A CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR IMMIGRANTS

I HOPE John O Donoghue has a happy Christmas. The last time I saw our Minister for Justice on television, he looked and sounded like a deeply troubled man. He was being interviewed on the Prime Time programme on RTE about the refugee issue. As the programme unfolded, the awful reality of the experience of refugees and immigrants in Ireland was laid bare. Alongside the moving and emotional testimonials of the people themselves, the behaviour of officialdom here began to look ever more hostile and prejudiced. Even if we didn t already know it, the programme made it quite clear that horrible things are being done in the name of the people of this country by those charged with responsibility for this area of our social administration. In the circumstances, the Minister s performance was far from reassuring. New measures have been introduced by the government which would facilitate the deportation of immigrants. While he was hesitant, inarticulate and disturbingly clumsy in his account of his own Department s stewardship in this regard, one thing was clear: he wants to see bodies on the boat out of Dun Laoghaire. The Minister said that he hoped that illegal immigrants would do the honourable and decent thing and leave. The words should have stuck in his throat. What, he should have been asked, about the Irish government doing the honourable thing? What about the Irish government doing the decent thing? What about the Irish government letting these people stay?
Let no one be under any illusion just how unpleasant what s happening is. In Amiens Street station, there is a welcoming committee for people getting off the train from Belfast. Black people are being singled out, stopped and questioned. Some of them are being forced to take the same train back across the border.
But it isn t just at railway stations that the new border guards are going into action. All points of entry are now being defined as security zones. Passport control at airports is becoming increasingly unpleasant. Ports are being targeted too. Inexorably, the self-flattering notion which we have attempted to propagate of Ireland of the Welcomes is being contradicted by the reality that there is a modern-day gestapo at work here.
Is this really what we have been reduced to? Tens of thousands of Irish emigrants went to the United States and lived there illegally during the past 20 years. They are still going. And when the Donnelly Visa lottery takes place, every couple of years, we howl with indignation if we don t get what we consider to be our entitlement. Irish politicians participate wholeheartedly in this farce, pulling every stroke they can dream up to get green cards for people they already know to be in the States. I don t have any problem with this, really. The more freedom people have to travel between Ireland and the United States and to work in either jurisdiction, the better. But for those same politicians to be throwing their hands up in horror about a small influx of refugees arriving on these shores is a shameful example of hypocrisy at its most foul.
What s worse is the zeal with which some of the immigration officials pursue their mission as enforcers. You may recall a case in the not-too-distant past in which an Algerian national who had been living and working in Ireland for a number of years, and who was married to an Irish woman, was intercepted at Dublin airport. The fare to deport him was extracted from his brother, who runs a restaurant in Dublin. Having been put on notice about the intention to contest the deportation order in the courts the following morning, the two officials left the jurisdiction with the Algerian national early the next day, apparently in order to ensure that the individual concerned would be on a flight to Algeria before anyone could intervene.
At the time the obvious question was this: why did they not wait to have their position vindicated by the Courts? What frenzy had gripped them that they could not hold back? Some months later, the individual in question won the right to remain here through the courts, and luckily he was allowed to leave Algeria. But he might not have been. And given the appalling political climate in that country now, who knows what fate might have subsequently befallen him?
Not all of the officials involved are quite so zealous but if this is the spirit in which even some of those in immigration control go about their work, then serious mistakes will be made and who knows what grisly misdeed we will be party to in the process?
So I hope that John O Donoghue has a happy Christmas and indeed a prosperous new year. In turn, he might just consider extending the same greetings to the 4,000 or so immigrants who are facing the threat of deportation over the coming months. Indeed he has the means by which he could ensure that this is precisely the kind of Christmas they would enjoy.
He could offer an amnesty to all illegal immigrants currently in Ireland. He could give them visas to live and work here. And then we could begin 1998 with a debate about how best to shape a decent, humane and generous policy, which would allow immigrants to come here to live and work.
It s as big a test as we have faced as a nation since independence. How we respond will be a measure of us the Irish as a people. I fear that we may disgrace ourselves.
But it doesn t have to be that way.
Niall Stokes
Editor