The screwed system

It has been widely said that Cork TD Noel O’Flynn was merely seeking votes when he pandered to the lowest common denominator a few weeks back by launching an attack on refugees as “spongers and freeloaders” who were “screwing the system”. But this is far too kind.

Rather than opportunistically relating to bigotry among voters, there is the possibility O’Flynn was consciously out to engender bigotry among them.

Hatred of refugees was the inevitable consequence of a member of parliament demanding compulsory health tests for all immigrants on the ground that they were “putting disease control programmes at risk”. Why should we believe that this predictable outcome wasn’t the point and purpose of his intervention, the exact effect he was deliberately aiming at?

Likewise, it’s said that Charlie McCreevy allowed loyalty to a colleague to overrule better judgment when, days after O’Flynn’s outburst, he travelled to Cork to speak at a fund-raising dinner for the foul-mouth. But where’s the evidence for such a benign interpretation? Could it not be argued that McCreevy was signalling his support for O’Flynn because he shares and endorses the disgusting views O’Flynn had spelt out?

The notion that racism arises at the bottom of society out of ignorance and fear and that political leaders then have a moral decision to make as to whether they cultivate it or curb it is the reverse of the truth. Historically, racism has tended to develop first at the top. Whether it finds resonance lower down depends on what difficulties the common people are already experiencing in day-to-day life and on the degree and clarity of grass-roots resistance to the rule of the elements on top.

The most powerful factor generating racism in southern Ireland today, as in EU countries generally, is immigration control. If it is true, as governments say, that immigrants seeking refugee status are mainly or largely “bogus”, that they are all, or almost all, conmen and women trying to pull the wool over our eyes so as to get from us something which they are not entitled to and which will leave us worse off, then hostility towards them will come to seem reasonable, even natural.

In Wexford last December, eight people from Kurdistan died in horrific circumstances in the sealed container in which they had travelled to Ireland. Bertie Ahern, in a speech crafted by his writers to project him as angry at the crime and compassionate towards the victims, announced that his government would “do everything in our power to find those responsible” – by which he meant the traffickers who had organised the refugees’ terrible journey.

Doubtless, the traffickers are bad guys. But traffickers would have no role or function, no service to offer to anyone, if Ahern’s government and others were not building up and grimly defending the walls of Fortress Europe in order to keep immigrants out.

The Wexford atrocity followed the death last year of 58 Chinese people who suffocated in a container which had entered Britain from Holland. Meanwhile, bodies of refugees trying to make it into the EU are washed up every day along Italy’s Adriatic coast. So common has the sight become of sopping bundles of humanity tossed onto the beaches that Italian tourism chiefs have reportedly demanded navy patrols to fish the bodies out before they float into view to spoil the contentment of lucrative holiday-makers.

In southern Spain, too, on a daily basis, the bodies are picked up of those who have tried and failed to traverse the strait from the north African enclave of Ceuta.

All governments in western Europe respond to these ghastly occurences by attacking those who ply the “evil trade” of trafficking – while simultaneously resolving to make it even more difficult for refugees to reach their shores safely and legally and arranging harsher treatment for those who manage nonetheless to get through.

The rise of racism in southern Ireland, as elsewhere, cannot be understood other than in the context of official policy and practice. This fact was hinted at – no more – in an advertising campaign by Amnesty last year. But far from welcoming the campaign as a rare, if tentative, acknowledgement of the truth, commentators, including a number usually seen as being somewhat on the Left, rushed to regret Amnesty’s ascription of malignancy to politicians of the mainstream.

This year again, an Amnesty campaign implying that words like O’Flynn’s might put refugees’ lives at risk from the boot-boys of bigotry drew gasps of dismay even from normally fair-minded folk like Theo Dorgan. A terrible accusation against the decent people of Cork altogether, it was suggested, when it was nothing of the kind. In context, what the Amnesty posters intimated was that society in Cork as exemplified by its politicians might have a case on racism to answer – in any rational estimation, a guarded response to the poisonous outpourings of the likes of O’Flynn.

The context includes also the fact that it was only three days after O’Flynn’s rant against refugees that Zhao Liu Tao was murdered by racists in Dublin. There’s little reason to believe there was a direct connection: but no reason not to believe that O’Flynn’s intervention will have boosted the numbers emboldened to say that while the murder was a terrible thing, mind you, they could understand anger at the “crisis” created by the numbers of refugees.

But there is no refugee crisis. There’s a resource crisis. Or, to be more exact, a crisis in the distribution of resources.

The number of refugees is much too small to be a major factor in the housing and jobs crisis affecting working-class communities. Of the 25,000 people who entered the southern State in the past two years, around 17,000 were in categories tacitly excluded from those bracketed by the bigots as refugees/asylum seekers to be looked on with suspicion. That is, they were returning emigrants or EU or US citizens.

Even if all of the others were spongers determined to take every State benefit available but never to do a day’s work, they wouldn’t be a decisive factor in depriving native people of resources.

A moment’s thought on Irish patterns of emigration over the years makes the point. Allowed to work, immigrants everywhere tend to be higher net contributors to the State than the generality of the host population.

It needs to be stressed and stressed again that the view of immigrants as a drain on “our” resources – to be accepted or resented according to degrees of charity – is wholly inaccurate.

And, anyway, it’s rich to the point of being ridiculous for a member of Fianna Fail to complain about “spongers and freeloaders... screwing the system”. Fianna Fail has for decades been sheltering the major scroungers screwing the system in Ireland.

Aside and apart from the crooks and swindlers who have occupied the highest positions within Fianna Fail, the party has helped construct a haven for tax-dodgers and rip-off merchants of one sort and another who have cumulatively drained enough revenue from the State to fund, for example, a crash programme of public building to cater for all those in need of affordable housing, however long or short their residency in the country.

Take Elan, the pharmaceutical giant which was the wonder of the Irish stock exchange just a wet week ago which has now gone wallop. In 2000, Elan recorded profits of IR£150.3 million – on which it paid tax at a rate of 2.6 percent.

Then there’s the charismatic Tax-Avoidance Kid, J. P. McManus, who deprived the State of the more than IR£100 million he’d have had to cough up if he’d been subjected to the same regime as PAYE victims by skedaddling out of the country one step ahead of the revenue posse, and who has been welcomed home with open arms and hailed as a hero by Ahern and sections of the kept media for offering half that towards the Bertie Bowl folly.

The fat controller of Independent Newspapers, Tony O’Reilly, although reputedly “Ireland’s richest man”, appears not to pay any tax in Ireland at all. There’s Michael Smurfit, who “earns” a fortune every year from the labour of Irish and other workers while officially resident in the taxation bolt-hole of Monaco.

In the Financial Services Centre in Dublin every day, hundreds of companies play the money markets with billions of euro which might otherwise be used to improve public services here or help lift millions in the third world out of dire poverty.

To say nothing of the high-octane financial shenanigans of AIB, Bank of Ireland, NIB, ICI, Goodman, Eircom, etc., etc.

The main reason public services are suffering from scarcity is that the chancers and crooks who have control of our resources care nothing for the public interest and are motivated only by private greed.

One solution, revolution. Anybody who tells you different is squirting cider in your eye.