It was with great shock and sadness that we heard of Patrick Guerin’s sudden death last week. Above all, Pat was known to his friends and many others as a dedicated anti-racist. I first met Pat in 1998 when he enrolled in the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies of which I was the coordinator for the first 15 years. He was challenging, original, and knowledgeable, bringing anti-racism into the classroom and was always keeping me on my toes – a true pleasure to teach. His MPhil dissertation was a set of life narratives of Irish anti-racism activists, but he managed to lose his computer file and to my great regret, never deposited the bound dissertation in the Department of Sociology, thus it is not available for consultation.

Teaching at Masters level means that some of your students and graduates become friends – Pat was certainly a friend. In 1999 he suggested we run a seminar in Trinity, titled ‘Emerging Irish identities’. Though I am a critic of the concept of identity, the seminar was a great success. It was organised jointly by us and by the National Federation of Campaigns against Racism, which, Pat wrote, was formed in March 1999, inviting affiliations from all open, democratic and non-party political groups campaigning against racism. Consisting of eleven groups, the NFCAR supported the right of immigrants to seek meaningful well paid employment; opposed the scapegoating of immigrants for the deficiencies of the Celtic Tiger and the deportation of what was then called ‘non-nationals’; opposed the discrimination against all ethnic minorities including Travellers and supported free movement for all. Concerned about the anti-immigrant hysteria, Pat linked this to his critique of Irish identity as overtly nationalistic, suggesting that ‘emerging Irish identities’ are anything but nationalistic or closed. His interest in anti-immigrant discourses was developed in a chapter he wrote for Racism and Antiracism in Ireland, which I edited with Robbie McVeigh, and which dealt with anti-refugee media discourses in the early 2000s. He developed his writing and editing skills in Asyland, a journal he edited for the Irish Refugee Council for which he worked as an outreach worker.

Pat was not only a good writer and a committed comrade, he also never shirked backing unpopular causes – his particular support for and work with Roma people is a typical example; indeed, through him I met several incredible Roma people who have made Ireland their home, despite the fact that Roma people are the only EU citizens regularly deported from Ireland and Western Europe. Pat was also not afraid to put his neck on the line – as member of Anti Racism Campaign (ARC), he and his comrades staged a sit down at Taoseach Bertie Ahern’s constituency office.

Pat had his personal demons and we were all delighted when he returned recently to the anti-racism scene, looking a bit worse for wear, but as humorously acerbic as ever. Never lost for a quick riposte, he always gave his support to asylum seekers and migrants who, he knew, were racialised by state and society. It’s true we didn’t see each other often recently – he kept saying he was about to visit me in my office, but sadly we kept missing each other, though we did meet on several occasion in the months before his untimely death. Our last interaction was about what Anti Deportation Ireland (ADI) was expecting of its supporters. Ever the straight talker, Pat asked ADI to become clearer, and was perhaps not patient – fifteen years later – to let them do things in their own pace. As for me, I am sorry that out last exchange was one of disagreement and that I was unable to tell Pat how much I admired and appreciated him. I will miss him as will everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him as the fabulous person and committed anti-racist that he was.

The proceedings of the seminar are available online at: https://www.tcd.ie/sociology/ethnicracialstudies/assets/documents/emerging_irish_id.pdf

I went back to Who’s Minding the Children?, a book I co-wrote with Geraldine Niland (and Stella McMahon on Northern Ireland), published by Attic Press in 1980.  Many of the issues highlighted by RTE were covered in our 1980 book. Here I quote from the final chapter, ‘The future and what needs to be done’ to demonstrate that while our demand to introduce day care has been met, largely by private operators, some things have not changed in relation to childcare in Ireland, a country obsessed with protecting unborn children, but apparently less concerned with children after they are born. Some things have changed, of course. In 1980 crèches were few and far between, today there  clearly is  a wide supply; our demand for a Department for Children has been met; finally, today I would not insist that childcare is a women’s issue – it’s clearly a parents’ issue. However, some things have not changed, particularly in relation to standards, training, inspection, and fair wages to staff; and reading the 1980 conclusion is interesting :

‘At the time of going to press the government’s task force whose brief it was to examine and recommend reforms within the child care services has not finally reported. It is likely that the provisions of day care facilities for the under fives will not score highly on their list of priorities. However, one provision which could come out of their recommendations is the registration of child care facilities outside the home. At this stage it is debatable whether private child-minders would be included, as they are in Britain and Northern Ireland, under the Nurseries and Child Minders Regulation Act… When and if regulation becomes law, it may not be implemented effectively…

As we see it, child care is the women’s rights issue of the eighties, and to quote from our introduction, it is our hope to stimulate demand. You can help… Women’s groups can campaign on all our behalf and trade unions, also, would – we think – welcome moves towards day care provision, even if it comes from employers as opposed to the state. The important thing is that day care becomes a reality. And if we cannot, ourselves, ensure the supply, let us at least ensure that:

•    Registration is effective: enough public health nurses, health inspectors, social workers. At present, all these are overloaded, and unless additional staff are taken on, they cannot be expected to carry out supervision of child care facilities adequately. And it should be flexible. It should not matter how many square feet or how many loos there are per child; the criteria should be the quality of care.
•    Training includes more full-time courses and more easily accessible courses at local level.
•    National planning includes the setting up of a special department dealing with child care services… It should also mean attracting something like a rider clause to Planning Permission for new factories and housing schemes which would ensure a compulsory supply of child care facilities. Meanwhile we must look again for flexible working arrangements for parents; part time jobs; flexitime; job sharing; better maternity leaves and paternity leaves in case of a child’s illness. Other important introductions would be some form of emergency care service, and after school care…’

In 1980 there was little official response to the book but since then, with the surge in the number of working mothers, many changes have been made in terms of flexitime, job sharing, part time etc. Note however, that child care standards, training, regulation and inspection remain a huge issue. Community crèches seem to be better places than the nurseries shown by RTE, but many of them are strapped for cash, while private nurseries, which cost up to €1,000 euro per month, seem to be money-making vehicles for their owners. Beyond Garda investigations and closures, and beyond pushing women back into the home, in 2013, like in 1980, we again demand quality child care, at reasonable cost, run by well trained, and above all, caring people.

On 14-15 May a Diaspora Forum conference was held in Fitzpatrick’s Hotel in Dublin. It aimed to celebrate migration, migrants and the contribution the diaspora makes to home countries. Keynote speaker, the Economist business editor Robert Guest celebrated mass migration, which, he said, makes the world brainier. If a century ago, migrants crossed the ocean and never saw their homeland again, today they phone or Skype home the moment their plane lands. Thanks to cheap travel and easy communications, immigrants stay in contact with home, creating powerful cross-border networks that create wealth, spread ideas and foster innovation.

Diaspora, contributors to the conference emphasised, is mostly about economics: through remittances, philanthropy and direct diaspora investment, members of the diaspora are primarily seen as alumni who their original state needs to touch for contributions – a discourse all too familiar to anyone working in today’s neoliberal universities. Workshops debated the role of governments in engaging their diasporas across multiple sectors and constructing strategies aimed to create partnerships between government and diaspora. To copper fasten such engagements, the conference also discussed the payback in terms of granting migrants voting rights, and working for ‘host country integration and return migration platforms’.

I have to confess that as a migrant and daughter of migrants, and as a supporter of migrant rights in Ireland, I have several problems with this diaspora-as- resource discourse. Firstly, seeing diaspora mostly as potential economic contribution regards migrants as privileged and ignores the millions of forced migrants, many of whom languish in asylum and detention centres, or segregated in low paid employment sectors, hovering between legality and illegality, not being able to afford Skype yet sending their meagre earnings to support destitute families back home.

Secondly, the discourse of diaspora as part of the nation is divisive and exclusive. Though the Irish diaspora, as we have been repeatedly told since President Mary Robinson lit the diaspora candle in Aras an Uchterain, are us, the diaspora discourse opens the way to blood-based citizenship. Thus Ireland grants automatic citizenship to third and fourth generation emigrants who have never set foot in Ireland, but not – since the 2004 Citizenship referendum – to children of migrants actually born in the Island of Ireland. Equally, diaspora Jews with a Jewish mother have automatic right to Israeli citizenship, while Palestinian refugees born on the land do not have a right of return.

The conference also included the CEO of the Zionist organisation ‘Birthright Israel’ which runs free trips for young Jewish people to Israel – to date some 300,000 youngsters from 59 countries have participated. The objective is to diminish the division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to Jewish history and culture.

I want to argue that Israel and Ireland are both blood-based ‘diaspora nations’. In both while maintaining the diaspora discourse is mostly economic, the ultimate objective is the consolidation of bloodline nationalism which racialises migrants and indigenous others as not part of the potentially net contributor diaspora. A demonstration of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign outside the conference venue included Palestinian West Bank activist Moussa Abu Maria whose banner read ‘I am Palestinian - what about our birthright?’ The Palestinian diaspora can also potentially make a huge contribution to Palestine if allowed to return, just as the members of the various diasporas currently residing in Ireland can make to their home countries. But we need to re-think the unproblematic diaspora discourse and move away from seeing all emigrants merely as alumni.

Though troubling, the dialogue was straightforward enough. Miko posted his plans for his UK and Ireland lecture tour on his Facebook page. After I heard he was charging for his Irish leg of the tour, I asked him on Facebook how much he was charging. He asked me to email him – he clearly did not want his fees disclosed in the public Facebook space. This was the email exchange, on March 31.

Miko: “I usually ask for $1500-$2500.  During my UK tour coming up I asked 500-1000 pounds. Why do you ask?”

Me: “I am asking because it rankles with me that you are making a living from the oppression of Palestinians, I suppose”.

Miko: “This is a cynical thing to say, and quite foolish, and considering my work it is totally uncalled for. Still, you can be rankled all you like, I am not the one oppressing the Palestinians, nor am I the one making a living off of their oppression.
I have a message that people want to hear, many people and I think it is an important one. I had to decide whether to sell my business and spread the message or stay home. I opted for the former I cannot afford to do it for free. Unlike others, I am independent, self employed and there is no institution or government that will pay to spread the message that I convey. It is excruciatingly hard work, to constantly travel and speak, there is plenty of money out there and I don’t see why it has to be done for free”.

On April 6, Miko published his UK and Ireland itinerary, enabling me to do a quick calculation, giving him the benefit of the doubt and allowing £500 (rather than £1,000) for each UK lecture and €500 for the Irish leg of the tour:

6/4/13
Leaving tonight for the UK: Here are the places in the UK and Ireland where I will be stopping to speak on this tour:
Mon. April 8th: BATH, 7.30pm. Manvers Street Baptist Church,        (£500)
Tues. April 9th: CARDIFF, 6.30pm, Cardiff University            (£500)
Wed. April 10th: LONDON, Evening dinner in the company of Miko Peled and Ilan Pappe
“Personal Journeys, the Global Impact of Israel’s Dissenting Voices” organised by Facilitate Global                                        (£500)
Thurs. April 11th: DUBLIN, 7.30pm, Gresham Hotel, facilitated by journalist Philip Boucher-Hayes    Sat. April 13th: CORK, 3pm, Gresham Metropole Hotel (Dublin and Cork: (€500 plus per diem and travel expenses – although his travel and subsistence were paid)
Mon. April 15th: LONDON, 6.30 to 8pm, CAABU Members’ event, Committee Room 6, House of Commons chaired by John Denham MP                (£500)
The grand total comes to £2,000 plus €500 (plus extraneous expenses) – not bad for one week’s work. He didn’t list Belfast, which was not included in the Irish leg; another fee?

You may think that hearing Miko’s message, including his support for the Teachers Union of Ireland’s motion on BDS, is worth the money. Perhaps, but, as a long term Israeli pro Palestine activist (I do not call myself a ‘peace activist’ mind), I am discomfited. The son of General Mattityahu Peled who, after an illustrious military career in the IDF, joined the Israeli ‘peace camp’, something his son emphasises in all his speeches, as he does the murder of his niece Smadar by a terrorist bomb (his book The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, is promoted on all his tours and his website), Miko lives in the United States and conducts his political activism outside Israel. I can agree with his belief in a one secular democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians and his commitment, as he says on his blog, to ‘the realization that Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in peace as equals in their shared homeland’.

So why am I so troubled by Miko making a career out of all of this? Is it because I keep thinking about what the group ‘Who Profits from the Occupation’ (http://www.whoprofits.org/) says about the financial dividends to Israeli and international companies from the occupation of Palestine? Or because of the plethora of international and Israeli NGOs, who, in ‘helping’ the Palestinians, actually perpetuate the occupation, releasing Israel, as occupier, from its responsibility for the occupied population? Or perhaps because selling his product and charging solidarity movements effects the movement and other potential speakers and damages the moral economy of solidarity work?

Some would say that I too, in writing and giving lectures while on a (rather meagre) university salary, profit from the occupation of Palestine (as did Miko’s sister Nurit Peled-Elhanan in an email to me after my exchange with her brother). However, I have never charged for own voluntary political work both in relation to racism in Ireland and to Palestine. Far from adopting a moral high ground, I recognise that perhaps all of us, Israeli activists for the liberation of Palestine, may be similarly implicated. But what rankled was Miko’s insistence that ‘selling his business’ is preferable to ‘staying at home’ and not conveying the important message that ‘many people want to hear’. And it was his high handed assumption that ‘there is plenty of money out there and I don’t see why it has to be done for free’ (though anyone involved in solidarity work knows how hard it is to raise funds), and that, as a freelance (by choice, I suppose), his work is ‘excruciatingly hard’ that got me.

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.

Living conditions in these hostels are dire. Residents tell us that they are often made to live in the same room with people they don’t know and who speak another language, they have to eat unpalatable food cooked by the management, they are often not given sufficient beddings and other necessities, and crucially - they are not allowed to work and, in addition to bed and board, have to live on a paltry allowance of €19.10 per adult per week, not raised since 2000.

Incarcerating people in direct provision hostels is a direct continuation of Ireland’s historical culture of incarceration, which over the years has created very deep habits of secrecy, collusion, evasion and adaptation, which is why most Irish people never questioned the incarceration of women, men and children in Magdalene Laundries, industrial schools and mental hospitals, and why they are not aware of, never mind questioning the incarceration of thousands of asylum seekers in these hostels. But there is a difference – if in the past Irish people were incarcerated so as to rid society of its misfits… asylum seekers are incarcerated in direct provision centres because of racism. They are marked as others and left to rot out of sight, out of mind.

Deportations

Let me start with some recent figures: According to the Department of Justice and Equality website, nearly 2,700 individuals were deported or removed from Ireland in 2012, including 2,260 persons who were refused entry and 298 unsuccessful asylum seeks and irregular migrants who were deported. Of those deported, 111 were returned on nine charter flights and 187 on commercial aircraft.

The state keeps saying that asylum seekers cost too much. Indeed they do. According to figures published by the Minister for Justice, in 2011 the Irish State spent €69.5 million housing and ‘caring’ for asylum seekers, with the majority of the money paying for a small cluster of private contractors who run these centres and who have seen their annual turnover soar.  In addition, in 2011 the Irish State was facing a bill of over €100m to fight injunctions granted by the High Court to 2,000 asylum seekers who are fighting enforced deportation. However, many asylum seekers are highly educated and if allowed to work, they would not cost money but rather work, start businesses and pay taxes – moving from being a net if enforced liability to being income bearing.

If the direct provision system costs a lot, deportations are hugely costly. As William Walters suggests, thinking about the costs of deportations can help to unsettle the view of deportation as simply an administrative procedure of the immigration system and start to see it as an industry. This industry implicates not just police and immigration officials, but airline executives, pilots, stewards, and other passengers. Most pointedly,  remember that private companies make a lot of money from this form of suffering. Answering a Dáil question, Minister Alan Shatter replied that in 2011 the overall cost of removing 280 persons from the State was slightly in excess of €1 million; between 2005 and 2010 the cost of deportations was more than €6.8 million. These costs relate to the deportees and their Garda escorts but not to overtime or subsistence payments for Garda escorts.

If this is the economic cost to the state, the human cost to asylum seekers is much higher. The conditions under which people are deported are inhumane and degrading and, in some European countries, have led directly to a number of deaths. People who receive a deportation order often experience high levels of anxiety and depression, may develop mental health and other medical conditions, or even resort to self-harm or contemplate suicide. Such issues are compounded by life in direct provision. The United National Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has expressed concern at the negative impact of delays in determining asylum seekers’ cases in Ireland. People who are candidates for deportation live in a liminal zone of uncertainty and fear. There is no assistance to children who are traumatised by seeing their parents deported. There is no follow up to see how deportees fare once deported, although we know that many find it incredibly difficult and dangerous – but who in Ireland cares?

Incarcerating asylum seekers in these hostels is not only racist, it also leaves them in a state of deportability. Think of it – housed in these holding camps, asylum seekers with deportation orders are always available to be deported, and can be picked up at any time by immigration officers. This is the purest form of racism – getting rid of people categorised as ‘non national’, seen to disrupt  the purity of Irish whiteness. I am particularly disturbed by deportations – during World War II members of my own family were picked up from their homes in northern Romania and deported across the river Bug to Transnistria, where throughout the war Jewish and Roma people – racialised by the Nazis and their Romanian fascist partners as  racially inferior – were incarcerated in unspeakable conditions,  though thankfully not exterminated. Personally I find it hard to sleep peacefully knowing that people in Ireland can be picked up at dawn and forcibly flown back to the countries from which they escaped to seek safe refuge in Ireland.

Conclusion

Anti Deportation Ireland operates on antiracist principles, without state, local authority or philanthropic funding, and not seeking such funding. Its actions are determined by members, most of whom are asylum seekers or former asylum seekers. We are asking for support and assistance, but we need to start thinking seriously about what sort of support we are looking for and I would like this meeting to start discussing it. Support and solidarity are complex issues – supporters should not dictate or change the agenda, but in order to get your support, we should be asking for specific things. Learning from UK Anti deportation campaigns, there are several things we could ask for: legal advice, which we are already getting from the ever helpful solicitor Gerald Cullen; attendance in court; participation in public campaigns and demonstrations; creative graphics and posters to be distributed online and on paper; disruption of deportations at the airport; safe houses for asylum seekers who are candidates for deportation. These are just some ideas.

My final point is that deportations are racist and have to stop. We must act against Alan Shatter’s seemingly logical argument that deportations are ‘an unfortunate but necessary component of a balanced and fair immigration system’. He further wrote that ‘For the Irish State to relinquish its right of deportation, subject of course to our laws and to human rights obligations, would subvert the principles of fairness and due process which are cornerstones of our immigration system’.  ADI aims to counter this racist state logic and bring an end to all deportations.

What did President Barack Obama’s visit to the Middle East actually achieve? Although many people dared expect him to express stronger views on the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, Obama used his ‘charm offensive’ to assure Israelis that the United States remains on their side.

As helicopters circled the skies, and Jerusalem and Ramallah were closed off to all non residents, Obama’s speech in Ramallah played down the Jewish-only settlements by saying that the US does not see them as ‘constructive’ or ‘appropriate’ for peace, but stopping short of calling for their dismantling, which prompted the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to uncharacteristically interject in describing them as illegitimate and more than an obstacle to peace.

In Israel Obama did all the usual things, including the obligatory visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum. But attention was focused on his speech at the Jerusalem International Convention Centre to thousands of Israeli students and academics. One of the phrases he used, in Hebrew, was ‘you are not alone’ – though using no similar phrase in Arabic when he spoke in Ramallah. Israeli Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy saw in this speech much hope because, after assuring Israel that the US is still on its side, Obama insisted that the only way forward is peace and a two states solution. Obama also stressed that the Iran threat is not only Israel’s problem, insisting that Israel must not go it alone and attack Iran without US approval.

While Palestinian Authority leaders expressed satisfaction and reiterated that only a Palestinian state side by side with Israel can bring peace to the region, more radical Israelis and Palestinians were less than enthralled. On the Palestinian side, Electronic Intifada reminds us that ‘US foreign policy has always favoured and strongly supported the Israeli occupation and rewarded it with billions of dollars in military aid annually. From 1949 until the present day, the US has given Israel more than $115 billion’. Rabeea Eid, an Israeli Palestinian student activist heckled Obama during his speech, asking ‘Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to see the apartheid wall on your way here?’ Though joked that he was expecting the heckling, Eid was bundled out of the hall by security guards. The president did not see the Apartheid wall, and during his visit some 30 Palestinian children were arrested for stone throwing, while in the south of the country missiles were fired from Gaza. In Israel, meanwhile, a group of radical Israeli Jews held a demonstration thanking Obama ‘for supporting our apartheid state’.

Palestinian disappointment with the visit encouraged their ongoing struggle. Thus this week saw a march in Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by Palestinian religious leaders to highlight the plight of Palestinian Christians. At Bab el Shams, the Palestinian protest tent city in area E1, where Israel plans to erect a new settlement cutting off the West Bank from Jerusalem, the wedding of a Jenin youth and his fiancée served as a symbol for the activists’ resolve to live a normal life and ensure Palestinian presence in this area, slated for Israeli settlement.

Obama, who played the good cop, has now left the region after what was described by the Israeli government and its Palestinian Authority acolytes as a successful visit, leaving Secretary of State John Kerry to play the bad cop. It will be up to Kerry to push the two sides to renew the negotiations for a two state solution, even though only very few in the region believe it is realistic.

On 28 February, an Israeli activist with Checkpoint Watch, a movement of Israeli women peace activists who oppose the Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinians’ rights to move freely in their land, and who conduct daily observations of Israeli army checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, was at the bus terminal in Oraniot on highway number 5. At 5 pm, she writes, two police vehicles and two army trucks arrived at the terminal, and a sergeant ordered all the Palestinians to get off bus number 286, on its way to the Jewish settlement of Ariel. The soldiers collected identity documents and permits from all the Palestinian workers on the bus; the workers were told to get off, sit on the cold floor and wait. At first some of them managed to catch another bus (although they have to pay double fares), but the soldiers found out and made them march on foot for the Azoun-Othma checkpoint two and a half kilometres away.

It was cold, the sun had set. Most of these Palestinian workers had got up at three AM to catch their transportation to work inside Israel. Most live within a few kilometres and all they wanted was to be allowed to stay on the bus for a stop or two. They had paid the bus fare and 8,000 Israeli shekels (€1,670) for the permit. You have to work very hard before you can cover such expense and earn your first shekel.

The Palestinians were told by the soldiers ‘you have no permission to be on highway number 5’ – at long last an official admission that this is Apartheid Israel. Bus number 286 was the only way these workers could reach their workplaces, but of late the settlers complained – they didn’t want Arabs on ‘their’ buses. As a result, Israel has introduced separate buses for Palestinians only – so that they do not contaminate the racial purity of the Jewish settlers.

I am not entirely sure whether the separation between the colonising and colonised populations in Palestine constitutes the same level of Apartheid as in South Africa. But like in South Africa, this separation involves not only major political decisions, but also banal everyday practices, including allocating areas for residential construction, different legal systems, inequitable distribution of resources and separate bus lines for Palestinians and settlers who, remember, illegally inhabit Palestinian land.

According to Israeli law professor Aeyal Gross, special buses have been introduced ‘although by law a Palestinian with a permit to enter Israel cannot be prevented from travelling on regular buses’. He goes on to argue: ‘Occupied territory is meant to be managed by the occupying state as a temporary trust for the benefit of the local population. There are clear rules aimed at preventing the evolution of a colonial or apartheid regime. The way the State of Israel is managing the territories is a far cry from the way occupied lands are meant to be managed’.

Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government does not admit to banal Apartheid. Rather, its deputy ambassador in Dublin argued in a letter to the Irish Times last week that these separate buses are actually a positive development for the 30,000 Palestinian workers, allowing them ‘direct transport from their towns and villages to the border crossing’. She said nothing about the fines that Palestinians tried in military courts in the West Bank, often because they are caught without permits, have to pay. According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, in 2011 alone Palestinians paid 13m Israeli shekels (€2.7m) in such fines, financing their own occupation.

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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.

Ethnic groups, writes the anthropologist Frederick Barth, are biologically self reproducing (you are born a Traveller, you cannot become one), have common cultural traits and common fields of communication (nomadism is the Traveller way of life and state of mind, and Gammon or Cant is the Traveller language), and are identified by others and self identify as a separate group. Even in the current era of mass migration, there are very few groups who remain so distinct. Over the years, successive Irish governments attempted to settle the Travellers, in the belief that once they settle, they will cease being Travellers. Their ethnic group status is recognised by Britain and Northern Ireland. Ethnicity denial, argues Robbie McVeigh, is a slippery slope. Nazi Germany exterminated a large proportion of Europe’s Roma people. Although Nazi anthropologists measured their skulls and noses to establish their identity, post war Germany refused to pay reparations arguing they were not incarcerated and murdered as a (non-Aryan) ethnic group but rather as criminals. Today, Roma and Traveller people throughout Europe are deported and their camps destroyed in Italy, France, Germany, Ireland – even though they are EU citizens. Next time Roma and Travellers are massacred because they are Travellers, European states can continue to deny their ethnic status but this won’t change their separateness and disadvantage.

It is clear why travellers want to be recognised as a (specifically Irish) ethnic group. Far from demanding special privileges, Travellers are demanding recognition and equal rights, and a basis from which to conduct an effective antiracist struggle. Quilligan insists that being accorded ethnic status will not reduce Travellers’ Irishness, but will be an important step in improving their health, education and accommodation status (did you know that Travellers have a lower life expectancy than settled Irish people, that 84% of them are unemployed, that the suicide rate among them is six times the Irish average?)
But why is the Irish government is so intent on ethnicity denial? I think it does not have to do with the fear that if recognised they will not perceive themselves as ‘being Irish at all’, as Flanagan suggests, but rather with naked state racism against Travellers, Ireland’s largest ethnic minority. I suspect the main reason is the Fine Gael / Labour coalition’s fear of the sanctions of the international conventions Ireland is signatory to and the reparations that might follow. Recognising Travellers’ ethnic status – while not an answer to all their problems – is a first step towards their equality.

The case occasioned hundreds of international media articles on rape in India. The Economist claimed that rape was called by the UN’s human-rights chief a ‘national problem’. Rapes and the ensuing deaths (often from suicide) are routinely described in India’s press—though many more attacks go unreported to the public or police. Delhi has a ‘miserable but deserved reputation’ for being unsafe, especially for poor and low-caste women. Sexual violence in villages, though little reported, keeps girls and women indoors after dark. And sexual violence, according to Indian feminists and anti rape campaigners, is on the increase: rape cases in India more than doubled between 1990 and 2008, and national crime records show that 228,650 of the 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year had women as victims, with a conviction rate for rape cases at 26 per cent.
All this led the international media to describe India as almost synonymous with rape. One example is British journalist Libby Purves who described Indian men as possessed of ‘murderous, hyena-like male contempt’. Such description vilifies half the population of a vast, diverse country and is unhelpful to what should be a global discussion about patriarchy, misogyny and sexual violence. Such descriptions are extremely ethnocentric – by using western culture to measure other cultures we pretend that the west is ‘civilized’ by comparison, and that ‘Indian men’ are culturally prone to rape.
The reality, however, is much more complex. According to The Economist, there is no reason to think that India is destined to abuse women. Its biggest religion, Hinduism, is relatively tolerant towards them. India already has a liberal constitution and a host of progressive laws, for example against sex-selective abortion and dowries.
Many other non-western countries also boast high incidence of rape. Take for instance the Democratic Republic of Congo, known as the ‘rape capital of the world’, where as many as 200,000 surviving rape victims live today. Or South Africa, which has some of the highest incidences of child and baby rape in the world. In a survey conducted among 1,500 schoolchildren in Soweto, a quarter of the boys interviewed said that ‘jackrolling’, a term for gang rape, was fun.
And are western women really safer? In the US, 5 per cent of college students experienced rape or attempted rape in a single academic year, and 80,000 American school children are sexually abused each year. Sweden, that bastion of democracy and welfare, has the highest incidence of rape in Western Europe with 46 women per 100,000 population (compared with 23 in the UK).
We should discuss patriarchy and gender based violence calmly and rationally without vilifying or assuming that ‘we’ in the west are any better; people in glass houses, remember, should not throw stones.

Let me nail my colours to the mast – I am in favour of women having full control over their bodies, including the choice to have an abortion. I am also in support of legislation in this fraught area, ensuring the life and health of mothers, not only of unborn babies. Indeed, I never saw my students so enraged as they joined the pro choice vigils, with slogans saying ‘she had a heartbeat too’.
But something was missing. No one was speaking about Savita’s migrant identity. Remember when other migrant mothers became central to Ireland changing its birth right citizenship entitlements because these mothers were allegedly ‘flooding’ the maternity hospitals, and ‘childbearing against the state’. Like Irish women who, when pregnant outside wedlock, were locked for decades in ‘Magdalen laundries’ in lifelong servitudes to the nuns, their babies sold away for adoption, migrant mothers’ birthing Irish citizens, became a problem, a  constitutional ‘loophole’ that had to be plugged by changing the 83-year old birthright citizenship entitlements. Since the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, babies born in Ireland to migrant parents, though still ‘part of the nation’, are no longer citizens.
This is my lament. For a beautiful woman who decided to have a baby in Ireland not to gain citizenship for her baby but because she and her husband were told that Ireland is a ‘good place to have a baby’. They didn’t bank on being met with the racialising attitude of ‘this is Ireland, a Catholic country’ where even if your life is oozing out, you have no chance of a termination to save your life. This is my lament and my apology for this beautiful migrant woman whose trust in Ireland killed her.