Who killed Zhao Liu Tao?

For a long time, those who are close to the situation on the ground have been warning us. Over the past two years, there has been a significant increase in the incidence of racially motivated aggression in Ireland, and in Dublin in particular. Specifically, crimes of violence against non-Irish nationals have become more frequent.

There is, we have been told by those on the frontline, a danger that things may become really toxic. Action is needed to combat the menace of racism, and it is needed now. The Government have known this for some time. So have the Gardai.

Some of the attacks that have been carried out have been brutally savage. That alone should have served as sufficient warning. But most of us, I imagine, had hoped that, rather than escalating, the pitch of the racism that was becoming evident on the streets might fade.

On occasion, there can be a twisted, faddish aspect to developments like this. It was the case during the early years of punk, when violent confrontations between different factions were commonplace. It was the case with the rise in so-called queer bashing, which reached its nadir with the appalling events that would go down in local history as the Fairview Park murder. And more recently, it was the case with the rivalry between certain Dublin rugby schools, which descended into disaster with a couple of violent confrontations that ended in death on the streets of the capital.

It would be utterly wrong to minimise in even the smallest way the gravity of any of these events. But – in different degrees – there is evidence of a temporal aspect to them, which suggests that society has the potential, at least, to reform itself and move on. There had been the seed, just, of a sense that this might have been the case with racist assaults. Over the past few weeks, there was a drop in the number reported. Now the brief hope raised by that statistic has been smashed.

In Dublin last week, a Chinese student, Zhao Liu Tao, was murdered in the course of what the Gardai have described as a racially motivated assault, in Beaumont, on the northside of the city. Zhao Liu Tao was brutally beaten on the head with an iron bar. There can have been no doubt in his killer’s mind as to the likely outcome of the assault.

At the time of writing the Gardai are appealing for witnesses to the killing. However, it has emerged that the murdered man and two companions were confronted, as they walked home, by a number of Irish youths, who engaged in racial taunts. The attack followed, with horrific consequences.

While this is clearly the worst incident of its kind ever in Ireland, members of the Chinese community have said that attacks on their number are not infrequent. There are about 20,000 Chinese students – most of them from the Liaoning province in North East China – based here now, many of whom work part-time. Their presence has strengthened the Chinese presence in Ireland – with over 50,000 residents, they are by far the biggest foreign ethnic minority in the Republic.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice commented on the killing, that all right-thinking people would be outraged at this appalling attack. He or she was right. However, the problem is that mere expressions of outrage and disgust are not enough. The Department has put in place a campaign of awareness-raising, and within this, good things have been happening. But the terrible truth is that so much of what takes place at official level serves only to compound the assumptions which those who have been involved in racist behaviour operate on – that members of minority communities do not belong here, that their presence is an affront, that they are second-class beings, and that we are entitled to manhandle them and throw them off our patch, or worse, at will.

I say this advisedly. Zhao Liu Tao was not the only foreign national who was jumped on last week. In another incident that made the front pages, a Nigerian by the name of Femi Adesosi was snatched by immigration officers en route to the registry office in Carlow, where he was due to marry 19 year-old Laura Behan, from Kilcullen in Kildare. There were shambolic scenes outside the registry office, as Femi was forcibly arrested and taken away to Mountjoy prison in Dublin.

Within the letter of the law, there is no basis for suggesting that the authorities were acting in any way improperly. Femi Adesosi had been issued with a deportation order. He was one of three Nigerian asylum seekers who subsequently challenged the Government’s deportation procedures. That appeal failed in the Supreme Court, in July. Since then, he had been evading the authorities.

However, there is a symbolic aspect to this kind of heavy-handed treatment of an individual Nigerian. If Femi and Laura Behan had been allowed to get married, it would have made it far more difficult – most likely impossible – to deport him. But is the urge to throw an individual out of Ireland so great, that it requires this kind of dramatic intervention at the door of the registry office? (And, by the way, would the authorities have acted in this way if the marriage had been scheduled to take place in a church?).

Let’s leave the intricacies of the particular case out of it. Forget the arguments already advanced in Hotpress regarding the nature of the regime back in Nigeria, from which Femi and others from that part of the world have attempted to escape.

What matters is this. Over the past number of years, the principal concern of the State, in relation to the arrival here of an increasing number of non-Irish people, seems to have centred around how to limit them. They have been seen as a problem. And policies have been adopted which, rather than showing a welcome to refugees and other foreign nationals, and treating them with dignity and respect, has greeted them with suspicion and hostility.

In some cases, they have been hunted down. They have been snatched from their houses, or on the streets. And they have been taken away, in some cases kicking and screaming.

Against this kind of background, those who perpetrated the murder of Zhao Liu Tao may imagine that their hostility to Chinese or Africans, who are living here, has some kind of official approval.

It behoves the State and its agencies to behave in a way that is beyond reproach, in their dealings with those non-Irish people who – for one reason or another – want to make this island their home, even temporarily.

With the killing of Zhao Liu Tao fresh in our minds, it might now be appropriate for the Government to declare an amnesty for those asylum seekers who have come here, whether as refugees or as economic migrants. Whatever about future policies on the issue, that would certainly send out the right message: that we want an open, inclusive society in which people of all colours, and of every creed, and none, can play a full and active part. It doesn’t matter whether you are black, white, brown or any other colour along the spectrum – including that very Irish shade of puce red – you will be treated with dignity and respect.

Going back two or three years, politicians had the opportunity to lead, on this hugely important issue, and they failed. But what they failed to do in the past, potentially they can still do now – and to enormously positive effect.

They should begin by looking at the operations of the Immigration Police. Allowing Femi Adesosi the freedom to proceed with his marriage to Laura Behan wouldn’t go astray either.