Our scandalous treatment of dispossessed children

In the last issue I wrote about the plight of young people who arrive in this country as separated children seeking asylum. I hadn’t expected that the issue would be startlingly illustrated over the following 10 days, but there you are. You never know.

It emerged that separated children are being housed in accommodation centres which fail to meet legal minimum standards of care and safety. It is deeply discomforting to hear that 328 such children have disappeared from State care over the last five years from hostels and residential centres in Dublin.
In parallel we heard of the bizarre plot by members of the French charity Zoe’s Ark to bring a plane load of children (103 in all) from Chad to France. They have been arrested and charged with attempted abduction. They claim they were rescuing orphaned children from Darfur to bring them to host families, each of which had paid the charity several thousand euro.
It provoked outrage in Chad, a fury that was exacerbated when it emerged that most of the children weren’t orphans. Ninety one of the 103 came ‘from a family environment with at least one parent in a family role’…
The charity workers say they acted in good faith and that the children were presented as Sudanese orphans at risk fro the Darfur conflict. It’s going to trial. Traffickers or crusaders? Who knows what truths and lies and evasions will emerge or not?
But it begs many questions, some of which relate to the separated children now floating dangerously in the Irish social care system. Where did they come from? How did they get here? What’s really going on? And how can we ensure that they don’t get sucked into anti-social activities? Now they’re here, how can we best respond?
The disconnection of services targeting these young people doesn’t augur well. Neither does the uneasy and discomforting interplay of advocacy and indifference, of unhelpful services and hyperactive charitable organisations.
Overall, the omens are poor. Look at the mess that has been revealed in the Paris banlieues. Dammit, look at the situation emerging here with families moving themselves lock stock and two smoking barrels, a so-called white flight and an attendant ghettoisation of, in particular, African children, as reported in Intercultural Education, a report from Dublin 15.
It ain’t that pretty at all. Just one example – the aptly named Mary Mother of Hope National School in Clonee had three teachers six years ago. Now it has 39, there are 700 pupils, 60% of whom don’t speak English as a first language.
We are facing into a tidal wave of change and while, quite clearly, many agencies are concerned and active, there is no sense that anyone is in charge, that collectively we have agreed on where we’re going and what we’re going to do if we ever get there. David Begg of ICTU said last week that it would be ‘unconscionable’ for Ireland to repeat the mistakes made by other countries on immigration. But that’s exactly what we’re doing.
There are straws in the wind – the Garda Siochana is thinking of recruiting from east Europe police forces. That’s good. But they’d need to also recruit from Nigeria, despite the inevitable protests from civil libertarians.
Just how ugly it can all get was illustrated in Italy where there has been a succession of attacks on Roma and Romanians over the last month. A key trigger was the murder of 47 year old Giovanna Reggiana.
The alleged killer was living with his family and up to 60 other Roma in fragile shacks hidden in a wood in northern Rome. They are but a tiny fraction of the half million Romanians who have moved into Italy in the last five years, most of whom live in appalling conditions similar to those in which the Rostas family lived (by their own choice) on the M50 roundabout.
But the mood in Italy has darkened and there have been many attacks on Roma and, ironically, on Romanians, even though the latter hate the Roma and discriminate against them in their home country.
The Italian authorities are beginning to expel the Roma, as the Irish have as well. Mind you, two of the Rostas family have already returned to Ireland, so it’s not that simple…
It might seem insane that living on an M50 roundabout could possibly be better than living in Romania. But it must be. They wouldn’t come back if it weren’t. I suppose they’re fed here. And charities support them. And somewhere there’s the hope that there’s more. Sure, some are here to live off the fat, but most want to work.
We have to remember that life in some parts of the world is simply unliveable. How and why else would fifty six Africans set out from Senegal in a rickety boat to try and reach the Canaries?
It’s an appalling story. One by one they died and were pushed off the side of the boat or committed suicide. Only one survived, Leidi Fall, and he was too weak to push the bloated bodies of the last seven passengers off. Their boat was found south of Cape Verde having run out of fuel and drifted 2,000km south of their target. It was his second attempt to make it.
Now that’s what I call desperation. How about you?
It’s hard to envisage solutions to all this. But the least we might do is try.