At long last, a real debate seems to be beginning in Ireland about our treatment of immigrants. It may get nasty and unpleasant at times over the coming months. Already, the foul stench of prejudice and bigotry is in the air, with the attempted launching of the Immigration Control Platform by the Clonakilty schoolteacher (the mind boggles) Aine Nm Chonaill. This pathetic creature s ideology stinks but, in a perverse way, in launching her campaign she may be doing us all an unintended favour. Because what she espouses is little more than an extreme version of what passes for official policy on immigration in this country.
When you analyse the current Minister for Justice s position on refugees and immigration, the bottom line for those people from outside the EU who have landed on our shores seems to be this: WE DON T WANT YOU. Of course, the public have been treated to the familiar platitudes about Ireland s great tradition of tolerance and compassion. And we have been warned that if we want to provide a haven for genuine refugees then we must distinguish between them and these people who have come here simply to live off the benefits of our welfare system. But when you look at the facts and the figures, all this can be seen clearly for what it is: a smokescreen.
The truth is that the authorities from the Minister, through the departmental officials, to at least some of the Gardam in immigration control have been behaving abominably in the name of the Irish people. They will continue to do so, unless it is made clear to them that this is not what we want.
And I don t believe it is what we want.
H H H H H
I wrote about this issue in the final Hot Press of 1997. Bizarrely, some of the comments I made in the editorial were picked up on by the News Of The World ten days ago. A report on the front pages of their paper stated that I was in favour of an amnesty for the spongers who have come into the country and were living off welfare here.
The rest of the piece was predictable nonsense but the reference to spongers was particularly revealing.
It is the kind of word that stirs up paranoia and bad blood. It s a familiar and emotive term of abuse, commonly directed against people who happen to be underprivileged and unemployed. And its use is designed specifically to polarise people, and to ferment hostility, even hatred.
On this level, to throw the term around is careless, if not reckless. But it is worse than that in another way, in that it is exceptive, ignoring as it does the fundamental fact that refugees or immigrants currently have no choice in this matter. The Irish state refuses to give them work permits until their applications for refugee status have been processed. There is, therefore, no way for them to keep themselves in food and clothes other than to apply for welfare.
Worse, the wheels of bureaucracy have been moving so slowly that it takes an inordinate length of time for people who apply for refugee status to get an answer a period during which they are consigned to an occupational limbo, their lives effectively put on hold.
The term spongers is always objectionable, but in this context it is doubly so. To prevent people from working and then to accuse them of being spongers is outrageously hypocritical. But this is what has been happening.
There is, of course, an answer. Give those immigrants who want to work permits, and let them have the opportunity at least to support themselves.
H H H H H
In the last issue of Hot Press, I referred to the fact that people are now being harassed at ports, airports, at Connolly Station and on the train from Belfast itself, by officers working on behalf of immigration control. Most of the people who are being stopped and questioned are black.
No one should be in any doubt about the fundamentally racist nature of what is going on. Having been at the receiving end of similar treatment as a people, you d think we might know better. But this is the policy of the Government of the country, and it is being put into effect by the paid custodians of pubic order. At least when signs went up in windows in the UK stating that No Blacks No Irish Need Apply you could put it down to individual ignorance and prejudice. Not so with the treatment of immigrants who have come here.
In Ireland, right now, if you re black, you re a suspect. It s official.
H H H H H

IS it really that bad? Yes, it is. As Eamonn McCann reports in this issue, black people with Irish passports are now being singled out for questioning at points of entry into the country. And they are being singled out because of their colour. We must be willing to deport illegal immigrants, the former Minister for Justice Maire Geoghegan-Quinn wrote in The Irish Times recently, clearly supporting current Department thinking. Presumably, then, unless there is a change of heart that will be the next step.
The prospect is grisly. It is accepted that there are probably 4,000 new immigrants in Ireland right now. In 1996, a total of 1,179 applied for asylum. Only 119 applications were granted. On that ratio, we ll soon be packing 3,600 deportees off to wherever we can dump them. If it comes to it, I hope they go kicking and screaming, and that they drag some of their tormentors down with them.
The Minister has made much of the concept of a safe third country , arguing that it is quite legitimate for Ireland to deport immigrants to their first place of landing. This is disingenuous, in the extreme. It is, in effect, a way of attempting to guarantee that very few refugees can possibly claim asylum legitimately here. How many flights, for example, come to Dublin from Somalia, the Congo Republic, Liberia, or other parts of Africa? On the face of it, whatever nasty mind dreamed this one up seems to have been attempting to give a veneer of bureaucratic respectability to a policy of keeping blacks out, while we airlift a few Bosnians in to salve our consciences.
But there is no guarantee whatsoever that these people will not simply be moved on again, back to whatever traumatic circumstances they were attempting to escape from in the first place. Indeed, there is little doubt that in some cases this will happen and that rejected refugees will die as a result, unless there is a significant change of policy. That is what we must now demand from the government as a matter of urgency.
H H H H H