I came back to Ireland after forty-two years in Canada and, remarkably, nobody gave me an instruction manual.

I didn’t need one.

Ireland had changed almost beyond recognition. The Church had retreated, the country had become wealthy, Europe was everywhere, immigration had transformed the streets, and quite a few things that were illegal when I left were now unremarkable parts of ordinary life.

But I still knew how the place worked.

Not the useful stuff. I had to relearn plenty of that. I mean the other stuff: how Irish people talk without necessarily saying what they mean; the importance of where somebody is from; the dangers of taking yourself too seriously; when an insult is actually a sign of affection; why history can suddenly enter an otherwise innocent conversation.

The operating system had been substantially upgraded, but I could still use the keyboard.

That got me wondering about somebody arriving in Ireland without any of this stored cultural knowledge.

Imagine arriving from Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan. You may know very little about Ireland beyond the fact that it is safe and somewhere on the western edge of Europe. You are handed information about accommodation, healthcare, education, employment and the international-protection system.

All important.

But who explains the Irish?

This is where a perfectly innocent question wanders into dangerous territory. Immigration has become one of those subjects on which we are expected to select a team before we’re allowed to speak. Immigration is good. Immigration is bad. Diversity is strength. Integration has failed.

I’m not particularly interested in any of those slogans.

I’m interested in information.

Every culture contains an enormous amount of assumed knowledge. We acquire it so gradually that we forget we ever learned it. How close to stand to somebody. How men and women interact. What constitutes rudeness. How authority works. What subjects are sensitive. Whether disagreement should be direct or disguised. What role religion plays. How families operate. What people laugh at.

None of this is encoded in our passports.

The greater the cultural distance travelled, the more useful a map of the destination becomes.

So I wondered whether Ireland provides one.

The answer turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.

Ireland does provide refugees with extensive practical information. The IPAS resident handbook explains the protection process and how to navigate healthcare, education, employment and public services.

But that isn’t quite the question.

I wanted to know whether we explained Ireland.

And then we discovered that, in one part of the refugee system, we do.

Refugees brought to Ireland through the organised Irish Refugee Protection Programme receive structured orientation. Before departure and after arrival, they can be introduced to Irish politics, education, employment, cultural norms, gender relations, children’s rights, the position of women, the Gardaí and everyday life.

Somebody, somewhere in the Irish State, therefore reached exactly the conclusion I had reached sitting in Galway:

people arriving from another society may benefit from having this society explained to them.

The curious thing is who gets the explanation.

Since 2015, a little over 4,500 refugees have entered through the organised resettlement programme. Over roughly the same period, close to 80,000 people applied for international protection after arriving through the much larger spontaneous route.

The structured cultural orientation appears to belong principally to the smaller group.

This becomes more interesting when you look at where recent applicants have come from.

In 2025, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan alone accounted for almost 38 per cent of international-protection applications.

It would be easy at this point to call these “Muslim countries” and disappear down the familiar rabbit hole.

That tells us surprisingly little.

A doctor from Karachi, a farmer from rural Afghanistan and a professional from Mogadishu don’t become culturally interchangeable because they share a religion.

The useful concept is cultural distance.

Contemporary Ireland is relatively secular. Men and women mix freely and have equal legal status. Same-sex marriage is ordinary law. Religion can be practised, changed, criticised or ignored. Children possess individual rights. Workplaces tend toward informality. Authority is treated with considerably less reverence than it once was.

Someone arriving from another society may share all of those assumptions, some of them, or very few.

We shouldn’t guess.

But neither should we pretend the differences don’t exist.

And here is the distinction that makes the whole thing rather simple.

Some things are laws and civic principles. Everyone living here needs to understand them.

Others are merely Irish customs. Nobody is obliged to adopt them.

You need to understand that women and men have equal rights.

You don’t need to develop an interest in hurling.

You must respect another person’s freedom of religion.

You are under no obligation whatsoever to drink Guinness.

And although Irish law requires many things of you, understanding what somebody means by “grand” remains entirely optional, if occasionally useful.

None of this requires newcomers to become culturally Irish.

Quite the opposite.

A Syrian family can remain Syrian. A Somali family can remain Somali. They can retain their food, religion, language, traditions and family life while understanding the society around them.

Integration doesn’t require people to become the same.

It requires them to become understandable to one another.

Which brings me back to the handbook nobody gave me.

I didn’t need it because I already had an old copy stored somewhere in my head. Forty-two years in Canada hadn’t erased it. I merely had to download the updates.

Someone arriving in Ireland for the first time doesn’t have that advantage.

So perhaps we should give them the manual.

Not an integration course. Not an examination. Certainly not a €4.7 million EU-funded Multicultural Civic Integration Knowledge Portal involving seven countries, fourteen NGOs and a twenty-six-person steering committee.

Just a small book.

Welcome to Ireland: The Things Nobody Tells You.

Here’s the country you’ve arrived in. Here’s a little history. Here’s how the place works. Here are some things we take seriously and some things we don’t. Here are a few things about us that may initially seem strange.

You don’t have to become us.

But we’d like you to understand us.

And perhaps we should make a little more effort to understand you too.

Welcome to Ireland.

Here’s the map nobody thought to give you.