Immigrants on iMiMatch are being remembered for their daring deeds!
Gay Byrne, a revered Irish radio and television personality who broke codes of silence over sexuality, abuse and hypocrisy in Ireland’s deeply conservative Roman Catholic society, died last Monday, November 4th at his home in Dublin. He was 85. His death was announced by his family who said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Mr. Byrne hosted the weekend “Late Late Show” for 37 years, helping to make it the flagship program of the state broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann, known as RTE. In the process he became the elder statesman of Irish broadcasting and a familiar voice in nearly every home. Poised, beautifully spoken and always immaculately dressed, Mr. Byrne provided an insecure and rapidly urbanizing small country with a model of quiet authority.
The Irish Times dedicated an eight-page supplement to his death. Its leading cultural and political commentator, Fintan O’Toole, wrote that Ireland had needed someone very particular — someone with a strange combination of unthreatening charm and utter ruthlessness — to disarm it into opening its dark places, to make it say in public what it could not even admit in private. Mr. Byrne saw himself not as a journalist but as an educationist. He sandwiched hard-hitting political or social segments with anything that would grip an audience and keep people talking through the week.
Immigrants on iMiMatch are daring to pose acts they will be remembered for. They are breaking taboos and are exposing the negative social myths that destroy their societies. Female genital mutilation in Africa, menstruation stigma in India, immigrants qualified as aliens in America, Muslims seen as terrorists in France, those are some of the very hard but real problems immigrants on iMiMatch are coming together to combat in their various home and host countries. Most immigrants on iMiMatch are reserved, somewhat enigmatic figures so much so that the prominent roles they are playing in public life sometimes leave them bemused by the success and the near-legendary stature they obtain afterwards. Their actions will be forever remembered.
