100 Voices #AllAgainstRacism: Andre Fazaz – "It’s 2021. Ireland is very diverse right now, so let’s start including everybody"

Andre Fazaz,
singer, rapper (A92)

Ireland is very diverse, there’s a lot of cultures here now. Even in the last five to ten years, there have been Polish, Nigerian, Ghanian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Brazilian – many different countries that have come to Ireland. It’s time that we come together and just say, “Forget racism, forget the colour of the skin. Let’s just try and diversify the country. Let’s try and give everybody the same opportunity.”

When it comes to the Irish music industry, RTÉ shows, The Late Late Show – you don’t really see that many people from the urban scene. Traditional music is more favoured over, for example, Afrobeats. So if somebody wants to book something Irish, they would automatically just go to traditional music. But the definition of what it is to be Irish has slowly changed over the past few years. We have Afro-Irish, we have Brazilian-Irish, whatever the case may be: there’s people that are actually born in Ireland, they’ve been there their whole life, all they know is Ireland.

So when somebody says, “What’s Irish music?” you could say, “Ok there’s Afro-Irish Afro beats, There’s Afro-drill, there’s Irish drill.” At the end of the day, we are all Irish despite us being brown, yellow, white, grey, blue, orange, whatever the colour is. It’s 2021. Ireland is very diverse right now, so let’s start including everybody.

Read Part 2 of 100 Voices: #AllAgainstRacism in the current issue of Hot Press:

Special thanks to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission for their support in this project.