Clodagh Finn: We need to think of refugees as net contributors, not as a burden

When you hear the word 'refugee'. do you want to push the words 'Ireland first' up a flagpole, asks Clodagh Finn

Wed, 25 Aug, 2021 - 07:00

The message of the week goes to a friend in the US who sent this: “Just met a lady at nearby park today with greyhound rescued from Limerick that arrived via Heathrow and Seattle, and now in Portland [Oregon]. Glad to see not all refugee activities at a halt though it doesn’t seem our State Department has changed since WW2.”

Is there a more apt observation of our back-to-front world, in which a person will go through hoops to rescue a dog, while governments drag their feet to take in desperate people fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan?

The note is all the more potent given that it came from Professor Ronald Friend, who was three years old when he and his elder brother, Michael, (then aged six) were saved from deportation to Nazi concentration camps in 1942. Corkwoman Mary Elmes played a key role in their rescue, but so did many others.

The brothers were taken to a safe house in Toulouse. From there, a priest, Fr Louis Bézard, and his aide, André Violier, smuggled them onto a train under heavy Gestapo surveillance. (“We had to hide the children in our luggage and under a big overcoat,” he later wrote.) When they reached their destination, a town in the south of France, they were harboured at the presbytery and then cared for by foster families.

What is striking in Professor Friend’s story is the number of ordinary people who saw that a human being was in danger and did something about it, often risking their own life in the process.

Had the rescue been left to governments to develop refugee schemes, the estimated 470 children taken to safety by Mary Elmes and her colleagues from Rivesaltes camp in southwest France would certainly have perished.

Instead, countless lives were saved because people acted on that most primal of instincts to help another human being in danger.

That instinct is still strong now. I was particularly moved by a recent tweet from Neil Flek Waugh: “I am a 76-year-old pensioner, I live on my own in a two-bedroom bungalow. I have today informed Wakefield Council [UK] I am willing and able to give 2 refugees accommodation in my spare room.”

I am a 76 years old pensioner , I live on my own in a 2 bedroom bungalow. I have today informed Wakefield Council I am willing and able to give 2 refugees accommodation in my spare room.
— neil flek waugh . revolutionary socialist/marxist (@sammythedog1989) August 18, 2021

It received 93 thousand ‘likes’, which is heartening in these cynical times. Although, we have seen before how difficult it is to match the people willing to help with those in dire need of it.

During the refugee crisis of 2015, when some 6.8m people left a civil war-torn Syria, the Irish Government pledged to accept 4,000 people under the first phase of the Irish Refugee Protection Programme. At the time, more than 6,000 Irish people pledged a bed to a refugee, few of which were filled.

It is naïve to suggest that relocation is as simple as matching the pledges with real cases, but it shows a willingness to reach out the hand of humanity when people’s lives are in danger.

We see that same instinct again now, though not in the figures announced by the Government which has committed to resettling a risible 200-plus Afghans under various schemes. Aid organisations have called on them to multiply that number by five, but even that doesn’t seem nearly enough to help the tens of thousands of Afghans who face turmoil, violence and an uncertain future after the hasty withdrawal of international military forces.

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Then there is the real issue of getting them here. It’s nearly a year since the Government pledged help when fire ripped through Greece’s largest migrant camp in Lesbos, leaving 13,000 people without shelter. Some 28 unaccompanied children and 53 adults have yet to arrive, although they are on the way.

The mayhem in Afghanistan has prompted much political debate. It is hard to look at the West’s intervention and not see an unpalatable trace of those 19th-century colonisers who felt duty-bound to ‘civilise’ the natives.

Yet, this is not a time for simplistic analysis; this conflict embraces four American presidencies and demands an understanding of the complexities of Afghanistan and its history. Few are truly qualified to comment, but what is beyond debate is the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding.

Many will say — indeed they have already said — that Ireland has no business getting involved, particularly now as a Covid-scarred country tries to come to terms with its own health, housing, and jobs crises.

Even so, Ireland is still a relatively rich country. In 2020, albeit pre-Covid, the average Irish real wage was 15% above the OECD average, according to the OECD Economic Survey of Ireland. Even allowing for the ravages of Covid, we are still in a position to help people in danger.

And, as a country so familiar with emigration, it would be unconscionable to close our doors as soon as our fortunes changed. In recent decades, we have gone from being a country of emigration to one of immigration.

In that time, migrant workers have helped increase growth, eased labour shortages, improved output and contributed to reducing earnings inequality, according to a UN report, Managing Migration in Ireland: A Social and Economic Analysis.

The same report — and many others — show that immigrants contribute not only to the economy but the social and cultural fabric of a country.

Some may initially receive benefits but many go on to work, pay taxes, contribute to local communities and start businesses. They enrich us in so many ways, even if we seldom take stock.

When you hear the word ‘refugee’, what do you feel? Outrage at the ongoing injustice of direct provision? Or perhaps an urge to lobby political leaders to do their moral duty and help those displaced through no fault of their own?

Or is there fear of being overwhelmed with each new wave of migrants? Do you want to push the words ‘Ireland first’ up a flagpole?

The irony is that we Irish are a product of several influxes of people, some welcome, some not. That awful phrase, “And they became more Irish than the Irish themselves” reminds us that the movement of people, from earliest times, is very much part of our own history.

It also tells us that those migrants, refugees, raiders and/or invaders were assimilated into Irish life. That is not to romanticise Viking raids or colonising plantations, just to say that the movement of people has been a reality for millennia.

And it will increase in the coming decades as people try to escape conflict, human rights abuses and climate breakdown. At the end of 2015, one in every 113 people in the world was either a refugee, an asylum seeker or internally displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. By 2020, one in every 95 people on earth had fled their home.

At a time when data and mapping analysts predict that some 70,000 Irish homes could be underwater in three decades, it’s not outrageous to suggest that someday we might be one of them. Then we’ll be glad that we put out a helping hand when it was needed.