No Blacks Need Apply

Did Omaniyi Joseph Ekundoyo assault a garda at Dublin airport while he was being deported? It is a very interesting question.

Ekundoyo is a 29-year-old asylum seeker from Nigeria. His story was told in the Sunday Tribune last week and it made harrowing reading. Having spent three months in a Nigerian prison in 1997, he escaped and fled to Ireland via Belgium. He presented himself to immigration at Dublin airport and was accepted as someone who might qualify for refugee status. He registered with the Department of Justice and made his application for asylum. The dole was provided as support and he found a place to stay. So far so good.

What happened subsequently is altogether murkier. His application for asylum was turned down. He appealed. However, some time later, when he went back to the Department of Justice to have his identification card renewed, he was told that he had overstayed his welcome in Ireland.

The way Ekundoyo recounts it, he was informed by gardaí based in the Department that his deportation papers had been processed months previously and that he was being returned to Belgium, his country of first landing in Europe. He was taken to Mountjoy, where he was detained, pending the finalisation of his travel papers.

From Mountjoy, he made contact with the Nigerian Asylum Association. An injunction was sought to prevent his deportation, which was scheduled for just eight days before Christmas 1998. However, he says, the police arrived a day early to bring him directly to the airport, without allowing him to collect his personal belongings from the place he had been staying in.

When he was refused this basic decency, Ekundoyo says that he took off his shirt in protest. He was handcuffed, and then reinforcements were called. The scene he describes at the airport would be comical if it weren't brutally real. He says that he was pushed to the ground and when he started screaming he had his shirt stuffed in his mouth. He was thumped and was called a "black bastard". He was struggling on his way across the tarmac to the plane when one of the crew took the initiative, telling the police that he would not be allowed onto the plane. In response the four officers involved picked him up bodily, carried him forcibly through the airport and took him back to Mountjoy. He was charged with assaulting a garda. "The garda said I assaulted him but they had four, I was just one. How could I fight them?" he asked the Sunday Tribune.

By the time you read this, the courts will have decided in relation to the assault charges. But whatever view is taken on that particular matter, there can be little doubt that Omaniyi Joseph Ekundoyo's experiences reflect very badly on the way in which asylum seekers, and black people in particular, are currently being treated in Ireland. His account of duplicity on the part of immigration authorities and of their apparent determination to frustrate people's legal rights echoes very clearly the experience of a young Algerian who was rushed onto an airplane and whisked to London in 1997, despite the fact that officials knew that an application to have the decision to deport him overturned was due before the courts later the same morning.

At the time, serious questions were raised about the behaviour of the officers involved. What could have made it a matter of such compelling urgency for them, that someone should be rushed to the airport and removed from the jurisdiction before the courts had an opportunity to deliberate on the individual's case? The only possible conclusion then was that there was a degree of zealousness involved which bore the marks of a kind of vigilantism—a deeply unhealthy development among those charged with responsibility in this area.

Was anything done to caution or discipline the officers in question or to ascertain precisely where the responsibility for what was, at the very least, extremely bizarre behaviour lay?

The treatment which Omaniyi Joseph Ekundoyo describes suggests that things have not changed or improved in the interim. Indeed, the situation may have deteriorated. It is apparently routine now that black people are singled out and harassed at immigration control. There is only one word to describe this phenomenon, and it is racism. We have always been very good at clapping ourselves on the back for our compassion and charity but when it comes to sharing the fruits of our privileged lifestyles with black people, then that seems to be a different thing.

This is not an issue that we can run away from. People are being discriminated against, abused and maltreated in our name. Just occasionally they are being brutalised. We cannot allow it to continue. In particular, we must ensure that those who are employed by the State to deal with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants on our behalf treat everyone with whom they come in contact, fairly, with dignity and as equals.

I cannot believe that we are incapable of that bare minimum. But then I've been wrong before.