IT was amusing to hear the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern calling for a reasoned debate on the asylum issue last week. During the previous seven days two of his own TDs had gone further than any other Irish politicians yet in stoking the fires of racial hatred.
The first intervention came from the Taoiseach's brother, the TD for Dublin North-West, Noel Ahern. A man who has attempted to make a virtue of his 'right-to-life' anti abortion views, Ahern didn't seem too concerned about carrying the implied logic of those views through in relation to immigrants and asylum-seekers. Ahern is known as a somewhat pious Catholic of the old school. Is there not supposed to be some basic tenet in Christianity about loving your neighbour as yourself? Isn't one of the essential Christian values meant to be based on the story of how Joseph and Mary could find no room at the inn in Bethlehem, and were forced to have their child - the son of God! - in a stable on a hillside? Are we not meant to conclude from this poignant tale that there should always be a welcome in a Christian place for travellers and nomads of whatever shade or stripe?
No matter. Noel Ahern's statements on the issue hit all those buttons familiar from the rantings of racist groups in Britain and elsewhere. Talking about immigrants he said there was concern amongst people "who feel threatened by them and who feel they are in competition with them for housing and jobs."
Was he saying this to support the case for more investment, by the government, in housing? Was he arguing for a greater emphasis on skills training for his working-class constituents? No. He was making the point that something would have to be done about the numbers of immigrants arriving here. And in his language, he was running the risk of fuelling that most primitive of (ir)rationalisations of racial hatred: they're taking our jobs; they're taking our houses; next, they'll be taking our women.
It got worse. The following day, perhaps emboldened by Noel Ahern's putrid contribution to the 'debate', another of Bertie Ahern's party colleagues entered the arena.
Ivor Callely, the Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin North Central, called for a tough line on asylum-seekers. The language which Callely was quoted as using in an Irish Times report, was intemperate in the extreme. He raised the spectre of bogus and rogue asylum-seekers, expressing concern about "the block of people coming to Ireland to cash in on the benefits asylum-seekers are able to claim." He talked about "great abuses" of the system. But he went further in describing what he saw as the appropriate response. How should we treat 'illegal' immigrants? We should be tough, he said. We should "throw them out. Send them back."
Now I don't know how you feel about this - but my own response is that this is completely inappropriate language for the Chairman of the Eastern Health Board to use, under any circumstances. We have all seen pictures of asylum-seekers being dragged, kicking and screaming, to airplanes, waiting on the tarmac to 'send them back'. We all know that individuals have been battered, bruised and injured in these circumstances. This is what happens, some of the time at least, when you decide to 'throw' asylum-seekers out. What kind of twisted sense of priorities would enable the Chairman of the Eastern Health Board - that's the Eastern Health Board - to feel free to recommend this kind of bullying response?
For the record, the Eastern Health Board is responsible for accommodating the bulk of the asylum-seekers who have arrived in Ireland. It is the role of the Eastern Health Board to care for these individuals, and to provide for them if necessary. In the context, the idea that the Chairman of this agency wants to "throw out" those asylum-seekers who are deemed not to be 'genuine' is nothing short of astonishing. Everybody knows that the vast majority of asylum-seekers are economic migrants. Only a very small proportion are likely to be in a position to genuinely substantiate any claim to political status. So with 8,000 asylum-seekers currently awaiting an official decision on their applications in the Eastern Health Board area, the Chairman would seem to envisage a lot of throwing out taking place over the coming months. Might I suggest that an official viewing stand should be arranged for him at Dublin Airport, or at Rosslare Harbour, so that he can applaud as Immigration Officers turf the illegals out on their ear?
Some of our zealous law enforcement personnel are at it already. Ahern and Callely's comments came in the same week that two Ghanain women were, in the words of the Fine Gael TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, John Browne, "drummed out of Ireland because of the colour of their skin". The two women, Jackie Dusey and Beverley Smith, are in fact British citizens. They travelled to Ireland with a Dublin woman, Linette Wall, arriving in Dun Laoghaire ferry port to attend the wedding of a work-mate, Linda Dempsey, in Carlow.
As they drove off the ship, they were stopped by a Garda. Reports suggest that, despite the fact that they produced driving licence, bank cards and wedding invitations, they were refused entry. The women were vouched for independently and the mother of their Dublin friend offered to go guarantor for them - and still they were turned back.
What a squalid little regime we are running here. Common sense, if not common decency, could have prevailed. But there seems to be no room for either anymore in a country that's become increasingly obsessed with rules, regulations and bureaucracy. Instead two people who came here in good faith without passports, assuming that as British citizens they were covered by the agreement between Britain and Ireland on a Common Travel Area, were treated like aliens and effectively told to bugger off back to where they came from.
It's symptomatic. During the '70s and the '80s, Irish people in their droves left for the USA as illegal immigrants, as many as 100,000 of them. No one was better than Fianna Fáil at putting on the poor mouth and pleading that they should be given visas.
Now that the boot is on the other foot, there isn't a single Fianna Fáil TD with the courage to make the case for those who have arrived here in what are effectively identical circumstances.
If someone said we were a bunch of self-serving hypocrites, it'd be impossible to disagree. n