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Speaker’s Corner Our Famine experience should allow us to empathise with immigrants who come here.
“As white Europeans we take it for granted that we will be welcomed in every country we visit”
Speaker’s Corner Áine Ryan
INSTEAD of playing golf, watching the television or going shopping to Castlebar or Galway next Sunday afternoon, take a drive out to the National Famine Monument in Murrisk. The gut-wrenching poignancy of John Behan’s sculpture of a coffin ship whose sails are stitched together with the skeletal threads of our forebears never diminishes. And it shouldn’t. Not simply because it is a symbolic reminder of the human tragedy of repeated famine, a memorial to the cruelties of British colonialism and an exploitative medieval landlord system; it is much more than that. At least, it should be. When thousands of us left in the 1840s in a haemorrhage of desperation from Westport harbour and the quay in Ballina, we were in no fit state to analyse or define whether we were economic or political migrants. We didn’t leave for opportunistic reasons; we left because we were starving, because we lived in an inequitable system; we left because our culture and language was being repressed; we left because we had said the wrong thing in the wrong place; we left because we wanted a life, a bearable life for ourselves and our children. I had coffee with a number of asylum seekers in Ballyhaunis recently. They too left their countries – Nigeria, Pakistan, Serbia, Sudan – for much the same reasons as we did 160 years ago. They fled unstable political regimes and inequitable economic systems; they escaped religious persecution and tribal wars. They came to Ireland, not out of pragmatic opportunism, but in the simple hope of a better life. For help. This dream of a better life – due to a protracted asylum-seeker process here – invariably turns into a nightmare as lives are left in a state of suspension for months, years on end. Meanwhile, they are corralled in an institutionalised environment – like the Old Convent in Ballyhaunis or the Railway Hotel in Kiltimagh – forced to live on a meagre pittance while not being allowed to work. They receive €19.10 per week from the State and €9.60 for each child. Reflect on that for a moment. €19.10 and €9.60. In light of our Celtic Tiger riches, it is farcical, demeaning and even amoral. Each year, as the annual announcement of the Government’s budget approaches, there is a chorus of demands from a plethora of interest groups and individuals about the urgency of increases and decreases on this and that: drink, fags, petrol, mortgage interest rates. ASH will demand an exorbitant increase in the price of a packet of cigarettes, the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association will urge a hike in the price of the pint, PAYE workers will call for an expansion in tax bands. Parents and various lobbyists will highlight the burgeoning costs of childcare, education, clothing, feeding, rearing the country’s children. They will argue for higher child benefit and contend that the usual €10 hike is paltry, a pittance. After all, what can you buy with a crumpled or even shiny €10 note nowadays? Why not ask the experts? Asylum seekers with children. They know how to stretch their weekly €9.60 stipend for each child. It hasn’t changed for seven years and, moreover, their entitlement to child benefit was abolished a number of years ago. Our cute hoor Government – the same one that just awarded itself massive pay-rises, some of which were greater than the average industrial wage – feared the smell of a gravy train. Time to call a halt; especially since we had already lured enough Poles (conveniently white and Catholic) to the country to carry out all the menial jobs and replace our own working class. As white Europeans, in general, we take it for granted that we will be welcomed in every country we visit. We head off on holidays to Turkey, Dubai, South Africa, Singapore and because of the freckles on our faces, the colour of our skin, the language we speak, the flash of our credit cards, there are smiles all-round. Wow! Haven’t times changed rapidly. There was a time when the Paddy abroad was just about as welcome as a black man at a Ku Klux Klan meeting and a dog at a cat fight. A feeling not unknown to many of our asylum-seekers.
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