Free Radikal

Posts Tagged ‘Ireland’

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.

Since the onset of the recession and the demise of the NCCRI and the cut in
the budget of the Equality Authority and the Irish Commission on Human
Rights, no one has been speaking much about racism. Most Irish people feel
they have other priorities, as they try to make ends meet, get a bank loan,
or secure their pensions.

Racism, however, has not disappeared. Migrants, Travellers and members of
other ethnic minorities are reporting a marked increase in racist incidents,
though, apart from CSO statistics on ‘racially motivated crimes’ (which
don’t differentiate the experiences of Travellers, migrants or other
racialised groups) there is little hard evidence.

It was therefore encouraging that the Equality Authority and the European
Network against Racism organised a discussion forum on ‘Tackling racism and
the impact of racist stereotypes’. The event, hosting academics, members of
NGOs, some of whom were themselves migrants, Travellers and members of
minorities, aimed to identify ‘best practices and tools to address racism
including racism arising from stereotypes’.

However yet again, none of the speakers was a member of a migrant or
minority group. The keynote speaker was Anastasia Crickley, a long time
anti-racist campaigner for Traveller and minority rights, and chairperson of
the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (formerly the EU Monitoring Centre against
Racism, Antisemitism and Xenophobia). She listed four reasons for addressing
racism: charity, cohesion, economics and ethics, but she did not speak about
the politics of antiracism, or about the role of the state in perpetrating
racism. In the Equality Authority’s background document, ‘Living Together:
European Citizenship against Racism and Xenophobia’ the best practices
listed for Ireland mostly focused on cultural diversity, not antiracism.
Twelve years after the European Year Against Racism, racism is still spoken
about in terms of cultural diversity. The EA’s event gave no space to the
lived experiences or analysis of racism by the racialised.

The famous anti colonial fighter Frantz Fanon emphasised the lived
experience of the black man. Yet  contemporary academic preoccupation with
‘culture’ and ‘identity’ as the sole positions of the struggle of racialised
people leads to the conflation of ‘identity politics’ with anti-racism and
to the depoliticisation of the anti-racist struggle. However, one of the
most important questions asked in relation to antiracism is ‘who speaks for
whom, who says what and from where?’ Antiracism can be either generalised -
intending to raise awareness among the population and reach a post-racial
‘racelessness’, or colour blindness. Or it can be self-representational,
where the lived experience of the racialised informs the struggle.
Generalist antiracism is anchored in universal values such as democracy,
human rights, equality and tolerance; it reduces the importance of state
racism and emphasises individual (or institutional) prejudice.  In contrast,
self organising antiracism stresses the role of the state, which focuses on
notions of the race idea rooted in the political structure. The lived
experience of the protagonists informs the struggle and names the state as
the main culprit rather than stress individual prejudice, a way of
depoliticising racism and antiracism.

Not privileging the experiences of the racialised means nothing much has
changed. Antiracism in Ireland continues to be solidaristic, performed by
well meaning white, settled, Christian Irish people, whose ‘best practices’
documents continue in the tradition of soft interculturalism and cultural
diversity, while racism goes on.

Roma families given temporary shelter after racist attacks

When ‘post conflict’ Northern Ireland was dubbed by the BBC the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ in 2004, Robbie McVeigh’s analysis made the point that it was wrong to say, as many journalists did, that racism escalated simply because Protestants and Catholics had stopped fighting each other. Rather, McVeigh insisted, racism was not a new phenomenon in Northern Ireland, but was rather part of a legacy of intolerance built into Loyalist areas and into Unionism itself.

The racist violent attacks against a group of Romanian Roma in Belfast confirms McVeigh’s analysis that racism, rather than being the consequence of neo-Nazi BNP sympathisers – a claim made all too easily by Northern politicians including MLP Anna Lo (who by the way, as the only minority ethnic representative, received death threats because of her support for the Roma) – is built into northern Loyalism. It’s true that the attacks happened only a few weeks after the victory of the BNP in Britain’s European and local elections. It’s also true that both the UVF and the UDA denied their involvement with both the BNP and the attacks against the Roma families. Yet according to journalist Peter Geoghegan, the ‘Village’ area of Belfast, a run-down area of Loyalist terraces which became popular with eastern European migrants has seen many racist attacks of which the attacks on the Roma last week were only the most recent. Read the rest of this entry »

Pamela Izevbekhai with her children

I am writing this before the case has been decided and before we know whether a Nigerian mother who is seeking asylum in Ireland for herself and her daughters is allowed to remain in Ireland.

Much has been said about Pamela Izevbekhai’s case. Her recent admission, on the Marion Finnucane show, that her asylum claim was based on forged documents provided a dramatic turning point not only in her own case, but in the whole complex relations between the Irish state and African, particularly Nigerian, asylum seekers.

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In the aftermath of the resignation of Niall Crowley, Chief Executive of the Equality Authority, the Minister for Justice made ‘no apologies’ for cutting the Equality Authority’s budget, privileging instead police spending. This is in line with seeing equality work as defending Irish society’s problematic marginal populations, rather than maintaining equality for all, which was what the EA was about.

Denying racism and declaring itself post- and anti-racist, Ireland, like other EU member states, in restricting immigration, limiting it to those migrants who are useful to ‘our way of life’, and castigating Travellers and poor people for not playing their part, particularly now that the economic boom is over.

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