Callous indifference sours asylum seekers' dreams of a bright future

DURING the week, the first annual report of the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner was published, and it showed that 6,631 applications for refugee status were rejected last year.

According to the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell: "Those who are entitled to protection from persecution will receive that protection from our State."

Surely, everyone should be entitled to protection from persecution? The minister's choice of words may suggest there is a criterion under which some people currently in this country are not entitled to protection from persecution. Was this just a clumsy choice of words from a man who is normally careful with words? He should clarify the situation. The public is entitled to know if there are grounds under which this country is not prepared to protect people from persecution.

One in ten of the applications refused were described as "manifestly unfounded", which suggests there was at least some justification for nine of ten applications. That amounts to more than 6,000 people. Yet only 467 were granted refugee status.

Among those refused were 1,975 who did not attend a second scheduled interview. We should be asking why so many did not show up. Was this evidence of a lack of confidence in our bureaucratic process? Someone once wrote: "The perfect civil servant is a man who has a valid objection to any possible solution."

"A very considerable proportion of the asylum seekers are not, in fact, entitled to asylum," Mr McDowell declared on Thursday. "I think it is fairly well known, and I heard a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties say yesterday that a good deal of that is explained by economic considerations. That is, flight from poverty rather than persecution brings a lot of people here."

The people who fled this country in the aftermath of the Great Famine, were fleeing poverty, disease and starvation. Is Mr McDowell now suggesting they should not have been entitled to asylum, or is he saying that it is perfectly legitimate to reject the asylum applications because those people should have applied for immigrant status. That is the kind of bureaucratic crap that we have come to expect from the Department of Justice, and it is a sad portent if Mr McDowell is already programmed.

Proportionately more Irish people have sought economic asylum than any other European people in the past century and a half. They were not initially welcomed with open arms because they were disease-ridden. More people died of diseases like typhoid and cholera than died of starvation during the famine. Those diseases were the great killers on the coffin ships. When the emigrants got to the New World, they were quarantined.

Prior to World War II, our government was afraid that giving asylum to Jewish refugees would fan the flames of anti-Semitism. The Department of Justice even rejected a request from the Vatican to take some doctors who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. For a country whose people have sought refuge and succour all over the globe, our response to the plight of the Jewish people was as bigoted as it was shamefully pathetic. At the end of the war, 266 German servicemen were interned at the Curragh under fairly liberal conditions. They were allowed out on parole every day and four of them married to Irish girls. Most of the Germans asked to be allowed to stay in this country but the Department of Industry and Commerce objected because they would take jobs from people here. The fact that some of the more industrious could, and probably would, actually have created jobs never seemed to occur to our myopic civil servants.

Four Austrians were permitted to stay here but all the Germans were repatriated, even those married to Irish girls. Seven fled and went into hiding, but they were all eventually caught and sent home. One was actually arrested in the County Galway home of a Fianna Fáil member of the Dáil Mark Killilea, the father of the recent MEP. That showed what he thought of his own government's behaviour on the issue. Maybe there is a future in Irish politics for young Jonathan O'Shea from Carrigaline, Co Cork, the man arrested in Australia for assisting the breakout of 35 asylum seekers from the Woomera detention centre on June 28.

Two of the escapees 12 and 10-year-old brothers Alamdar and Montazar Bakhtiari were in the news after they were brought, in search of asylum, to the British consulate in Melbourne by a Brigidine nun. The British refused. Will the Australians charge the nun with assisting the young refugees? Are we aping them, or could they be aping us? In September 1996, two seriously ill Ukrainian children were refused entry and deported from Shannon, along with their mothers. Those women had probably heard of the generosity of ordinary citizens toward the children of Chernobyl and in their desperation they came for help for their sick children. Fine Gael and Labour were in power then, so the political shame can be spread evenly.

Is such callous indifference really representative of a people who have produced Bono and Bob Geldof, not to mention the missionary doctors, nurses and teachers? Many, if not most, Irish people have members of their family abroad, and this was even more prevalent in our grandparents' generation. My grandmother emigrated to the US, one sister settled and died in South Africa, another became a Brigidine nun and spent the rest of her life in Australia. A third sister worked for years in England.

While travelling in America in the 1960s, one was struck by the number of servicemen in bus terminals, rail stations and airports, but once in the Aer Lingus terminal in New York, the difference was immediately apparent. The soldiers were replaced by priests and nuns. We never sent any conquering army abroad but we did send missionaries, not just to convert but also to educate the ignorant and heal the sick. We can be proud of the great majority of them.

One missionary returning from Africa used to say he felt that he was flying back into the Middle Ages as he approached Dublin. That was not a reflection on the people of the country, but on the hierarchy that was ruling the Catholic Church here.

A considerable proportion of the Irish missionaries went to Nigeria, and it is probably a tribute to them that more than a third of those seeking asylum in this country are from Nigeria. Many are well educated but they are barred from working, and then some demagogues are complaining about them sponging off the State.

A man complained recently about my argument that refugees should be allowed to work and their willingness to do so should then be a major factor in consideration of their application for refugee status.

"You know," the man complained, "I haven't been able to find a job since 1963." Somehow, I don't think the refugees are keeping him out of a job. Moreover, if society ever becomes dependent on the likes of him to do some work, we are all going to be in deep trouble. And the saddest aspect of all we will deserve no better! Of course, we can't save the whole world but we could try to help the comparatively few who have got here, often under the most trying conditions.