Why bother blogging about the election?

Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year 

Noel Grealish TD has targeted immigrants and asylum-seekers 

Why bother blogging about the election?

After all, every fool seems to have an opinion, and nobody seems to want to pay for decent journalism these days.

Why bother writing about the old friend you met at Christmas who you rarely bump into any more?

He’s voting for Noel Grealish in the upcoming election, he said, because he “said what nobody else is saying”.

With a straight face, he told you that immigrants and asylum-seekers are to blame for nearly all our woes, but nobody else has the courage to say so.

Your friend has a business to run, a young family to feed, and spends hours stuck in traffic every day. Life’s a struggle, he said, and when he heard a local politician describe African migrants as “spongers” it seemed to really strike a chord.

My old friend doesn’t pay much attention to what goes on in the Dail. He doesn’t know that Noel Grealish has one of the worst speaking and attendance records in the Irish parliament or that he was exposed as one of the worst offenders for signing in, claiming travel and accommodation expenses, and failing to turn up for votes.

Or that he plucked figures about Nigerians from thin air before raising spurious questions about reparations in the Dail.

He’s too busy to pay attention, you see, but he bought into the atmosphere of intimidation, fear, and hatred whipped up by the prospect of a Direct Provision centre being located in a small Galway town last October.

Blaming the immigrants because you can’t buy a house or get a bed in a hospital allows him to find a scapegoat and feel better about himself, but does it offer a solution to our problems?

Scapegoating the most vulnerable and marginalised never tackles the cause of injustice or inequality, but it sure allows some people to find a target for their rage.

Why bother blogging about the health service?

Why bother writing about the 48 hours your late father spent lying on a trolley in a corridor after a fall in his house two years ago?

Dad was 93, a lifelong Fine Gael supporter who had worked hard for 45 years, when he suffered that fall.

Like thousands of others around the country, he lay in silence at University Hospital Galway for two full days and nights before being transferred to a ward.

It is hard to know exactly when the unacceptable became the norm, but the tendency of Irish people to just grin and bear it – and never complain – was very clear to me when I took two days off work to sit or stand by his side.

How could such an elderly man be left to lie for 48 hours in a brightly lit corridor with not a hope of privacy or confidentiality for such a long time? It felt like a war zone in that Emergency Department just down the road and I wondered what kind of Government could treat its most vulnerable citizens with such contempt.

My dad was lucky because he had a family member by his side, to provide him with an occasional glass of water, to look out for him, or just to ask what the heck was going as his wait for a bed and some comfort continued over two horrible nights.

All around me, other relatives were faced with the same ordeal. We shared each other’s agonies and frustrations. I had to stand for three hours without a chair as I paced up and down, feeling like a burden or an inconvenience on the nurses who seemed unable to cope with so many patients.

“If you treated an animal in the way the HSE (Health Service Executive) is treating patients you’d be up in court and rightly so,” a woman tweeted me in frustration, four months after her father died 36 hours after being admitted to an overcrowded public hospital.

I counted 18 trolleys occupied by patients in the corridor at any one time and I know the situation has deteriorated since then.

Almost 900 people were left lying on trolleys in January 2020.

What kind of heartless Government would allow this kind of situation to continue, to promote a “two-tier” health service which favours the rich?

What kind of canvassers would dare to come around to our houses to ask us to vote to keep the people responsible in power for another term?

Why bother blogging about the housing crisis? The students sleeping in hostels, or  sharing rooms with strangers, or sleeping in vans, or forced to clear out of their accommodation on Friday nights so that the landlord can get tourists in (and make bigger profits) at the weekends?

Why bother blogging about the domestic violence victims who opt to stay and be abused because the alternatives are unthinkable? Or the people you know in their 30s and 40s who have moved back in with elderly parents because they can’t afford the rents?

In a country which is supposed to be “booming” it’s amazing how many of us are just a monthly pay cheque or two away from living on the streets.

Why bother blogging about job insecurity?

Why write about the colleague you know who, at short notice, was given just one week’s work for the month of January? He still has the rent to pay and feels guilty each week when he has to share the bad news with his wife.

He won’t go on the dole, he tells me, because people on Social Welfare are “spongers” and it just wouldn’t feel right. So he suffers on with no money, hoping things will pick up, and the Government statistics will insist that he – like thousands of others – is gainfully employed in 2020.

So there’s an election coming up and the choice seems to be between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two parties who have shared power between them since the foundation of the State.

When Fine Gaelers come canvassing will I be too polite to tell them the devastation their policies are causing in the provision of health care?

When the Fianna Failers knock on the door, will I thank them for being so greedy, bankrupting my country, and forcing many of my friends to seek new lives overseas.

Or will I do “the Irish thing” and smile and thank them for calling, because their dad used to play for Galway or they once managed to get a few workmen to fix the road outside my estate?

We vote for the same chancers time after time and then we are surprised when hospitals are overcrowded, houses are unaffordable, and there is no security in our jobs.

We vote for them again and again, and we expect the results to be different.

Yep, when there are false promises and appalling track records to be challenged, why bother blogging at all?

--  * A digital journalist based in Galway, Ireland, Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. 

A meeting to oppose a Direct Provision centre in Oughterard

With friends like Katie ...

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

The Connemara Gateway Hotel in Oughterard

Katie Hopkins cares deeply about the people of Oughterard. She said so in a Tweet, which she posted with a video from a protest in the Connemara town.

“Bless these lovely people in Oughterard,” she wrote. “Silently protesting against the imposition of African migrants into a converted hotel in their quiet Irish town. Will Ireland follow Germany? Do we never learn?”

Hopkins is British. She’s a far-right extremist who despises immigrants, whether they are asylum-seekers fleeing persecution or economic migrants in search of better lives. If she had been writing for the British tabloids in the 1950s or 1980s, I doubt she would have had too many good things to say about the Irish.

Hopkins has been re-tweeted by US President Donald Trump and, bizarrely, given a platform by Ryan Tubridy to express how much she despises foreigners on RTE’s ‘Late Late Show’.

I very much doubt she would have been able to locate Oughterard on a map of Ireland three weeks ago. But somebody here in Ireland was compelled to send her a video of a protest against plans to locate a Direct Provision centre in the Co Galway town.

Why would she suddenly be concerned about the 1,300 residents of a small town in the West of Ireland? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the kind of fascist rhetoric used by Hopkins in the UK and ‘alt-right’ groups in the USA is beginning to take a foothold here?

Why would it bother her if there are plans to locate up to 250 asylum-seekers in a Co Galway town?

When it comes to migrants, Hopkins has form. It is quite possible that her sudden concern for the people of Oughterard is motivated far more by a hatred of immigrants – and links to like-minded Irish groups – than any real concern for the welfare of the town’s residents.

“Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants,” she wrote in her column in The Sun in 2015, before referring to migrants in Calais, France, as a “plague of feral humans” as they tried to board trucks to gain access to her beloved United Kingdom.

Not for her any concerns for nice Syrian Christians fleeing persecution as they make their way across the Mediterranean Sea in search of new lives in Britain or Ireland.

“Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984”, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors,” she also wrote four years ago.

Just the kind of person the people of Oughterard need on their side right now.

A heated public meeting about Direct Provision in Oughterard

Rowan Croft, who tweets as Grand Torino, says he cares deeply about the people of Oughterard.

“We are not the land of milk and honey for economic migrant window shoppers who, skip through European countries till they find one with weak politicians and a generous welfare system to sponge off,” he tweeted recently, using the hashtag #Oughterard.

“We are full. Ireland and Irish first.”

His message echoes the ‘America First’ rhetoric of Donald Trump or the ‘Britain First’ language of far-right British fascists who have been emboldened by the Brexit vote across the water.

Croft describes himself as an “Irish patriot”, even though he once served in the British Army and swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen of England.

Apparently, Hermann Kelly of the Irish Freedom Party cares deeply about the people of Oughterard, too.

He must do, because he was invited onto ‘Drivetime’ on RTE Radio One this week to talk about the campaign to keep a Direct Provision centre out of the town.

To the best of my knowledge, Kelly has no strong connections to the Connemara town. His main claim to fame, so far, is that he has worked as Director of Communications for Nigel Farage’s group in the European Parliament.

But people like him have been stirring up legitimate concerns in Oughterard, where local people have a right to ask questions about plans to house up to 250 ayslum-seekers in a disused hotel in the town.

Gearoid Murphy also cares about the people of Oughterard. So much so he travelled up from Cork on a Wednesday night to attend the now infamous meeting in the community centre; where concerns were raised about the prospect of turning the Connemara Gateway Hotel into a Direct Provision centre.

It was Murphy who filmed Deputy Noel Grealish, the Independent TD, claiming that African migrants were “sponging” off the system in Ireland.

Noel Grealish is concerned about the people of Oughterard. There is an election looming within the next year and he probably figures his comments have done him no harm.

He saw how presidential election candidate Peter Casey experienced a surge in support after making comments about Travellers last year. Two weeks have passed and there is no sign of an apology or retraction from the Galway West TD.

Presumably, he has never met the Nigerian woman I spoke to two years ago, who was captured and held captive by Boko Haram, who wanted to use her as a sex slave.

Trapped in a small room in a disused hotel with her daughter in Galway, she could not afford the price of a text message when she needed to postpone our interview.

There is no way she dreamed of "sponging off the system" in a disused Salthill hotel, struggling to get by on €38.80 per week, when she arrived in Ireland eight years ago.

She doesn’t fit Grealish's narrative of “good Christian Syrians” fleeing ISIS in order to make a new life, because he believes all Africans coming here are spongers.

The language Grealish came out with in Oughterard that night was exactly the kind of rhetoric being spread by the far-right in the United States in the lead-up to the election of Donald Trump in November 2017.

He has normalised the kind of language which allows us to look at Syrians or Brazilians as “good” immigrants while those who come here from Africa are “bad”.

On his own website, Grealish admits that seven members of his own family have been economic migrants. He currently has three siblings living in Boston and one each in Copenhagen, Chicago and Nebraska.

Poster for a protest against Direct Provisin this Saturday

“I can guarantee you it is not the persecuted Christians and Syrians who are coming here,” Deputy Noel Grealish told the Oughterard meeting. “It is the economic refugees that is coming in from Africa that are trying to get across the Mediterranean and ended up in Europe, and ended up in Ireland, and ended up in Oughterard.”

One wonders what kind of persecution his own family members faced in Galway before they left for new lives overseas.

Or is it ok for some people to become economic migrants, but not others?

I have spoken to three people, none of whom know each other, who attended that meeting in Oughterard. Although quite a few locals were present in the crowd of about 800, they saw people spread throughout the hall they had never seen before in their lives.

All of them said that they were shocked and intimidated by the atmosphere in the room, the stoking of fears, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the abuse directed at any speakers who went against the prevailing narrative.

People in Oughterard have genuine concerns and they have every right to raise them at a public meeting.

They have a right to know why they have no Garda Station at night, why it’s so hard to get housing, why there is so little information coming from the Government, or what leisure facilities would be put in place to cater for so many asylum-seekers forced to live on €38.80 per week for months on end.

They have a right to ask why it feels as though their town is being left behind while the major cities are booming.

They have a right to ask whether Direct Provision is a humane system and whether it’s right to force up to 250 people to live for years in a disused hotel in a town most of them have never heard of.

What they don’t need are far-right extremists, with links to British, American, or Italian fascists, coming along in order to hijack their protest and exploit their concerns.

Locals are set to stage a peaceful demo in Oughterard

• Two protest marches against Direct Provision take place in Co Galway on Saturday. Locals have organised a silent march in Oughterard at 11.30am, while the Galway Anti-Racism Network (GARN) has scheduled a protest for 4pm in the city. The time of the city protest has been changed to accommodate people from Oughterard.

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.

Looking to hire a blogger or columnist? ciaran@ciarantierney.com

Beware of shysters bearing promises ... !

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

Homeless on the streets of Galway, May 2019

In my part of Galway, a young man running for the local elections told one of my neighbours recently that he had never heard of Direct Provision.

The system which the Irish State has used to detain asylum-seekers for almost two decades somehow slipped under his radar.

A system which has made some business people, no doubt many of them supporters of his party, very rich indeed had never entered his consciousness before he began to canvass householders across the city.

But, sure, it doesn’t matter.

He’s a sound lad and he used to be a mighty footballer.

He's the new face of the most popular political party in the land.

He wears a shiny suit and, sure, what more do you want from a local politician? He might even swing a planning application for a member of your family sometime in the future.

Another young(ish) man from his party, who happens to be the Minister for Housing, announced this week that young people in our cities should be “excited” by the prospect of co-living apartment schemes.

The en-suite bedrooms proposed are smaller than the recommended minimum size for a disabled parking space and young workers or students should be delighted to fork out €1,300 per month for these tiny rooms with no kitchen facilities.

As a young man in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember being shocked by the tiny bedsits some of my friends were living in on weekend visits to Dublin.

It seems the solution to our appalling housing crisis, with 10,300 people now homeless, is to return to the bedsits of the 20th century or the tenement slums of the 19th century, while business people in suits – the kind of people who vote for Fine Gael – can celebrate the huge profits to be made from other people’s misery.

The scale of the homelessness crisis is unprecedented

But we vote for these people, don’t we?

We vote for the kind of people who left my 93-year old relative lying on a hospital trolley for 48 hours last summer.

As I sat beside him for hours and hours, losing hope, I didn’t dare to complain.

Because that’s not the Irish way, that’s just the way it is, and anyway you might just be punished if you dare to speak out.

You wouldn’t want to be left an extra day without a bed because you made a complaint now, would you?

Third world conditions in an Irish public hospital

We all know there have been crises in health care and housing for a decade and yet here they are again, knocking on our doors, filling us full of promises five years on from the last round of promises which led to very little or no action.

In my city, the men in shiny suits tell us we badly need a bypass.

As the climate teeters on the brink of catastrophe, an urban roadway through one of the most beautiful parts of the city is the solution to the city’s chronic traffic problem.

No talk of buses, trams, or bicycles, when planners cannot think beyond the car, even as some of the children of the city are experiencing an obesity epidemic.

At the primary school I pass every morning, the road was widened on both sides to make more room for the parents’ cars. And yet they still double or treble park when dropping off the youngsters in the mornings.

It never entered the minds of the planners, or the local politicians, to look for alternatives to the car or to point out to parents that it might be a good thing for the youngsters if they could walk, cycle, or take the bus to school.

Plans are in place for a motorway to destroy a green area of Galway

Across the city, in another ward, a councillor in a shiny suit has become adept at making slick videos.

He walked through the city centre last year to make a video about buskers. Only he didn’t actually speak to any of the buskers themselves.

In the Capital of Culture 2020, it’s all about business and not so much about culture. Why bother talking to the artists who give the city such a welcoming atmosphere when there are businessmen to listen to and bucks to be made?

Funny, I have never, ever met a tourist who has told me he or she has left Galway with treasured memories of the British-owned shops along the high street.

They tend to love our city for its street life, for its vagabond performers, but try telling that to our local politicians who are more interested in looking after investor landlords than solving the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who are struggling to pay the rent on time.

The street performers, the artists, the vagabonds, and the ordinary working class people are being driven out of our cities and out of their homes by politicians who have done so little to provide social housing or control spiralling rents since they last came knocking on our doors five years ago.

It’s actually monstrous that so few people (investors, landlords, bankers, developers) are benefiting so much from the troubles and struggles of so many.

So many people I know have no money at the end of each month.

So many with “zero hour” contracts or par-time work barely earn enough to pay the average rent in Irish cities.

So many people worry at night that they are just a week or two without work, in jobs with no security, away from not having enough money to pay the ridiculously high rents on their homes.

So many people I know believe – sorry, know – they inhabit a different planet from smooth talking Government Ministers like Eoghan Murphy, with his proclamation that the young should be “excited” by paying €1,300 per month to live in a shoebox on the edge of town.

But I guess it’s our own fault.

After all, don’t we vote for these “shysters” with their promises time after time?

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.

Hate speech on the rise in 'Land of a Thousand Welcomes'

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

 

A protest agianst the Direct Provision system in Ireland

by Ciaran Tierney 

@ciarantierney

"Board up those houses with the c***s in it and petrol bomb the s*** out of it".

Somewhere in Ireland this week, a man called Anthony sat down in front of his computer or mobile device and decided to write the above comment in response to a “news” story on a Facebook page.

The story, written to provoke and elicit shocking views, had appeared on an Irish site which has a history of stoking up racial hatred, stealing news stories from legitimate outlets, running fake competitions, and attacking minorities while at the same time championing “free speech”.

The comment was one of many calling for violence or arson in response to a loaded headline which intended to provoke a response from racists.

The headline claimed that there was “uproar” in one part of Ireland because “migrants” were due to receive “beautiful houses” . . . presumably, or the implication being, at the expense of native Irish people.

At a time of an unprecedented homelessness crisis, with almost 10,000 people not having a place of their own to sleep in at night, you no longer have to look far to find people online who are only too willing to blame migrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers for all of society’s ills.

It’s so easy to blame the “soft” targets, the people at the bottom of our society, for so many of our woes when those who have caused such appalling inequality (the bankers, landlords, developers and politicians) are far less visible or transparent than those who have been branded as “rapefugees”.

Certain sites attract comments which call for migrants
to be burnt out of their homes. 

The truth does not really matter to these people when there are foreigners to be hated, Muslims to be demonised, and bogus asylum-seekers to be sent home, because the commentators claim we have to look after “our own”.

Funny, too, that those who are clamoring to deport asylum-seekers never seem to put as much energy into actually helping out the native Irish people who are forced to sleep out on the streets of our cities at night.

Two and a half years ago, many Irish people were shocked by the election of President Donald Trump in the United States.

We watched with horror the casual racism, sexism, and Islamophobia which surfaced throughout his campaign, and swore such things could never happen in Ireland.

We watched how gullible, ignorant people devoured “fake news” and blamed Syrians, Iraqis, or Central Americans for the injustice, inequality, and neglect which came from years of neoliberalism in the US.

We understood their anger, perhaps, but felt they were blaming the wrong targets and rallying around the wrong man. 

A protest against US President Donald Trump in Galway

This is Ireland, we said. A place with a long and painful history of migration, a troubled history of conflict, and a knowledge of what it means to be demonised or treated as a second class citizen in your own land.

We were the “land of a thousand welcomes”, a people with cousins and friends scattered all across the globe from Birmingham to Boston and Sydney to Seattle. For hundreds of years, we have known what it’s like to migrate in order to flee persecution or seek out better lives.

We were once the nation of migrants.

And we know what it’s like to be discriminated against or told we are not welcome at the end of an arduous journey. 

Surely, the Irish, of all people, could not hate immigrants or migrants or poor people in search of better lives.

Surely, if people fleeing persecution were placed in a disused hotel, we would welcome them with open arms or at least recognise that they needed to be treated with dignity while they wait for their cases to be processed.

Do we really think people want to flee their friends, families, and communities in order to live in a run-down hotel in rural Ireland on €38.80 per week?

Do we really think they enjoy spending up to eight years in a sort of limbo – waiting to see if Ireland will accept them but fearful, at the same time, of being sent home?

The Irish were the impoverished migrants of the 19th century

Two years ago, I interviewed a woman from Nigeria who was living in Direct Provision. She left me waiting in a Galway pub for two hours and did not answer my texts or calls. I became extremely angry, as this had never happened to me in almost three decades of working as a journalist.

That night, her tearful daughter rang me from the Direct Provision centre. They had no credit on their phone and her mother had been called away at short notice.

When she told me her story the following day, about being kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and having to flee her village, all of my anger evaporated. I realised people like me did not have a clue what life was like for a woman in Direct Provision.

And yet we judge.

Two years ago, I read a book about the ‘Alt-right’ in the United States and the role far-right extremists had played in the election of President Trump.

And I swore that kind of thing could never happen in the Emerald Isle.

Well, it’s 2019 now, and it has.

Hate speech against migrants and minorities keeps popping up online, to such an extent that a man feels it’s acceptable to go onto Facebook and call on people to  petrol bomb a house with migrants boarded up inside.

We had a presidential candidate last year who received a huge boost in support when he, cynically and deliberately, decided to target Travellers midway through the campaign.

Peter Casey is no Donald Trump, but he and others saw how effectively criticising an ethnic minority led to a surge in support.

An anti-racism protest in Galway last year

We now have some far-right YouTube channels in which the same presenters interview each other, again and again, about global conspiracies and how our land is being “swamped” by migrants and refugees.

We have hosts who brag about Islamophobia, with little concept of the fact that most of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims want nothing more than peace and prosperity for their families – just like the rest of us.

We have a former newspaper journalist, who says she’s leading a campaign against corruption, attacking multiculturalism.

“We have to reclaim our Irishness,” she told her YouTube channel recently. “If that’s racist, great. Bring it on. But we are going to make Ireland Irish again and I’m sorry if I sound like Donald Trump.”

Those who speak out against racism, those who claim refugees should be treated with respect in Ireland, often face torrents of abuse from online trolls who hide behind anonymous accounts.

And all the time the online debate descends further and further into the mire, so much so that an Irishman now thinks it’s fully acceptable to call for migrants to be locked up and burnt alive inside their “beautiful” new homes. 


Related:

Shock as Italian fascists plan meeting in Galway pub: 
my report for Irish Central in December
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/shock-as-italian-fascists-plan-meeting-in-co-galway-pub

* Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportuniities in a digital world.   

ciaran@ciarantierney.com

Call off the blimp!

The Donald Trump 'blimp' is not coming to Ireland after all 

Let’s call off the blimp, because Mr President is not coming after all.

Well, not yet, at any rate!

It has been amazing to hear so many people in Ireland express regret that President Trump has postponed (or cancelled) his Irish visit this coming November.

They were so fired up that many said they were looking forward to joining a political protest for the first time.

Irish protesters had to reach out to their counterparts in the UK, who turned out in their thousands to make the President feel so unwelcome when he visited London back in July.

Sorry, they said, we won’t need to ship the giant orange “baby blimp” to Ireland after all!

People in Dublin were really looking forward to the sight of a giant baby Donald in a nappy floating across the skyline.

And a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign had already covered the cost of bringing over the six metre high blimp within days of being set up.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be part of mass protests against the US President. The sense of anti-climax was palpable as soon as the White House announced that he had postponed his travel plans.

The leaders of two opposition parties, Labour and the Greens, had come  together to announce plans for a joint rally for “democracy, decency, and international solidarity” in Dublin.

As though such concepts, so alien to Mr Trump, were plentiful across the political spectrum here in Ireland.

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin went as far as to say that President Trump was “no friend of democracy or human rights”.

Mr Howlin said it was important to stand up to Trump on issues such as climate change, the treatment of migrant and asylum-seekers, spending on arms, and the slashing of aid budgets.

In Galway, the local anti-racism group wanted hundreds of people to gather to spell out the words “Feck off Trump” (with a little Irish humour, from the ‘Father Ted’ TV series) on a beach.

In much different times, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed 50,000 people in Eyre Square and the city authorities renamed it as Kennedy Park in his honour.

We are unlikely to see a ‘Trump Park’ in Galway any time in this millennium.

So many Irish people wanted to protest against Trump in November

So many people are disappointed that the street protests are off. They wanted to convey a firm message that Trump’s policies have no place in a modern, prosperous, outward-looking Ireland.

They want to reject the anti-immigrant rhetoric on an island where emigration provided the only refuge for the afflicted through much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The street protests are off . . . as though there was nothing to protest about closer to home.

The economy might be in recovery, but the recovery does not seem to have reached so many Irish people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Last week, masked thugs – protected by masked Gardai – used heavy-handed tactics to evict homelessness campaigners from an empty building in Dublin.

Marcing in solidarity with homelessness campaigners
in Galway city centre last week

The sight of masked policemen with no identification on their uniforms caused consternation at a time when there are almost 10,000 people living in emergency accommodation across Ireland.

And now our Minister for Justice says he would support moves to criminalise the photographing of Gardai as they carry out their duties.

Such a move would be an attack on press freedom and should lead to questions as to what the Gardai have to hide.

Would that mean banning photos of public events such as GAA games or the annual Macnas Parade?

The last time I checked such measures were only being considered in states such as Israel, where an oppressive occupation force has a vested interest in covering up its crimes in the West Bank.

Given recent Irish history, we don’t have to cross the Atlantic in search of police forces who abuse their power. In fact the filming of protests has helped to prevent injustice from occurring.

So, instead of worrying about Trump, perhaps we should be looking at how power is being abused much closer to home.

Children sleeping in a Garda Station in Dublin

Last month, a photo of homeless children sleeping in a Garda Station went viral. The youngsters had to sleep on hard chairs in the police station because there was nowhere else for them to go.

The distraught mother who took that photo could soon be guilty of a crime.

Last week, a photo of a sick and distressed 92-year old woman sitting on a chair in a public hospital Emergency Department went viral.

Gladys Cummins posted the photo on Facebook out of frustration and despair. Her mother did not even have a trolley, as she spent 25 hours sitting on that chair.

Two months ago, I saw a 93-year old family member spent 48 hours on a trolley in the ED Department in Galway. The unacceptable has become acceptable and lengthy waiting lists in our public hospitals have become the new norm.

In a supposedly “socialised” health service – compared to the US at any rate – the old and the weak are being forced to spend days lying in corridors in overcrowded facilities.

But Irish people are not taking to the streets to protest about our health crisis.

In June, Irish people became outraged by the images of child migrants on the US-Mexico border crying in distress after being separated from their families. They were outraged by Trump.

Yet few of them have much awareness of the hardships endured by those who spend up to seven or eight years in Ireland’s own Direct Provision system.

A protest against Direct Provision in Dublin

About 5,000 asylum-seekers are detained at 31 accommodation centres without permission to work, or even to cook for their children. Among them are 2,000 children, growing up in highly inappropriate shared spaces with adults from a variety of countries.

Direct Provision centres have been described as the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes of our times. Some even see them as a "time bomb" for future problems to come.

We have British politicians steamrolling headlong towards Brexit, with little or no awareness that their dangerous language is threatening the peace process which transformed life in Northern Ireland over the past 20 years.

We have the families of victims of loyalist collusion who are shocked that a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is now at the helm of the Irish Gardai.

They believe he has questions to ask about their long search for justice for atrocities such as the Miami Showband Massacre and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

We rant against Trump for his sexism, at a time when Irish society has been convulsed by a cervical smear test scandal in which the Irish Government treated Irish women appallingly this year.

A lot of Irish people are disappointed that they won’t get a chance to protest against President Trump, but let’s not pretend that we don’t have some pressing problems much closer to home.



Would you like to advertise on this blog? Please email ciaran@ciarantierney.com if you would like to find out more! 

Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Find him at http://ciarantierney.com/

Whatever happened to the compassion of the Irish?

Between 1847 and 1850, a hundred ships set sail from Galway Bay. Their ‘cargo’ included some of the most impoverished humans on the planet at the time and many of those who dreamed of starting new lives in Boston on Brooklyn never survived to see the other side.    

Protesting against Direct Provision in Ireland

The story of our ‘Coffin Ships’ is one of the most troubling in Ireland’s painful history. Impoverished people, fleeing starvation and persecution by the British Empire, counted themselves lucky if they had the fare for the long voyage across the Atlantic.

No doubt, many of them cried tears of despair upon leaving family members behind. In those days, a ticket to America was only one-way and many lived for 50 or 60 years without ever getting a chance to return to their homeland.

For those people, the prospect of a decent, peaceful life seemed impossible in their homeland. The crops had failed, their British masters showed no mercy or compassion, and they dreamed of just having enough to survive on when they got to the ‘New World’.

Behind them, thousands were starving, including a six year old girl called Celia Griffin, whose distressed family walked into Galway in search of “relief” in 1847. The nuns tried to help her, to provide her with food, but Celia died on a roadside.

She was too far gone.

Many of those who embarked on the Famine Ships from Galway Bay would have passed by little children like Celia, starving on the roadsides, on their way to America and their hardship gave them a steely determination to succeed in the New World.

The Ireland they left behind was a place where the natives faced religious and economic persecution.

In the previous century, Catholics had been denied the right to vote and the Irish language could only be taught in “illegal” hedge schools.

The terrible poverty of the 19th century and our centuries-long struggle for independence has meant that Irish people are universally popular across the globe, especially among the downtrodden who take inspiration from our long struggle.

Hard to believe now that the Choctaw people of North America, despite facing huge oppression themselves by colonisers, were so taken by the plight of the Irish people that they raised $170 to send to Ireland to ease their suffering in the year little Celia died, 1847.

That would be a pretty substantial amount of money these days and their generous gesture has been commemorated forever with a sculpture which was erected in the town of Midleton, Co Cork, two years ago.

The Celia Griffin Memorial Park on the shores of Galway Bay

Only 16 years after the Choctaws themselves were forced off their land by US President Andrew Jackson – leading to a 500-mile trek to Oklahoma, known as the 'Trail of Tears' – this was an extraordinary act of generosity by Native Americans who had so little themselves.

In Ireland, we always tend to pride ourselves on rooting for the underdogs. In his acclaimed 1997 Pulitzer-prize winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt wrote of how the impoverished  children in his native Limerick in the 1940s would always cheer for the ‘Red Indians’ as they were being slaughtered by the ‘Cowboys’ in Hollywood Westerns.

In the cinema, the Irish children would hoot and holler for the Native Americans on the big screen, perhaps with some subconscious awareness of how those people had helped their own during Ireland’s darkest days.

I thought about the Choctaw Nation and Angela’s Ashes last week when I wrote a piece for IrishCentral.com about Ireland’s notorious Direct Provision system.

Direct Provision is the system the Irish Government uses to process the cases of asylum-seekers, who often spend up to seven or eight years living in former hotels or hostels as they wait for their cases to be processed.

These people live on €19.10 per week and their voices are rarely, if ever, heard on the Irish media.

They are afraid of repercussions for speaking out, either from the Irish authorities or from criminals or political forces in their own countries.

Campainging for a better world for everyo

It took me six weeks to set up the interviews with two of the asylum-seekers. They were extremely fearful of speaking out and didn’t want their real names to be used.

We couldn’t meet in the centre where they share their lives with so many others from a wide variety of countries, so I suggested the back of a pub which I knew would be quiet on a weekday afternoon.

One of them didn’t turn up. And I was really annoyed. I sat in the pub waiting for almost an hour, thinking this had possibly never happened to me in 25 years of journalism.

I texted her a few times, to no avail. I felt she had let me down.

Later that night, I received an apologetic text from her daughter. She had been taken on a day’s training programme at short notice by the Irish authorities and didn’t have any credit to send me a text message to cancel the interview.

So she agreed to turn up the next day and was actually 30 minutes early for our interview.

I had no idea what story she had before our interview began, as I had never met her before.

I didn’t know that she had been praying in a Church in northern Nigeria when Islamic terrorists from Boko Haram broke in and shot most of the people dead.

I didn’t know she had been taken prisoner and managed to escape after making up a story about needing to go to the toilet out in the bush.

I didn’t know that the woman who brought her and her daughter to Ireland has been trying to take €50,000 from her, money she clearly doesn’t have.

I don’t know if her life would be any better if she had tried to stay in Nigeria and maybe move to another location, away from Boko Haram, with her three sons

Instead of living in a tiny, grotty former hotel room with her daughter, with no right to work, for months or even years on end.

But I do know I saw genuine fear and despair, even terror, in her eyes.

I do know that it was painful and uncomfortable for her to talk about her life, as she’s used to putting on a brave face for her daughter.

I was taken aback by how upset and how lacking in hope she was.

And yet she was grateful, because at least she shares her room with her own daughter - whereas others in the centre have to share small bedrooms with two or three others from other countries, without even the benefit of a shared language.

And then I read some comments on social media sites. About how she should go straight back to Africa, or how I must have been a fool to believe a woman I met in an Irish pub (an interview in a venue I chose, which took weeks to set up, by the way).

And I wondered what had happened to the famous compassion of the Irish, supposedly the poster boys and girls for underdogs all across the globe.

Judging by 90% of the comments on social media sites, the Irish in America have lost all of the compassion which saw the Choctaw send money they didn’t have all the way across the world to people in distress in a far-off, strange land.                                                  

A protest against the 17-year old Direct Provision system

In a way, it helped me to understand why the 50,000 ‘illegal’ Irish in the United States are now getting so little support from established, older Irish-American communities in Trump’s America.

The Chinese have a saying that an ambitious horse never returns to its old stable.

Perhaps the Irish, on both sides of the Atlantic, have forgotten where they came from when it comes to dealing with people fleeing war, terror, persecution, and famine across the globe.

I have no idea whether the women I spoke to last week have a right to stay in Ireland or not. But I do know that their voices need to be heard, without keyboard warriors who know nothing about their circumstances shouting out that they should be sent straight back "home".

Imagine how much worse life would have been for our 19th century emigrants if racists at the ferryports sent them straight back home.



Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and Digital Storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here

Welcome to the wonderful 'Regime Radio'!

Welcome to ‘Regime Radio’ … right here on your dial every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Giving you all the information you need to know your place in this big, bad world.

You know you should 'rat' on your neighbour, you
really should ... for the greater good!

 . . . First up this morning we have a Government Minister to tell us about his campaign against welfare fraud. The frightening underclass among us are ripping us off for millions and he wants you to “rat out” your neighbour if you see him going on holidays or buying a new car.

Funny that he doesn’t have statistics to back up his claim that welfare cheats are milking the system or that he’s launched his hate campaign against the poor just when he’s aiming, too, to become leader of our land.

And we won’t bother asking him about banker fraud, because we don’t get “sexy radio” out of that kind of white collar crime.

 . . . Now, next up in the studio we have a ‘Senator’ from outside the Pale. And not just any old Senator, but a former successful businessman, until he went bust, who will tell us all about the wonderful committee he chairs.

He’s a great man to talk, this Senator, especially about himself and his wonderful political connections.

What we forget to mention, though, is that he wasn’t actually elected to the Senate by ordinary or normal people like you, dear listener. After failing to win a popular vote, by a complete miracle he was nominated by the leader of a party who bankrupt the country a few years ago.

But we don’t talk about things like that here on Regime Radio!

Or we won’t talk about his old company, and how it survived for so long on subsidies from that same – once disgraced, but now resurgent – political party.

Sure, they are on the way back, we’ve completely forgotten that they brought the country to its knees, and so is our wonderful Senator.

And we only back winners here on Regime Radio!

 . . . Next up we have a wonderful former Government Minister. Wonderful, because he likes the sound of his own voice so much we have no problem inviting him onto the radio, to talk about anything at any time.

We only back winners ... here on 'Regime Radio'!

He’s from deepest Tipperary where they know a lot about the kind of neck it takes to get to the top in Irish politics.

He’ll tell you how he did this and he did that, and he was the first person to raise this or that issue in the Dail. We love big egos here, to match our massive salaries on your favourite Regime Radio!

We won’t ask him much about how his party collapsed after turning their backs on the working class or how one of his colleagues referred to the poor among us as “the f---ing dregs”.

We try to be positive here on ‘Regime Radio’!

 . . . And now we have a communications expert, who will laugh and joke about how she prepares her political clients for grillings on this very type of show.

She’ll defend the indefensible, as long as the price is right. Mind you, she might storm out of the studio if we ask the wrong question. She won't let us talk about nasty religious orders, who have refused to compensate abuse victims after causing them decades of pain. They're great clients, you see, and she's coached them on how to avoid pesky questions.

But, sure, we wouldn’t want to ruin your weekend morning by talking about such horrible issues here on the wonderful, positive 'Regime Radio'!

 . . . And now we have another Senator, a superb male expert on female bodies. We won’t talk about the fact that he was “elected” by a tiny pool of University graduates, or the fact that his beloved Institute seems to have been on the radio more times than we’ve had hot dinners this year.

He’ll give you the courage of his convictions and, sure, if he’s not available this Saturday we will replace him with another member of his Institute who bemoans the biased “liberal” media while she writes a national newspaper column every week.

 . . . We have a special guest this week, a senior Garda officer. We won’t ask her about the corruption, the smears, or the fabrication of evidence which has undermined your faith in the Irish police force; instead, we will guarantee her the easiest interview she’s had since she entered the service at Templemore.

Let's not talk about the viciosu smears, which almost ruined the
life of an honest whistleblower. Sure, it'd ruin the dinner!

. . . And we’ve time for one more superstar, a “celebrity” guest from the heart of Dublin 4. She’ll remind you how insignificant your little life is out there on the West coast, you consequential little peasant, as she gives us “the goss” on “celebrities” you’ve never heard of.

We’ll celebrate the pending arrival of the summer, loike, with our tales of the hardship of camping in the VIP section of a sold-out music festival. There’s no mixing with the plebs for us, here, when we have such access to the stars on ‘Regime Radio’!

There’s no better way of feeling like an outsider in your own land than listening to a lovely group of South Dublin people gossip about other South Dublin people.

Just to remind you how “out of the loop” you truly are down there in darkest Donegal or gloomy Galway.

If you are lucky, yes really lucky, we might have a time slot to feature one of our colleagues just up the corridor, after nailing him or her in the ‘Regime Radio’ canteen. There’s hardly a Saturday or Sunday goes by that we don’t interview one of our own colleagues, just to justify all the money you spend on the licence fee.

We are so glad to bring this dizzying array of high profile guests to you here on ‘Regime Radio’ every Saturday and Sunday. It’s such a stressful job that we have to take about ten weeks holidays a year.

. . . Of course, if you want to find out more about our wonderful station, you might learn more by looking at the people we WON’T put on the show this week or any week in the near future!

 . . . You won’t hear from the young mother from Cork who walked all the way to Dublin because she wants to use medical cannabis to treat her daughter’s severe form of epilepsy.

Her seizures stopped when she got access to medicinal cannabis, but her mother was made to feel like a criminal when she was forced to import the drug from overseas. We can’t have anyone who challenges the law of the land contaminating your little West of Ireland minds!

 . . . You won’t hear from the bank executive turned whistleblower who reported breaches in liquidity to the central bank a year before the nation’s entire banking system collapsed. He might just have saved the State a few billion euros if anyone in authority actually listened to him back in 2007.

He wants to know why no action was taken to deal with his concerns, or why the State contrived with developers and bankers to help out a rotten banking system in a ‘bailout’ which resulted in a cost of billions of euros to the Irish taxpayer.

The authorities have never explained why they didn’t act on his urgent warnings. He hasn’t worked for years, but his voice is not the kind we want to hear to challenge the cosy consensus here on ‘Regime Radio’.

Our readers don't really want to hear about the mum
in Direct Provision who couldn't afford a taxi at UHG

 . . . We won’t hear from the mother who carried her child home from a Galway hospital last week, because she couldn’t afford a taxi on her weekly allowance of €19.10.

We don’t want to upset your dinner by discussing the terrible Direct Provision system – not while we are highlighting the plight of “our own” undocumented Irish fearing for their lives that Donald Trump will expel them from the United States – here on ‘Regime Radio’.

 . . . And we won’t hear from the single mother who has been living in a hotel with her daughter for a year, because the homelessness crisis might also upset our listeners as they prepare their weekend dinners here  on your favourite radio show.

 . . . Or the teenager who was hauled out of his bed at dawn for daring to sit down in front of a Minister’s car during a protest in Dublin. He’s too articulate, too angry, too intelligent and too much of a threat to the widespread view that those awful Irish Water protesters are nothing more than the “sinister fringe”.

Sometimes, you see, you learn more about what’s going on in the real Ireland by looking at the stories we don’t feature here on your beloved ‘Regime Radio’.


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and Digital Storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here He admits to having a sense of humour and denies being a member of the "sinister fringe"