Let us not rush to refuse claims for asylum as we did in the past
29 May 2006
Recently, I went for lunch with some friends in Avoca Handweavers' shop in Suffolk Street. The restaurant is situated on the fourth floor and while I gather there is a lift to it hidden somewhere I always feel obliged to walk up the steps.
At last I rounded the last quarter of the stairs having paused from time to time to examine pink Wellington boots or kites-out of interest regarding purchasing them not because I was out of breath. At the top of the stairs was a fit-looking young one waving the menu and shouting encouragement. I suggested she lower down a rope and I would put it around my waist and she could pull me up. We eventually settled on her having a glass of water ready for me if I rushed the last flight.
We had a delicious lunch. The food there is healthy - lots of green leaves and home-made brown bread and pumpkin seeds - so one can eat a lot of it because it can't be fattening, can it? I had a glass of wine as well, the water not having revived me sufficiently but no cappuccino. I watch these TV programmes telling us we are what we eat and I know now that a glass of wine is the equivalent to four teaspoons of sugar while a cappuccino is the same as eight. So there is no competition between wine and coffee, is there?
A really interesting thing about eating in this restaurant is that the patrons and the staff, who I suppose eat the food too, are all slim. Dublin may be full of fat people but they are not in Avoca Handweavers Suffolk Street.
Off I went to Grafton Street passing the burger-and-chip joints on my way back to Leinster House and a great realisation came upon me. Here the fat people were eating and all the restaurants were at street level. Here is a new piece of lateral thinking - to help decrease the girth of the citizens of Ireland, put restaurants upstairs and give no quarter to those who want lifts.
Planning permission is a big issue in Ireland - look at all those tribunals. There is a whole new concept out there in planning - really, I suppose, it is vertical rather than lateral. Initially all restaurants would be put on the fourth floor - above that might cause an even greater crisis in accident and emergency. There would be restaurateurs who would try to use influence (I'd better not say bribery) to try to get their premises down to the third or even better, the second floor. Never at street level, however. The really smart would have their own A+E franchise there.
As I write, to the collective relief of us all, the Afghan hunger strikers have left Saint Patrick's Cathedral. All those who helped end this incident with no loss of life deserve our thanks and congratulations. When some of the Afghans were threatening suicide it was really worrying. Suicide in a House of God occurred with one young Irish man in London recently and the mourning for that was fresh in many people's minds.
Fresh in our minds, too, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrible hunger strikes in Northern Ireland which left ten young Irish men dead. I wonder did any of those Afghan men read in the newspapers in recent weeks of those events which so altered history on this island? If any of the Afghans had died of starvation in the Cathedral I doubt if it would have had much influence on the War in Afghanistan but it would have helped encourage a national debate on asylum-seeking here.
As it was, groups with opposing views on those who seek refuge in Ireland gathered outside the Cathedral and one heard reports of pretty intemperate language from both sides. Every country is entitled to refuse entry through its borders and to vet those who come in, but I know I am not the only one who wishes the process of assessing people for refugee status was more open.
It's all very well to use the Dublin Convention to deport people but I would like to know more about how they are proceeding in the country to which they are to be removed. (The Dublin Convention, in brief, states that refugees must seek asylum in the EU country in which they first arrive and can be deported back from another EU country to that one.)
As well as finding out more about the refugee process in this country I wish we knew more, as well about the fate of those who are deported from EU Countries. There does not seem to be any comprehensive information kept anywhere.
The rights and wrongs of the Afghans' claims for asylum are unknown to me but one Irish young man who spoke in their favour has made a clear point about times past when we refused asylum and regretted it later. He spoke about the refusal by this country amongst others to give asylum to Jews who were fleeing from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Some even sailed as far as Ireland, even as far as the United States of America and were refused permission to land. Alas, we all know their fate. Some years ago I read in the Jewish Museum letters by Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland Archbishops at the time requesting the Government of the day to refuse these Jewish refuges asylum. It is worth at this time reflecting on seventy years ago.
Last year my husband and I were in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see the jolly "Barber of Seville". There was an elderly lady sitting beside us and we got talking during the interval. When she heard we were from Ireland she said she had nearly visited there just before the war. She was a young Jewish girl from Strasbourg fleeing with her family on a boat. The passengers were not allowed land in Ireland and the boat sailed on to America but they were refused entry there, too. On they went to the Caribbean where mirablile dictum she, her parents and her sister were allowed to land in Haiti because they were French and Haiti had ancient connections with France. The ship sailed back across the Atlantic with the rest of the passengers to their terrible fate. When she was seventeen she got to America. Strange to think of Haiti, now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, being a place of refuge for anyone.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
