Ireland's Secret Police

Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better and better. I’m reading Roddy Doyle’s Oh Play That Thing at the moment, and it’s a fine and interesting work in which that line takes on more than a little importance. Think positive, chump!

The Beatles came up with a variation on the theme, which gave it a wider resonance. “Got to admit it’s betting better, getting better all the time.” It is a belief that we like to hold onto, for reasons that are obvious.
In many ways, however, it does accurately reflect the experience of Irish people over the past thirty years and more.
(While I have your attention, can I just say that I’m fed up to my bollix with the revisionist bullshit that’s being peddled with increasing belligerence over the past couple of years, which attempts to suggest that everything was somehow better when the Church ruled with a rod of iron, the State colluded and men were in charge of everything that mattered. Fuck right off. This place was a fucking disaster zone, in which, above all, children were treated like shit. Here’s one difference: the vast majority of children get up in the morning now and are happy to go to school. No fear of being beaten up. No fear of watching other kids being beaten up. No leather strap to impose discipline. Instead, we have an educational regime which is not built on the premise that you force the shit down children’s throats. But I digress).
In general, I can assure you, things are much better. But I’m afraid that there are ways in which the old mantra does not hold good.
Roddy Doyle’s book concerns itself with the music of Louis Armstrong, with black culture and how an Irishman connects with it in the United States of America, during the roaring ‘20s. In part at least, it’s a story about race and culture and the ways in which black and white interact and each influences the other. It is about our capacity for change, for growth and development – as long, that is, as we are open and willing to go with the flow. It has a relevance to Ireland in 2005 that I’m sure is intended – because while we may have learned how to treat children with a modicum of decency (and we have), the same does not apply to many of the black people and other so called foreign nationals, who have come to Ireland over the past five to ten years.
Last week the government chartered a plane. It was used to deport 35 or so Nigerians who had been refused asylum in Ireland. The plane flew out of Dublin in the dead of night. The following morning’s Irish Times headlined a story “Nigerians To Be Deported”. The newspaper of record didn’t know that it had already happened.
According to reports, many of the Nigerians who were snatched in this purge had received no notice of their intended deportation. Among those deported were teenagers who had arrived in Ireland as unaccompanied minors, but who recently passed the age of 18 – meaning that they were no longer in the care of the Health Service Executive. Spotting their vulnerability, the Garda National Immigration Bureau pounced.
One of those deported was a 19 year-old girl, Portia Osagiede. According to Mary King of the Dún Laoghaire Refugee Support Group, Ms Osagiede, who arrived in Ireland in November 2002, had been told to report to the GNIB headquarters on Burgh Quay every week for the past three or four weeks. And yet she was given no notice of her imminent deportation.
“I had heard there was going to be a deportation charter this week so I rang her to warn her, which she was glad of,” Ms. King said. Ms Osagiede arrived at GNIB headquarters at 3pm on the day of the deportations as requested and was escorted by a male and a female officer to her accommodation in the city to pick up her belongings. It is hard to believe that this is the way those charged with the responsibility of serving and protecting the people operate, but they do.
“When she rang me,” Mary King reported, “she was on a bus, being taken I suppose to Balseskin holding centre, or the airport. She has no family in Nigeria at all.”
Another youth, Olunkunle Eluhanla, also 19, who was due to complete the Leaving Certificate exam in June, was also deported still in his school uniform, Elunhanla wasn't allowed even to go home and pack a bag. A school friend of his, Anthony Mayne, told the Irish Times that he had spoken to Elunhanla after he landed in Lagos. He was in tears, stranded there with no money, no family – with nothing. It is an injustice – a barbaric injustice – that screams to high heaven for retribution.
Five children were left behind, their parents stolen from them. Some mothers, fearful of what awaited them in Nigeria, chose to leave their children. Others apparently were not offered the opportunity to collect them.
One woman whose baby died here last year was also arrested. “The baby’s grave is here and she is very distressed at the thought of having to leave her baby’s grave,” Mary King said.
So what is going on that deportations are organised in this way? Why are people rounded up, stuck on a plane and hustled out of the country in such a clandestine manner? Why are the media apparently misled about the timing of the departure of deportation planes from these shores?
We have read about events of this kind before. I am personally aware of one Algerian, an Irish resident of long-standing at the time, whose papers were in order, who was lifted by The Garda National Immigration Bureau and flown out before there was time to get into court to secure an order to prevent his deportation. The court took a dim view of the actions of the gardai involved. It didn’t matter. There was no sanction. And it took the individual in question, who was perfectly entitled to be here in the first place, many months to get back into the country.
The same policies are being applied in 2005. The approach is to round-up the failed asylum seekers, get them onto a plane as quickly as possible, and fly them out at night, both as a way of minimising access to the courts and of avoiding media attention. It is a horribly undignified process that smacks of dishonesty and evasiveness – not to mention a total absence of compassion – on the part of the authorities.
Whatever your views on the best way of responding to immigration, the current policy is indefensible – but it is in keeping with an approach to ‘law and order’ that is being given increasingly free rein under the current regime in the Department of Justice. The number of arrests on St. Patrick’s Day this year was double that of last year. Why? The consensus seems to be that it was not because people were rowdier, more aggressive or disorderly on this occasion – but rather because the Gardai decided that a harder line was expected of them.
And guess what happens when the Gardai adopt a harder line? People react. Trouble is doubled. And then up pop the usual suspects demanding that people who get drunk in the streets should be criminalised. And, bingo, we are into tagging territory under the plans unveiled a few months ago by the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell.
We have progressed in a myriad of ways, which have had the cumulative effect that Ireland is a far better place for the vast majority of Irish people to live. Certainly. But there is a new counter current that has the capacity to turn into a tidal wave. We have allowed a new strain of institutional bullying to flourish, a thoroughly unsavoury authoritarian strain, that is channelled through the Gardai and directed at those who are most vulnerable – including, most poignantly, our immigrants.
We need to stop this rising tide now, before it’s too late.