Free Radikal

After weeks of speculations, the Minister for Finance delivered his verdict, targeting public sector workers, unemployment allowances, children’s allowances, medical card holders, and other recipients of welfare allowances.

Yes, he did reduce public sector workers progressively – some high earners will lose more money, but lower earners will lose more proportionately.

I am not an economist and will not do a detailed analysis of the cuts. But I do want to reflect on the rhetoric of ‘we are all in it together’ and ‘we all must sacrifice’ for the ‘common good’. As Fintan O’Toole showed clearly in his recent book A Ship of Fools, the deep recession Ireland finds itself in, is due to both stupidity and corruption. As the rich became richer – aided by their friends in government – the less well off were somewhat better off during the boom, but also incurred greater debts, being forced to buy over inflated houses and pay over inflated mortgages.
What interests me here, once again, is the complete silence on the position of migrants in the debates about the budget cuts. While the community development sector rightly fought against their foreclosure and against the forced amalgamation with area partnership, the consequences for migrants and migrant-led organisations has not yet been spoken about.

So let’s reiterate. There still are some 6,000 asylum seekers in holding centres, living in limbo and awaiting decision on their residency status. In receipt of bed and board and a paltry allowance, not raised since 2001, asylum seekers are often desperate, often having to resort to a variety of strategies to make ends meet, including, in extreme cases, selling sex to put food on the table. Secondly, a large number of migrants who came here as labour migrants – to fill labour shortages in the construction, hospitality, agricultural and care sectors – now find themselves unemployed, and in many cases undocumented. Organisations catering for homeless people report growing percentages of migrants among their clients. Yet nobody speaks a bout them. Indeed, research has shown that people who formerly were reasonably supportive of migrants, particularly ‘useful’ labour migrants, are now saying they have other problems – migration is no longer on the radar.

Anecdotally, racism is on the increase. From vile online anti-Roma and anti-migrant postings, to the recent finding by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, that Ireland is among the top ten in discrimination against ethnic minorities. 54% of Sub Saharan Africans in Ireland report racial discrimination. Yet no one speaks about it.

Cuts in education, in health, in housing, in training and cuts in allowances such as children’s allowances are all bound to affect migrants, yet no one speaks about it.

Copy of a letter I sent to the Irish Times:

Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology
TCD

Madam,

The shortsightedness of the government’s plans to subsume community development projects in area partnerships (Letters, 25 November) was eloquently articulated by four community activists on Vincent Browne’s TV3 show on the same day. Cathleen O’Neill of Kilbarrack CDP, Rita Fagan of St Michael’s Family Resource Centre, Bronagh O’Neill of the Canal Equality Campaign and Margaret O’Shea of the Kerry Network for People with Disabilities highlighted the services CDPs provide, often by volunteers, to their communities, and the loss to theses communities of taking the projects away from the people they are serving. The transfer to area partnerships has been decided upon without consultation and it is evident that now more than ever CDPs are both ‘good value’ and essential in providing services such as childcare, after school care, programmes for women and disabled people, not provided by the state and local authorities.

Likewise, migrant-led organisations and networks, whose case has not yet been championed, are also facing drastic funding cuts. Like the CDPs, they also provide much needed services to their constituencies, often on a voluntary basis. These services, including empowerment and advocacy, language training, gender-based programmes, and basic advice on rights and entitlements, are not provided by the state or local authorities. Thus, like the CDPs, migrant-led organisations save the state money while at the same time facilitating the smoother integration of migrants into Irish society and preventing the eruption of banlieu-style disturbances in the future.

The planned cuts and amalgamations are supported by leading philanthropists, whose financial largesse involves the over zealous management of CDPs and migrant organisations, often leading to the decimation of the very sector they purport to support. I call on Minister Eamon O Cuiv and Minister of State John Curran to guarantee the continued funding and autonomy of both CDPs and migrant-led organisations whose contribution is vitally needed now more than ever before.

Yours etc

Ronit Lentin

An Garda Siochána have again made it absolutely clear that they do not want foreigners in the police force. In 2007, having appealed for recruits from what is euphemistically called Ireland’s ‘new communities’, it refused to allow a Sikh volunteer to the Garda reserve force to wear his turban on duty. The Garda explicitly denied that the turban ban was based on race or religion, but rather on the imperative to provide an ‘impartial police service’ requiring, among other things, ‘our standard uniform and dress’. According to Kevin O’Donoghue, Head of the Garda Press and Public Relations, ‘within the principles of an intercultural approach, An Garda Siochána is not advocating one religious belief over another, nor are we, in any way, being racist. We are attempting to… retain an image of impartiality while providing a State service to all citizens’. At the same time, An Garda declined to rule out the wearing of Catholic religious symbols such as crucifixes, Lenten ashes and pioneer pins.

It was an opportunity missed. Rather than occasion a much needed debate on the secularisation of the Irish public sphere, the turban ban drew supporters and opponents for an ‘Irish’ way of doing culture. Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, arguing that Garda and state practice is replete with Catholic symbolism and practices, proposed that state institutions either adopt a ‘no religious symbols in public’ ruling across the board, including Catholic religious symbols – his preferred option – or allow all religious symbols, including turbans and veils. In an interesting twist, Harpreet Singh, president of the Irish Sikh Council, linking immigration and Irish emigration, pointed to the large number of Irish migrants in the US who have converted to Sikhism and asked whether they would face the same barriers if they return home.

This was in 2007, towards the end of Ireland’s Celtic capitalism era. In 2009, as Ireland is sunk in the depth of a gloomy recession, the turban issue raises its head again. But wait for it, this time is it explicitly reiterated in the name of none but ‘diversity’. As the Garda’s ‘diversity champion’ chief administrative officer John Leamy said in a Garda conference on diversity on 19 November, the force’s diversity strategy ‘has taken an intercultural model, where diversity was respected and reflected in the force’ rather than an ‘assimilation model where newcomers would have to accept the majority status quo’. And yet again, the Garda claims the ban is about ‘impartial policing’ – as if a turbaned or veiled Garda officer cannot possibly be impartial, as opposed to a Catholic, cross-bearing officer of course.
But hold on a second. If diversity is ‘respected and reflected in the force’ and newcomers ‘do not have to accept the majority status quo’, how come the Garda is still insisting on assimilation, as Dr Jasbir Singh argued, effectively denying ‘equal employment rights’ to Sikhs and other minorities? The ban affects not only naturalised Sikhs migrants, but also their Irish born Sikh children. Dr Singh reminded the conference that in Britain and other countries turbaned Sikhs serve in the police.

Remember however, that the performance of cultural diversity becomes a device, a brand, as state bodies, companies, and educational institutions pride themselves on their ‘happy colourful faces’, albeit without relinquishing control of those diversity projects to the owners of these very faces. The reiterated turban ban denotes the confusion, by the Gardai and other state bodies, about the meaning of ‘interculturalism’, an Irish (policy) solution to an Irish (immigration) problem, both multiculturalism and assimilation under a different name. It is absurd to both claim diversity and interculturalism and demand ‘newcomers’ do things ‘our’ own way without taking any steps towards officially secularising Ireland’s (Catholic) public sphere.

The outburst by the Mayor of Limerick, who called for ‘anybody’ living in Ireland who cannot afford to pay for him/herself to be deported after three months, has highlighted the absence of concern for migrants living in Ireland in the current debates about the recession.  While concern has been rightly voiced in relation to people living on welfare and those in low paid jobs, no such concern has been voiced in relation to migrants, many of whom were invited or attracted to Ireland to fill labour market vacancies not filled by Irish workers. Indeed, as the Limerick Mayor insisted, ‘during the good times it was grand but we can’t afford the current situation unless the EU is willing to step in and pay for non-nationals.’

To put migrants back into the recession debate, let’s get some facts straight.

Firstly, workers were the great majority of the various categories of non-EU nationals coming to Ireland in the last decade (about 280,000 work permits were issued from 1998 to 2008), followed by asylum seekers (74,000 applications made from1998 to 2008), students and dependents. Between 2002 and 2006, there were 133,436 people with EU nationalities in Ireland, of whom 103,476 came from the UK, and, after 2004, 120,534 came from the 10 accession EU states.

Secondly, migrant workers make up a high proportion of people signing on the live register. According to the Trinity Immigration Initiative, between October 2007 and 2008, this number increased by over 100% from 21,035 to 44,600 (while the number of Irish nationals signing on increased by 52%). Most recently, the number of migrants from the New Member States signing on, who had the highest employment rate for any migrant group, increased by 200% from 6,542 to 22,285
In addition, in recent months the Homeless Agency noticed a trend of the increasing use of homeless services by non-Irish nationals, usually from the EU Accession states, who are affected by the Habitual Residency Condition, and therefore have worked and contributed PRSI payments for a period of at least two years, and are thus eligible for welfare payments.
What do all these facts and figures tell us? Firstly, if we follow the mayor’s call, we need to begin by deporting British people. But just imagine the outcry if Britain called for the deportation of Irish people who cannot afford to pay for themselves back to Ireland.
Secondly, we need to remember not only the contribution made by migrant workers to the Irish Tiger economy. We need to also remember that they are not just workers, but humans who qualify for the same rights and duties as Irish citizens.

Thirdly, and lest we forget, Ireland is also home to 6,841 asylum seekers whose cases are still pending and who are still living in direct provision holding centres, existing on an allowance of 19.10 euro per week (not raised since it was first introduced in 2001). They are surely the poorest of the poor, whose concerns, and the concerns of the unquantifiable number of undocumented migrants, many of whom became undocumented not by choice, are never raised in the recent discussions.

Irish people should remember that migrants are humans, part of Irish society. Moreover, migrants have children, many of whom were born in Ireland and knowing no other reality. For the sake of these children, if not for their parents, we need to make migrants part of all debates on the current economic crisis.

Eli Aminov                        November 09

Shortly after the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted the Goldstone Report the Israeli Ambassadress to the United Nations started a whining, emotional blackmailing attack against the commission: “Israel is the only state in the world which is being discriminated against by the commission and criticized more than any other state in the world!” she complained.

Her Excellency the Ambassadress should be reminded of what really makes Israel so unique globally.

    Israel is the only state in the world that apparently was established based on a United Nations resolution but whereas the said resolution was about the establishment of two states, a Jewish one and a Palestinian one, the resolution was immediately breached by Israel which took over most of the territory designated for the Arab state.
    Israel is the only state in the world which was established during the 20th century on the ruins of another people, which expelled two thirds of an indigenous population out of the territory it had concurred turning them into refugees and refusing to allow their return in direct contradiction to a UN resolution on this matter.
    Israel is the only state in the world that defined the remains of the indigenous population over whose territory she had settled as “foreigners” and subjected them to its peculiar immigration laws as if they had just landed in the state from far and beyond.
    Israel is the only state in the world that had managed to annul a fully justified UN resolution that defined Zionism as racism.
    Israel is the only state in the world that invented a nation which can only be joined through a religious conversion.
    Israel is today the only state in the world sustaining an Apartheid regime which discriminates against its own non-Jewish citizens through a complete set of laws and legislations, including property rules, nationality laws and security regulations.
    Israel is in fact the only apparition in the developed world of an army which owns a state, an army whose commanders blatantly interfere to interrupt every move to end the conflict that might jeopardize the smooth run of their gravy train.
    Israel is the only state in the world that instead of adhering to human code of conduct during its self initiated wars tries to convince the world that it deserves a special, different and more convenient set of war rules, rules that will not define the killing non-Jews as crime.
And so while the Israeli ambassadress to the United Nations tries to present herself and her masters as the Little Dutch Boy from the fairy tales who tries to stop the flood by sticking his little finger to the hole in the dam, indeed the only fill Israel can offer the world as a solution to unsolved issues is a dynamite stick.

Eli Aminov is a peace activist living and Jerusalem and a member of the committee for secular and democratic state.

http://www.onesdstate.blogspot.com/