Mick Clifford: Compassion viewed as weakness for Seamus Culleton and the so-called ‘other’

In recent years when such cases arose, the State was inclined towards some accommodation. The mood has since changed

Seamus Culleton, originally from Glenmore in Kilkenny, has been detained in an ICE centre in El Paso for the past five months. Picture: The Irish Times

They were called the Allston Seven. All young Irish men, lifted in the Allston suburb of Boston, and thrown into an immigration holding cell. It looked like they were on a one-way ticket back to the old country.

This was the late 1980s, when the world was very different place. There was no ICE, no Trump, no culture wars that demanded immigrants be treated like “the other”.