Free Radikal

Archive for the ‘racism’ Category

Talk given at an Anti Deportation Ireland public meeting, 11 April 2013

Culture of incarceration

According to a recent book on coercive confinement in Ireland, Ireland locked up one in 100 of its citizens in Magdalene laundries, industrial schools, mental hospitals and ‘mother and baby’ homes, where women pregnant out of wedlock were locked up and forced to give their babies for adoption. At any given time between 1926 and 1951 there were about 31,000 people in these institutions – only a small fraction of whom had committed any crime. This also applied to children – one child in every hundred was enslaved in an industrial school. Children in industrial schools, run by female and male Catholic orders, were treated with cruelty, not given proper food or education, made to work for the nuns or the brothers and were often physically and sexually abused. Their sole ‘crime’ was belonging to what would now be called ‘problem families’.

This history of incarceration, Fintan O’Toole writes, was Ireland’s way of establishing religious, social and moral “purity” by locking up and “correcting” potential deviants. This level of “coercive confinement” is extreme for any democratic society. In 1931, the Soviet gulags held about 200,000 prisoners – from a population of 165 million. The Irish system held 31,000 people – from a population of three million.

And this continues today. Between 2000 and 2012 Ireland locked up in direct provision hostels 51,000 asylum seekers, whose sole ‘crime’ was legally applying for Geneva Convention refugee status. In total, between 1991 and 2012 there were 68,847 asylum applications, of which only 4,130 or 6 per cent received positive answers. In November 2012, the last month for which figures are available, 4,822 people were incarcerated in these hostels, 75 per cent from Africa. Although intended to hold people for a maximum of six months, the average length of stay in these ‘holding camps’ is 44 months – almost four years, and many have been incarcerated for up to six years. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 9 1943, during the Holocaust, when, though Jewish people were cremated in their millions by Nazi Germany, the Irish state allowed only a tiny number of Jewish refugees into Ireland, Oliver J Flanagan TD made his maiden speech in the Dáil: ‘There is one thing that Germany did, and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair’s breadth what orders you make. Where the bees are there is the honey, and where the Jews are there is the money‘.  The House, shamefully, did not react.

Seventy years later, his son, Charlie Flanagan TD pens an article in the Irish Times arguing against the campaign to grant Travellers the status of an ethnic group. Travellers, he claims, are just like other groups in Irish society: farmers, Gaeltacht people, Kerry people and, yes, Jewish people, the same Jewish people his father wanted to rout out of Ireland. While acknowledging Travellers’ disadvantage, and while ‘significant progress has been made’ in improving their condition, designating them as a separate ethnic group is dangerous, he insists, as this will weaken their position and – heaven forbid – lead to members not regarding themselves as ‘being Irish at all’.

The article met with a wall of silence. No letters to the paper, very little on social networks, until Brigid Quilligan’s excellent article a week later. The ethnic group debate has been raging for a long time now, particularly since Justice Minister Michael McDowell withdrew funding from the Citizen Traveller project, declaring Travellers are not a separate ethnic group. Read the rest of this entry »

A conversation with close friends turned to new Irish citizens. My friends said the people recently conferred with Irish citizenship in the mass ceremonies organised by Minister for Justice Alan Shatter (some 16,000 to date) should be, and were, grateful. Shatter is to be congratulated for dealing with the backlog and, according to Metro Eireann, the majority of the new citizens were pleased with the process. Being granted citizenship is no doubt a bonus for people hitherto unable to travel freely. However, citizenship is entirely at the discretion of the Minister, there are no clear qualification criteria and no obligation to provide reasons for refusals. When I argued against the high cost of citizenship in Ireland – of which more later – I failed to persuade them, because citizenship, my friends insisted, is something valuable ‘we’ bestow upon ‘them’. Read the rest of this entry »

A dear friend has written to me recently about her worry about the rise of Islam, which, she wrote, is opposed to all the values she holds dear. Ronit, she implored, ’listen to them, to what they want. Look at the mass demonstrations after the Innocence of Muslims film. Look at how they treat women. How come that you, a liberal intellectual, a feminist who fights for equality, cannot understand that you are speaking a language that is no longer relevant? This for me is the main problem of the pacifist intellectual left’.

For a long time now Islam and Muslims have become the main enemy of the West. In the name of ‘protecting our way of life’ the West has gone to bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the name of the ‘war on terror’ Western states racially profile and persecute people of Muslim and Arab appearance everywhere. Although Muslims have definitely reacted violently to racial slurs in recent weeks, I would suggest that the main reason for this racialisation is racism and fear. Fear, as the fascist Dutch politician Geert Wilders warns, of ‘the last stages of the Islamisation of Europe’. A fear called Islamophobia, another way of saying racism against Muslim people. Read the rest of this entry »

I was privileged to speak at the Irish Traveller Movement 2012 AGM. Travellers have campaigned for recognition as an ethnic group for years and the state’s refusal in 2003 to recognise them as such after years of government attempts to settle and assimilate Travellers was a major setback, because it deprives them of a coherent platform from which to conduct an antiracism campaign.

My argument is that although there is plenty of individual racism against Travellers, from local councils to local residents who do not want Travellers to be accommodated near them, the chief offender is the state. In attempting to settle Travellers, in not providing sufficient halting sites, in prohibiting camping on public or private grounds, in not supporting Travellers in seeking second and third level education, and in denying Traveller ethnicity, the Irish state racialises Travellers as a group apart. Read the rest of this entry »