When they come to take your neighbour...
We have shared her joy and celebration at the births of two further children here in Ireland - a girl and a boy.
Her eldest is now at school in Galway, beginning to speak Irish, learning Irish dancing and becoming imbued with Irish culture.
Our friend showed us letters from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform announcing that for “the common good” her husband, her children and herself are to be deported to Angola.
In the UN 2004 human development index of 177 countries, Angola is placed at 167, one point better than Chad and one below Malawi - in other words, nearly at the bottom, while Ireland, at number 10, is nearly at the top.
So, one of the richest nations in the world is sending a young family with three small children to a living hell in one of the poorest - they have no house in Angola after all the years of civil war, no land and no traceable relatives. The paragraph in the preamble to the Irish constitution which refers to “the common good” goes on to speak of “due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained (etc).”
Can we honestly say that we perceive our own “dignity and freedom”, let alone our “common good”, to have been assured by the department’s action? In fact we have found ourselves shocked and horrified, our equilibrium so severely disturbed as to cause us to question any sort of “social order” based upon such inhumanity.
In Germany, in the 1930s and ’40s, Jews, gypsies, gays and the disabled would one day be there in the community and the next day gone - and no questions were asked. Years afterwards the questions are still being asked: how could ordinary decent neighbours have allowed it to happen? Now we know that our government is not sending people to Auschwitz... but there’s a certain familiar whiff. In Galway two months ago, the six-year-old daughter of an acquaintance of ours came home from school very upset. Her little friend had disappeared from school.
What will that girl think when she comes to understand that her friend was the child of an asylum seeker, deported to God-knows-where and into what conditions? And of course, deported suddenly and in secret.
Now is the time for ordinary, decent neighbours in Ireland, as soon as it is known that an unjust deportation is about to take place, to stand together and be visible against the agents of injustice. If the consequences are so-called ‘social disorder,’ then so be it.
Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden
10 St Bridget’s Place Lower
Galway
