By John Meagher
Lorraine O’Connor has had to get used to the “go back to where you come from” taunts. They occur more frequently than she cares to think about – on the street, in the park, at the supermarket.
But the Dubliner who proudly wears the Muslim headscarf, the hijab, every day never lets a verbal attack go unanswered. “I say to them ‘I’m from Coolock. Where are you from?’ You should see the look on their faces. They weren’t expecting to have abused an Irish woman.”
Lorraine converted to Islam 17 years ago at a time when Muslim numbers in Ireland were in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands of today. “There are definitely more of us now,” she says. “And more and more Irish people are finding that Islam is what they have been searching for.” [Read more…]
