It’s time to stop embassy ripping off Nigerian and Irish citizens

LAST week there was trouble outside the Nigerian embassy in Dublin as people protested over difficulties in securing passports for which they have been grossly overcharged. Up to 70 people were protesting outside the embassy at Leeson Park.

There was an ugly mood.

Some claim to have paid up to €700 for passports, which were promised within a week, but many have been waiting up to six weeks and even longer. Most seem to have paid €410, whereas the passport costs only €57 in Nigeria, and the embassy in Britain issues a passport for €77. A spokesman at the embassy in London stated that under no circumstances would they ever charge €400 for a passport.

The applicants are anxious to get passports before the end of the month, because Justice Minister Michael McDowell has suggested that those with Irish-born children would be granted residency if they meet the three qualifications: that they are of good character; can sustain themselves financially; and can come up with a passport from their home country before the end of March.

Last week, when they called for the passports for which they had been charged so exorbitantly, they were pushed off the premises by embassy staff who said the passport applications were being delayed because of a break-in at the embassy the previous night. Files, which purportedly contained the records of the payments made for the passports, may have gone missing. The embassy refused to provide RTÉ with an interview, and the ambassador refused to speak to Philip Boucher-Hayes, who interviewed one man who said that he has been waiting for his passport since 2002. A number of voluntary agencies sought an interview with the ambassador after they became aware of the overcharging, but they have been ignored.

Boucher-Hayes has since got a reply, but this may have been more in response to the fact that he copied his questions to the Nigerian Foreign Ministry. The embassy in Dublin sought to justify the charges on the grounds of a penal charge for lost passports. They do charge €237 to replace lost passport in Britain, but this does not justify the exorbitant demands in Dublin. It is an outrage that they are charging so much more here.

“We are aware that the Nigerian embassy is charging for passports,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Justice. “However, this is a matter which is entirely out of our control. Ultimately the Nigerian, or indeed any other embassy can charge what they like.”

Has that department learned nothing from the crass indifference of the Department of Health in relation to the illegal nursing home charges? Legally, the Nigerian diplomats may be immune from the Irish law but Irish authorities will deserve nothing but contempt if they do not let the Nigerian government know that this country will not stand for unjust behaviour any more than it was prepared to tolerate the criminal behaviour of republican gangsters.

How can any department that calls itself a Department of Justice adopt an attitude of such callous indifference to the blatant exploitation of vulnerable people? Is the department prepared to allow foreign delegations set up any scam they wish or are they confined to ripping off only their own nationals? However, remember that in this instance the people being ripped off are the parents of Irish citizens and those children deserve the protection of the Department of Justice.

When it comes to the misbehaviour of diplomats selling passports, some people might say the Irish should be the last people in the world to complain, in view of the passports for sale scandal at the Irish embassy in London in the late 1980s. But that is all the more reason that we should speak out forcefully. Our government took action in that case, and it should take steps to protect residents in this country, especially the alien parents of Irish citizens.

UNDER international law, the diplomatic staff of foreign embassies and their families have diplomatic immunity. That means that they cannot be prosecuted, but it does not mean that they can behave as they please, because they can be removed by declaring them persona non grata.

Over the years the issue of diplomatic immunity in this country has arisen on a number of occasions - usually in relation to parking offences. Before Grafton Street was pedestrianised, diplomats and their families were notorious for illegal parking on that busy thoroughfare, especially around Christmas time. When the issue was brought up in the Dáil, ministers merely responded that this parking issue was not significant. In 1981, the then Justice Minister Jim Mitchell provided details specifying that the diplomats, their families and staff from Australia, Egypt, Japan and Poland had only two parking violations per embassy, while Canada, Denmark, India, and the Netherlands had three violations each. The worst culprits were the British with 17 violations, the French with 52 and Greece with 31.

In 1970, one of the people at the Nigerian embassy was involved in a car accident and invoked diplomatic immunity in instructing the insurance company not to pay a claimant.

Of course, in relation to car accidents, this country had already broken diplomatic ground. On November 11, 1959, David Hearne, the son of John J Hearne, the Irish Ambassador to the United States, killed Jossie Hamlin on a Washington Street. Since Hearne did not waive his diplomatic immunity, the inquest on the woman’s death was cancelled.

David, who was a student at the American University in Washington, had been in trouble with the police some weeks earlier as a result of a brawl outside a Washington tavern. His friends were arrested, but the police could not pursue charges against him. The State Department announced it was maintaining a hands-off attitude in relation to young Hearne, but the announcement itself was the diplomatic way of saying to the Irish Embassy, “you clean up your act”.

Within a week of the accident, Ambassador Hearne announced that he was sending his son home to continue his studies in Ireland. If public pressure had been allowed to grow for young Hearne’s removal, the Eisenhower Administration would have been faced with having to declare Ambassador Hearne persona non grata to have him and his family recalled from the United States.

Mr McDowell received deserved political kudos recently for exposing Provo criminality. He persisted in accusing the IRA of being behind the Northern Bank raid and then he got up Mitchell McLoughlin’s nose and forced him to admit that the IRA did not consider the killing of Jean McConville a crime.

This week’s extraordinary IRA statement shows that they still obviously consider themselves above the law. They are not, but the people at the Nigerian embassy are above the domestic law. It is therefore imperative that the minister makes it clear that they will not be allowed to trample on our system of justice.

Those people who applied for Nigerian passports had to make payments to a specified account at the Bank of Ireland, which provided the applicants with a receipt for the embassy. Thus there should be a record of the payments at the bank. The Nigerian government should be quietly told to clean up its act without delay - or else face recalling its diplomats from Ireland.