Richard Hogan: The Government must show leadership on immigration

The Government cannot be on the sidelines watching this unfold, they must act now to stop the spread of discontent and poison

Richard Hogan. Picture: Moya Nolan

“Anger is an energy.” The violently charged vibrato of Johnny Rotten wasn’t wrong. Having recently stumbled into an anti-immigrant protest in Dublin City with my three daughters, I certainly felt the energy of anger.

“Get them out.”

“Go back to where you came from.”

“Protect our country.”

“Get the f*ck out of our country.”

Just some of the chants we heard as we moved quickly to the safety of a quiet street. My daughters were confused by what they had just witnessed. When I explained that people are angry because they feel they are being let down by the Government, and some people use that anger to create anti-immigrant sentiment to cause social unrest, they struggled to process that information.

“So, are they racist?” my eldest daughter asked.

Some people are racist, I explained and some people are genuinely angry because the Government have not included them in the process of accommodating immigrants. They feel betrayed or maybe not good enough to be included in the process.

I was trying my best to be objective describing what we had just stumbled into, but I was also angry. To see such vitriol directed at innocent victims. I can’t imagine what it must be like to flee a war- torn country, leaving your family behind, risking your life in that harrowing journey, to be offered a chance of hope, a new life, only to meet such ignorant bigotry. To be told to go home, you’re not wanted here. Not only that, the country you arrive into hasn’t got the services available to adequately meet your needs and protect you and now you are homeless surrounded by anti-immigrant sentiment.

I find that incomprehensible. And a terrible indictment of our country.

What exactly do we mean, when we use the word, ‘immigrant’? The image of the little boy in 2015 face-down in the water not far from the fashionable Turkish resort of Bodrum, a three year old Syrian-Kurd boy, Aylan Kurdi, drowned after the boat sank in a bid to reach the Greek island of Kos. That photo of the toddler who lost his life fleeing the chaos of Syria is one of those images that haunts me. His red T-shirt, his little shoes, the water soporifically washing over him. When we say immigrants, that is who we are referring to.

People trying to save their own lives. People desperate to live. Not some sort of bogeyman in the shadows, waiting to take our houses and our jobs. Boundaries we have created to classify each other are weaponised now to distinguish each other so we can drive some toxic political agenda. Keyboard warriors spreading disinformation, feed on the angst of local people unhappy with the lack of information coming from those in positions of authority.

The Government cannot be on the sidelines watching this unfold like some frightened spectator, expecting members of An Garda Síochána to sort it out for them. The more silent they are, the more chaos ferments. Poor communication is always at the heart of poor implementation of policy. The Government has responsibility for the awful scenes we are witnessing on our streets.

They need to liaise with areas impacted by their policy for housing immigrants, and hear what their concerns are. They need to bring members of that community into the conversation, not silently sit back and hope for the best. That approach gives these far right activists, for want of a better word, the power to create whatever narrative they want. And we have seen what that is: divisive, racist sentiment.

Images on our screens of banners reading, “Brits out, everyone else in”, an obvious attack on Sinn Féin, and another banner exclaiming, “We represent 90% of the Irish people”, illuminate the problem facing Irish society. How have we arrived at this point? In 2008 when the Irish economy collapsed, we didn’t really experience any of the anti-immigrant sentiment witnessed around Europe.

Leading us all to proudly conclude, we don’t have any latent racist leanings lurking in our national genes. So, what do we say to recent images of these angry anti-immigrant protests and terrible events where Irish-born civilians terrorised an encampment of non-nationals?

What can we conclude about those events? Maybe we are a little more racist than we would like to think? I have certainly worked with Irish teenagers whose parents are maybe from Ghana, Nigeria or India and I have sat listening as they described a childhood of racist abuse. Maybe it’s time to wake up to the fact that we are far from the thousand welcomes we like to portray about ourselves.

Maybe those elected officials who make decisions and draft policy need to be less supine and more considerate about the communities whose lives are impacted by the policies they draft, so that they get a very clear idea of what the issues are and people feel included in the conversation.

The Government can have all the ‘Our Shared Future’ policies in the world, but if they don’t share their vision of inclusion with ordinary people, it’s just a policy that has no actual meaning to the lived experience of people in these communities. That is the oxygen of discontent that these far right groups pour their inflammatory poison into.