Racism in the Irish establishment (part II)

Tuesday November 05, 2002 20:17

by MG

In 1997, current Justice Minister Michael McDowell (PDs) described the way the Government treated asylum seekers as "barbarism". He is now enforcing the exact same policies... (I'm reprinting this in full as you need to subscribe to Ireland.com)

McDowell buries better instincts
Fintan O' Toole.

Ireland can be a depressing place sometimes: corrupt, incompetent, cynical, smug. The saving grace has always been personal kindness.

Faced with abstract questions, we can often be intolerant, self-obsessed and hypocritical. Faced with individual suffering, we can be wonderful.

Last week's horrible little saga of the Brazilian cleaning workers held in virtual slavery in Dublin was a case in point. They were victims of bad laws and the beggars-on-horseback attitude of a newly affluent society. But they were rescued by the simple undramatic decency of a neighbour who saw the way they were being treated and felt ashamed to be Irish.

This instinctive impulse of generosity towards vulnerable people and outrage on their behalf was obvious also in the responses of a comfortable Dublin barrister. On a fine Saturday morning in 1997, he was driving into the city centre when he passed the headquarters of the Department of Justice on Stephen's Green.

There was a queue of refugees and asylum-seekers outside the building, about three or four hundred strong. He was so appalled by what he afterwards called "the indignity and contempt with which the Irish State was treating these families" that he called the Sunday Independent and asked them to send a photographer to capture the scene.

A fortnight later, this time on a day when rain was lashing down, he witnessed the same unholy sight. As he recalled, "The same three or four hundred men, women and children queued. . .They were soaked to the skin - even the children and babies. That scene was photographed as well. Several months later, the Department of Justice apologised to the Oireachtas for this behaviour. So well it might have done - especially when nothing was done to stop the barbarism when it was first brought to the Department's attention."

The barrister was no left-wing bleeding-heart liberal. But he had experienced one of those moments when political ideology doesn't act as a filter and the sheer cruelty of what is happening to other human beings in front of your eyes evokes a visceral response of shame and anger.

It was not the first time that, as he put it, his "blood boiled - or froze - in relation the Department of Justice". He had been sickened by "the appalling spectacle of a Dublin-Belfast bus being escorted by squad cars because there was a black man on it who turned out to be a long-term Belfast resident".

The barrister's name was Michael McDowell.

He wrote lucidly and passionately about all of this in the Sunday Independent in 1998 and 1999 when he was a private citizen. He told his readers that "the Irish State has a tradition of hard-nosed, red-necked discrimination". He warned them not to trust official denials and spinning because "the underlying values of the Department of Justice's immigration policy are never committed to writing".

Michael McDowell is now, of course, Minister for Justice at the head of the Department he accused of "barbarism" in its treatment of asylum-seekers.

What he wrote is immensely important. He was expressing the spirit that saves us from barbarism. He was vindicating the instinct that tells us that laws and systems must be ultimately subject to basic human decency: "Now it is time for coolness and kindness as qualities in the debate on immigration. . .Humanity has now a chance to prevail. . .What is of concern is not the issue but the values which we bring to bear on it."

Kindness, humanity and a sense of values are exactly what is called for in the case of Florinda Sylaj, a Kosovar widow, and her daughters, Eni, who is five, and Eda, who is four. Eni and Eda have lived in Castleknock for three years, which is most of their lives. They go to the local Educate Together school, where they are much loved and cherished. This is their world.

Florinda Sylaj's claim for asylum was refused, even though her husband was killed in the war and she fears his family because she is Catholic and they are Muslim.

This may or may not be a proper decision on the basis of the law. What is clear, however, is that it is unusually cruel to the little girls whose lives are to be torn apart. It is precisely because such cases do arise from time to time that the law allows the Minister for Justice the discretion to overturn a deportation order on compassionate grounds. In spite of pleas from the local community and especially from the school, Michael McDowell has refused to do so.

If it was barbaric to make asylum-seekers stand in the rain, what word do we use for what happened on October 8th last, when the Sylaj home was raided in the early morning, and the two little girls were questioned by officials for an hour-and- a-half with no other adults present?

And if Michael McDowell in office can so effectively bury the instincts that made his blood boil that Saturday morning in 1997, what remains of the kindness that is all we have to save us from the cynicism that will make us an irredeemably nasty society?