from the residents in the system both thethe ombudsman and the children's album was an endso if children have been compared to had
a person to make it to know and thethere is some effort made to improve the Cooking, Recipes conditions the children's and werecommended that the allowance adults get nineteen euro a week no i asked younineteen euro and many of the centers are out in the country so if you get abus to the nearest place there's not always transport you have to pay the busyou don't the free travel it's the pay the bus and if you go intotown to walk around the shopping mall enviously looking at things and windowswithout any money in your pocket 350 will take a cup of coffeewhere's 19 children were given 9 euros how are you going to close and shoechildren children is under 18 you know a
14 year old boy goes to shoes you knowas anyone knows and there are a hundred euro ahead these sneakers and these arenot brands these are just ordinary sneakerswhere you're going to get the money for it and to the credit of the governmentthey have more recently introduced and integration policy so they areaddressing the issues of how people will integrate we've seen it invalid arenaand all these people around this is a facial program but how do peopleintegrate we only have to look at france to learn the lesson of non integrationand how the algerians were huddled the way had held it away in corners and whatkind of a tinderbox do you have there
now so if there's the people are comingand if they are to integrate them must integrate i think i finish there but sinceeveryone is citing poetry i imagine we'll do it too i started witha statistic a statistic but i finished with a poem is a poem by langston hughesthe american jazz poet it's called eye to eye too sing americai am the darker brother they sent me to eat in the kitchen when company comesbut i laugh and eat well and grow strong tomorrow i'll be at the table whencompany comes nobody will dare say to me eat in the kitchen then besides they'llsee how beautiful i am and be ashamed i
too am america thank you
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