Driving for change

It’s enough to make your blood boil. Over the past week, the Evening Herald highlighted the cruel treatment meted out to Andrei Burlacau by the Department of Justice.

Andrei is originally from Romania. He left his home in the mid-nineties, just one of the hundreds of thousands of Romanians who were desperate at the time to find a better place to live and work than their own corrupt and crumbling country. A small proportion of these migrants ended up here; Andrei was one of them.

He applied for refugee status. While the wheels of bureaucracy turned with painful sloth, he went about the business of trying to make a life for himself in his adopted home. Originally a law student, he trained as a bus driver and got a job with Dublin Bus. That was back in 1998.

In many ways, his case offers an example of how the process of integration can and probably should operate, for immigrants to this country. Andrei worked hard. His employers, Dublin Bus, describe him as a model worker, someone who was willing to muck in and do whatever was asked or required of him. But he was popular with his colleagues as well, winning their respect and affection as a decent skin, who was a trusted member of the workforce.

As is often the case with immigrants, his work ethic was strong. He did well from it, or relatively well, picking up double-shifts and earning accordingly. He moved into a new city-centre apartment. He bought himself a car. He was settling down in Ireland. He had established roots here.

Three years, or thereabouts, after he first began to work in Dublin Bus, the immigration authorities decided to refuse his application for refugee status. They sent a deportation order to his original address. Andrei never received it. You could of course argue that it was his fault – he had forgotten to inform the authorities of his

new address. Whatever the rights and wrongs

of that – and you can take it that Andrei had begun to think of himself as a legitimate member of Irish society, and one who was pulling his weight – immigration officials didn’t hang around. When they located him, he was arrested. He was given no opportunity to close his affairs in Ireland. Instead, he was forcibly, immediately deported – put on a plane back to Romania apparently with just his jacket, his wallet and his mobile phone.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he was fucked out, unceremoniously and in short order – with no opportunity to collect his property or to bring his affairs in Ireland to a proper end. But this is the way immigration operates here. In effect the authorities carry out a legitimatised kidnap operation, sneaking up on their unfortunate, vulnerable targets, locking them up overnight and throwing them onto a plane, often before they have a chance even to phone a friend.

Why do we subject people to barbarous treatment like this? It would be laughable if it wasn’t tragic that this kind of appallingly insensitive action is being presided over by the Department of Justice. Some fucking justice – snatching people, in many instances without warning, and forcibly expelling them.

It is just another example of how crude and ignorant our policy on immigration really is. And for this, we must place the burden of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the Minister for Justice, John O’Donoghue. It doesn’t matter that he is not in personal charge of what immigration officers do on a day-to-day basis – these crude and despicable tactics are being pursued under his remit. He is the one responsible for putting the relevant laws in place. And he certainly is directly responsible for the spirit in which they are currently being enforced.

Andrei Burlacu may be relatively fortunate. Along the way, a small number of bus drivers here have generated bad press for the workforce because of their racist attitudes – but that tarnished image of the city’s bus drivers has happily been overturned by the public support that Andrei has received from his colleagues in the National Bus and Rail Workers Union. The General Secretary of the Union, Liam Tobin, issued a statement condemning the treatment of the Romanian driver. “The invidious manner of his deportation, which has aroused such resentment among his colleagues, cannot go unchallenged,” he said. Damn right.

The NRBU intend to put pressure on the Department of Justice to facilitate the return to these shores of Andrei Burlacu. It is a campaign that deserves support. There is an opportunity here, to press for the just and humane treatment of one, decent individual who – even if he made mistakes himself along the way – has been grotesquely treated by the system. And going beyond this, there is just the possibility that the manifest ignorance and injustice of this particular case might provide an opportunity to focus the government on the need to completely change both the policies currently in place in relation to deportations, and the draconian laws that underpin them.

This should be the target. Start agitating for it now.