Ireland must not even contemplate extraditing grandparents to the US
They had been rearing the boy since his father died before they brought him to the US to see his mother in 1999, after which she refused to allow him to return to Ireland.
Cork Circuit Court granted the Blakes custody of Dylan in January 2001, but his mother refused to deliver Dylan, and the US courts refused to implement the Irish order. The Blakes then tricked their daughter into letting Dylan have dinner with them in July 2004 in Chicago, and they took the boy home to Ireland. But they returned their grandson to his mother in November that year.
Now the Americans want the Blakes extradited to face charges of aggravated kidnapping in Illinois. Why? If you believe it is in the interest of justice, you probably also believe Santa Claus and Uncle Sam are one and the same. There is little doubt the Blakes took the boy out of love, and probably firmly believed they were doing so in his best interest. They did, after all, send him back without subjecting him to a messy court case here in this country, and there is no likelihood of a repetition.
There was a high-profile case in Ireland in the 1930s involving the daughter of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in October 1920. He had one child with his wife Muriel, who was a member of the famous Murphy distilling family.
Máire MacSwiney remembered refusing to eat an egg for her supper as a four-year-old. “My mother said if I didn’t eat it she would go away and leave me.” She called her mother’s bluff. “She was gone the next morning, leaving me with the maid, and I didn’t see her again for 12 months,” Máire noted.
When Muriel returned the following year, she took Máire to the continent and put her into a German school, where she had little contact with her mother. On her first Christmas at the school, Muriel promised to take her out for the day, but never showed. Thereafter, Máire was moved to a number of different schools, only seeing her mother during summer holidays.
Máire was cut off from the MacSwiney family. Her aunt Mary tried to visit her in 1931 but Muriel whisked her away from the school before Mary got there. Mary tried again the following Easter. “My mother got the wind up and sent this gentleman to collect me,” Máire recalled. But the man and Mary MacSwiney arrived at the same time and the woman in charge of the school intervened and did not allow the man to take the child. Later, Máire visited her aunt at a nearby hotel and managed to persuade her to take her back to Ireland.
“We caught a train and made our way back to Ireland via Geneva and Paris while the German police were looking for us. My mother believed, as was reported in the press, my aunt had kidnapped me when, in fact, I had to do all the kidnapping.”
The case ended up in an Irish court in 1932. Máire, who was then 14-years-old, made it clear she wished to remain with her aunt, and the judge ruled in her favour.
MÁIRE only heard from her mother one more time. In 1934 a man came to her with a letter from her mother asking her to return with him to Switzerland, where she was then living. If Máire did not do so, Muriel warned, she would never speak to her again.
“I had no difficulty in deciding to stay in Ireland,” Máire later explained, “having at last found continuity and stability in my life, but I don’t think I believed she would carry out that threat forever.”
In July 1945, Muriel happened to be in Dublin on the morning Máire married Ruairí Brugha. Ruairí went to Muriel’s hotel to try to persuade her to attend her daughter’s wedding, but she refused. She died in London in 1982, aged 90, having carried out her threat of never speaking to her daughter again.
How many people reading Máire’s story would believe the court should have returned her to her mother’s custody? Of course, drawing any analogy with the Blake case would be to ask how many people would think Mary MacSwiney should have been deported to Nazi Germany as a kidnapper? No doubt, given her so-called republican views, some people might think Nazi Germany would have been Mary MacSwiney’s spiritual home, but the Irish court was right to give paramount consideration to the interests of the child. Muriel, essentially, did not want Máire; she just did not want anybody else to have her, especially the MacSwineys.
Why are the Americans trying to extradite the Blakes? It is certainly not in the interest of the boy, or even his mother, who is opposed to the extradition. She has facilitated her son in keeping in touch with his grandparents with weekly telephone calls. Of course, with the threat of being arrested for kidnapping hanging over their heads, they can’t visit him in the US.
This is a case of too much love, even blind love, rather than criminal intent.
If the US law enforcement authorities can’t recognise that, they should be told to go to hell.
It is time people recognise that justice is being trampled on in the US. Take the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was seized at New York’s JFK Airport while in transit from Tunisia to Ottawa in September 2002. Without a semblance of due process, he was secretly deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for 10 months, held in solitary confinement and tortured before he was released. He had no terrorist links.
When he sought justice in the US, his case was dismissed.
The judge said he could not declare that extraordinary rendition in the Arar case was illegal because this could “have most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both”.
The judge ruled: “The task of balancing individual rights against national security concerns is one that courts should not undertake. Judges should not, in the absence of explicit direction by Congress, hold officials who carry out such policies liable for damages even if such conduct violates our treaty obligations or customary international law.”
In short, the courts are not going to enforce the country’s obligations under its own constitution, its international treaties, or international law, unless Congress specifically directs them to do so. This is a gross denial of the judiciary’s responsibility, and no self-respecting country should even contemplate extraditing anyone, much less two of its own citizens, to the US in such circumstances.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
