Race To The Bottom

"It's not the first racist attack I've heard of, but it's the first of this sort - one where people would literally daub 'blacks out' on a home. To my eyes, that's not an attack on a family - it's an attack on everyone."
People Before Profit Councillor Gino Kenny is the local representative in Clondalkin, a part of Dublin which unwittingly found itself in the glare of media attention last month. The crudely defaced façade of 14 Lealand Avenue registered a horribly sinister message. Most Irish people were aghast at the shocking ugliness of racism in action.
“That’s what caught people so much,” says Kenny, who was also involved in the clean-up operation, as well as providing assistance to the victim, Rebecca, and her two children. “It was so in-your-face, so blatant. The family’s car tyres were slashed – twice, in fact. The first time, it was presumed to be your run-of- the-mill anti-social behaviour. But it wasn’t; this was an attempt to torment a family, and drive them out of their home.”
And, as we now know, the racists achieved that objective. Kenny, along with other members of what is normally a very close-knit community, desperately wanted her to stay, but Rebecca (whose surname has not been made public, for obvious reasons) felt that she had to leave the area. “She’s not going to come back to her home,” Kenny says.
The land of a hundred thousand welcomes has a lot to answer for.

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Ireland is not a racist country. You hear it said, time and again. In ways, with good reason: certainly, politically we have not seen any surge in support for the far-right, of the kind that has been happening in many other European states. We’re not hastily sweeping a genocidal past under the carpet either, nor dealing with minority communities rioting on the streets.
In fact, the statistics suggest that Ireland has a spectacularly low level of racist crime. The 2013 figures from the Central Statistics Office show 113 hate crimes recorded, of which less than 100 were racially motivated. The 2014 figures record just 53 hate crimes overall.
Good news? Not quite...
“The official picture, I think we can all accept, grossly distorts the reality,” says Jennifer Schweppe, lecturer at the School of Law in University of Limerick. “Even the Garda interviewees that we spoke to agree that the figures are in no way representative.”
Schweppe is co-Director, with Amanda Haynes, of the Hate and Hostility Research Group at UL. They – along with researcher James Carr – have recently completed an extensive study of hate crime in Ireland, commissioned by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
“If you look at the NGO reporting mechanisms, as opposed to the official channels, it says there were 40 assaults alone. There was more race hate crime recorded in these figures than there was hate crime overall in the official figures, and that’s before even considering homophobic, transphobic and other motivations.”
Jennifer DeWan is the Campaigns and Communications Manager for one such NGO; Nasc, a Cork-based immigrant support centre. They have sought to offer an alternative to going straight to the Gardaí with reports of race crime – and as a result they may have a considerably more accurate picture than the official one.
“We’ve been using this system since 2011,” DeWan says, “and we’ve seen a steady increase in reports. Most likely, that has more to do with more people knowing that the mechanism is there, than with any rise in racist crime, but it still tells a story; the official numbers are way off.
”The question is: how far? The European Network Against Racism (ENAR) findings of 2013/2014 may be instructive. In their report, Northern Ireland reported 704 racist crimes and complaints; Scotland 4,735; and England and Wales a whopping 30,788.
Ireland’s number? 93. Whatever way you look at it, that has to be wrong.

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One fundamental difference between Ireland and those other jurisdictions is that we have no hate crime laws to speak of. “Of the 57 nations in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,” says Schweppe, “the enormous majority have some kind of hate crime laws. That tells you something about where we are; we’re an outlier in Europe. If you look at England and Wales, they have very well- developed hate crime legislation, and have had it since 1998. Northern Ireland has had its legislation since 2004. We are lagging far behind.
“England and Wales, which is single jurisdiction, has teams that specialise in hate crimes,” she continues. “If you look at the Garda inspectorate report – which engaged in something like 1,000 Gardaí – not one of them had recorded a hate crime. If our neighbours have teams that do this, but in Ireland not a single Garda in 1,000 has, that points to a systematic problem here."
One piece of legislation, the Prohibition of Incitement To Hatred Act, 1989, makes up our legal framework on hate crime. It does exactly what it says on the tin – tailored more towards preventing lynch mobs from forming than bringing the motivation of individual crimes under the spotlight.
“Because the Act is almost two decades old,” DeWan adds, “it’s unable to account for online hate speech. There’s an EU protocol on cyber-racism, but Ireland still hasn’t ratified it. A perfect example would have been the case in Waterford last year, where something started on Facebook – a page aiming to ‘name and shame’ members of the Roma community in Waterford. It quickly – within days – escalated to something akin to a riot on the streets, and a lynch mob. If anyone feels that hate speech isn’t as bad as action, then the speed with which that situation escalated into physical violence is the perfect illustration of why this needs to be thoroughly addressed by legislation.”
Schweppe goes further: “Because the legal system doesn’t have the language to deal with a hate element, it fails victims – often failing them the whole way through. When the system can’t address the issue, you find people changing the way they live, trying to avoid these problems. When the system is left without the language of hate crime, then from the second a person walks into a Garda station, they’re at the mercy of whether or not that individual Garda has specific training or not, or whether they understand to record the complaint as a hate crime. If it’s not recorded, it won’t be investigated, but even when it is recorded, it may not be prosecuted anyway.”
It turns out that the incident in Clondalkin, which shocked the nation, is far from the first of its kind. “Of twelve victims in our report, four were driven from their homes,” Schweppe says.

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The report which Schweppe and her colleagues recently published, Out of the Shadows: Legislating for Hate Crime in Ireland , outlines proposals for legislative reform, in the shape of a meticulously drafted Criminal Law (Hate Crime) Amendment Bill 2015. The authors studied approaches taken in other jurisdictions and considered how international best practice would fit in an Irish context.
“What we’re doing is simply taking offences that are known to the law – criminal assault, criminal damage, public order offences – and inserting the hate element into them,” says Schweppe. “We feel the word hate – while useful – doesn’t capture all the types of motivation, so the proposals encompass prejudice, bias, hatred and hostility, and contempt.”
Schweppe believes that the effect of introducing a bill of this kind would be powerful.
“The international experience tells us that hate crime is a message crime,” she says. “When someone commits a hate crime, they’re sending a message that an individual and their community aren’t welcome. But when we legislate against it, we’re sending a message that hate crime is not acceptable, and that society will not tolerate it. That message is not being sent at the moment.”
DeWan concurs: “There’s a sense of futility about tackling racism, and that’s disheartening to see. Law in itself doesn’t fix racism – it doesn’t cure racism – but it does create a normative framework, that says this jurisdiction, this society doesn’t tolerate racism. I think it has a very strong impact on people’s thinking, at the moment, that there is no legislation in place.”

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Call it complacency, naivety, or even laziness, but our lack of a legal framework is a blot on our otherwise impressive attitude towards racial issues. The heroic actions of the men and women of the Irish Navy on LÉ Eithne, for example, rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, deserve to be applauded. But how can we send our ships to rescue people, when we are unequipped to provide safe harbour on our shores?
The Syrian Humanitarian Admission Programme (SHAP) focused on offering temporary Irish residence to the vulnerable and helpless victims of a bloody civil war; it successfully reunited one family now living in Cork.
“They are now suffering ongoing harassment at their home,” DeWan says. “The woman is afraid to open the door or go outside. Everything on the news is about people going through horrific experiences leaving refugee camps; imagine arriving here and going through this?"
Clearly, action is urgently required. The strict laws on hate crime in England and Wales didn’t simply materialise overnight; it took the publication of a report in 1999 to prompt the decisive shift.
“The recommendations made in the MacPherson report were taken incredibly seriously by the police services,” Schweppe explains. “These included intensive training, so the process of recording
was explained and understood. The entire system was overhauled to ensure that institutional bias and institutional prejudice would not impact upon the way in which a crime was recorded or investigated.”
The MacPherson report was prompted by the brutal, racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death on a south London street corner in 1993.
We need to ensure that it doesn’t take a similarly catastrophic event for things to change here.