Brendan Hoban: Irish people must rise above the racist tide              

Western People 14.2.23

There are times when I cannot help but feel huge pride for my country. Once was when the then Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, resisted pressure to cap the number of Ukrainians entering Ireland. He spoke of the plight of refugees, of our own history of knocking on doors in times of national distress, of the importance of not turning anyone away, and, most compellingly of all, of the moral responsibility we had to ‘do the right thing’.

There are times too when I cannot help but feel shame for my country. As when I read about anti-refugee groups exploiting the fears of the poor, encouraging racist chants outside buildings that house refugees and immigrants and manipulating the simple-minded who often seem prepared to believe almost anything.

It’s difficult to under-rate the gullibility of people: the MMR vaccine causes autism; climate change is an invention; the moon landing was faked; Bill Gates is trying to implant monitoring microchips in people’s brains; COVID-19 never existed; and Elvis is still alive and was last seen spreading turf on Srahlollagh bog.

And then there are those who seem to be reasonable and sensible at least most of the time but pick up some daft notion and end up with an almost evangelical zeal in attempting to convince everyone they meet that there’s a conspiracy afoot to take over the world or whatever.

In a recent Sunday Independent piece, Gene Kerrigan, in his signature style deflated some of the best known conspiracy numbers: Ireland is top of the charts for the number of immigrants – no, we’re not, we don’t even make the top 25. Ireland is full – no, it isn’t, we have 78 people per square kilometre and the corresponding figure for, say, Denmark is 138 and the UK 270; and so forth.

At present it appears that a campaign of intimidation and manipulation is being waged in Ireland by a small group of far-right activists who have arrived under the radar­ – though they are at last being taken seriously by the authorities. They have succeeded in gathering significant groups of the fearful and the gullible by spreading hearsay about a gathering plague of people who happen to have black skins and speak foreign languages.

One group is echoing Trump’s ‘America First’. Effectively, it’s racism by rumour, lies and manipulation. Fear is exploited; lies are told; people whose homes have been bombed by Putin are presented as unworthy of our care; welcoming people we’ve never met is seen as indicative of naivety, weakness and failure; false rumours are spread of plans for housing huge numbers of non-Ukrainian refugees; and Taliban atrocities are listed even though both the context and the reality are inapplicable.

In effect, the politics of hate is being proposed for our adoption. Racism, undisguised and unadulterated, is part of the new manifesto and the counter-witness of our own history is being conveniently pushed into the background.

During the Famine years over a million Irish people emigrated, many in dire straits who depended on ‘the kindness of strangers’ to make a life for themselves. It birthed a respect and a focus on our responsibility in turn as a nation to stand for and with those who were experiencing similar needs and experiences.

It became anathema to everything we stood for that we should close our doors to refugees and immigrants or diminish in any way those in abject need or those who happen to have coloured skin. The legendary notice posted in foreign climes – ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ – is forever seared into our souls. We’ve been there, done that and it would be a denial of a core truth of our Irish identity to inflict that unease or unreason on more vulnerable immigrants.

In fact, the very opposite was the case. Fundamental to our beliefs and practices is, because of our own history, to offer ‘a welcome to the stranger’, to hold out the hand of friendship to those for whom we had no direct responsibility, to do what we can to lift others out of a poverty our own people had long experienced.

It’s why Trócaire – and our focus on the needs of the global needy – have long been at the heart of our national response to the clear necessities of those we’ve never met and will never know. It’s why missionary endeavour has for so long been a definitive and long-accepted the impulse of our people. It’s why, as I write, my thoughts are on two religious sisters ­– Orla Treacy, a Loreto sister, and Mary Killeen, a Mercy sister, who were part of a recent Faith Alive programme on Mid-West Radio.

Orla, who taught in St Muredach’s College, Ballina for some years, was in the news because she had led a group of students from the secondary school where she is principal in South Sudan on a 200km walk to the capital, Juba, to meet Pope Francis on his recent visit. In a diocese the size of Italy (with just two secondary schools) Orla and her staff have worked for some years in a civil war situation where girls as young as 12 are married off to men who ‘buy’ them into enforced marriages by giving X number of cows to their families. In that complex political and cultural situation, the Sisters have a thriving boarding school for girls.

Mary (Killeen) has worked for many years in a slum area of Nairobi, Kenya where a number of schools have been established to get children off the street.   

Both Sisters have received prestigious international awards for their work which, in essence, is the polar opposite of those who are haranguing refugees here to go home.

They shame us as a country – while Orla and Mary do us proud.