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

Are all Tribes welcome here?

Is Ireland a racist society?

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It’s a subject most of us choose to ignore, something that makes us just a little bit uncomfortable in the context of how many people from our own island have chosen – or been forced to make - new lives in other parts of the world.

The island has changed beyond all recognition over the past 20 years and it was significant that there were no representatives of the mainstream media present when the Galway Anti-Racism Network was launched at a public meeting which attracted a capacity attendance this week.

The speeches went on for almost four hours, yet nobody complained. It was the first time in memory that such a diverse range of speakers shared a platform, to share their own experiences of racism in the City of the Tribes.

Under the title ‘All Tribes are Welcome’, it was amazing to see the positive reaction among the attendance at the launch at the Galway Rowing Club.        

The capacity crowd at the Galway Rowing Club. Photo: Shane Broderick

These were people who rarely get a mention on the national airwaves, people who feel marginalised and that their voices are never heard. 

The atmosphere was all the more electric because no event like this had ever taken place in the city before.

The organisers of the meeting have called for an overhaul of the Incitement to Hatred Act after being taken aback by the sheer number of people who attended and shared their stories. They are also hoping to liaise with Gardai and schools to bring the anti-racism message into the wider community.

Speakers included an African taxi-driver, members of Ireland’s Muslim community, a former asylum seeker, a Traveller woman, and a black-Irish woman. Each of them told the four hour meeting of their own experiences of racism in Ireland.

Taxi-driver Henry Williams spoke of the casual racism of late night revellers on the city’s taxi ranks who walk pass three or four black drivers before getting into a cab with a white Irish driver for their journey home.

Singer Sharon Murphy, star of BBC television series ‘The Voice’, told the meeting about the pain she experienced growing up as a black person in rural Co Galway and the fear she felt when she first visited Harlem in New York.

As more and more black people got onto the subway train, and more and more white people got off, she realised she had inherited a fear of people of her own skin colour during her childhood in Connemara.

“In Clifden, in Connemara, I learned to be afraid of people like myself,” she said. “I remember the terror I experienced when I first went to Harlem. I realised the negative messages I had been given about black people.” 

Former asylum seeker Mosa Moshoeshoe spoke of the pain of trying to live on €19.10 per week under the Direct Provision system, when she was keen to work. 

She said she was a poor role model for her children, but because she was a refugee awaiting asylum she did not have the option of getting a job in Galway. Even though she has since been granted permission to stay in Ireland, she has been unable to find a house to rent.

Mosa told the meeting about a friend in Co Wexford who was unable to rent out a house. She was turned down by a landlady when she phoned to see if a house was available. A day later, her Irish friend discovered that it was still available.

Her friend was pretty sure she had been turned down for the accommodation because of her African accent.

Bridget Kelly of the Galway Traveller Movement said her community faced daily discrimination in the areas of accommodation, health, employment, and education. 

“Being refused access to hotels and pubs, being unable to get a house when people find out you are a Traveller, you feel ashamed of who you are,” she told the hushed attendance.

Imam Imbrahim Noonan spoke of the Islamophobia he has experienced from people who were later shocked to realise that he was Irish-born. He said that his children, whose mother is Pakistani, had experienced a different form of racism.

Speakers at the launch of the Galway Anti-Racism Network.

Imam Noonan, of the Galway Islamic Cultural Society, pointed out that Islamic terrorists were only a tiny minority among the global Muslim community. Yet some people in Ireland wanted to blame all Muslims for the actions of the tiny minority.

According to a spokesman, Joe Loughnane, the number of people who turned up for the first public meeting of the Galway Anti-Racism Network (GARN) vastly exceeded the expectations of the organisers.

“People brought food and were keen to engage with each other,” he said. “We couldn’t believe it when the place started filling up 20 to 30 minutes before we even began. People were just so happy to share their stories.

“They had never been in a room that was so diverse and yet everybody seemed to be speaking from the same page. The message was very much one of solidarity and positivity. People seemed to recognise that this coming together was something that needed to happen.

“All of the speakers were thrilled by the reaction of the people in the room. They did not feel judged and they were so happy to share their stories. There was a real spirit of action, of getting things done, in the room.

“People were taken aback by how similar their experiences were. It was unprecedented to have a black taxi-driver, a Traveller woman, a black Irish woman, an asylum seeker, and Muslim representatives sharing the same platform in the West of Ireland.”

He said it was clear that racism was an issue in Ireland, but that a lot of it took place behind people’s backs. 

Mr Loughnane spoke of his own experience growing up as a half-Irish, half-Pakistani man in Galway. He found that he experienced racism when he went into the city centre with one of his parents, but not with the other.

“There is this sense of people being taught to hate themselves or being ashamed of who they are,” he said afterwards. “Thankfully, we do not have an active far-right here in Ireland. But we want to challenge racist myths that are out there. We want to challenge racism wherever we see it.”

The meeting concluded when Ms Murphy led a spirited version of Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’.

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* Thanks to Shane Broderick for the photos of the GARN launch. For further information about the GARN, who meet every Tuesday evening, check out their Facebook page at:

 https://www.facebook.com/GalwayARN/

A hatred based on ignorance

This time last week, I attended a Muslim festival.

A local school about 2km from where I was staying had been completely taken over by colourful food stalls, clothes stalls, children’s amusements, and temporary concert venues.

There were about 400 islanders milling about the place – and maybe ten tourists.

The welcome we received was incredible. Villagers were dressed to the nines for the three day festival and had a huge welcome for the two big Irishmen who arrived on motorcycles to see what all the fuss was about.

Koh Lanta is a pretty unique place. It had no electricity until 1997 and, before the tourists arrived, the population was a mixture of Muslim villagers and sea gypsies.

It’s been developed at an incredible rate since I first landed on Saladan pier 15 years ago, but still retains the kind of charm which has seen Thai Buddhist, Muslim, gypsy, Chinese and ‘farang’ (white foreign) immigrants live side-by-side in harmony for the past two decades.

My travelling companion had never been to Asia before and was blown away by the welcome of the ordinary people we met during a fortnight on the island, which has a popluation of about 30,000.

As we browsed through the market, people invited us to check out the home-made fare on offer. A young woman offered us a cup of tea, not looking for a cent in return.

The language barrier did not seem to matter, people genuinely wanted us to check out local hand-made goods and home-cooked foods, to make sure we were having a good time.

We had some wonderful banter with a group of young lads when I decided to buy a Liverpool FC beach towel and enjoyed sampling some of the local dishes as we made our way around the festival site.

This being 2016, the era of the mobile phone, we were able to meet a couple from home in the island’s only Irish bar a couple of hours later.

Long Beach, Koh Lanta

But, that night, so many of our preconceptions were blown away. 

We saw that ordinary Muslims love to dress up for special occasions, like most people do, and that the locals have a huge welcome for foreigners despite how much tourism has changed their island over the past two decades.

Even within Thailand, Koh Lanta is a special place. For over a decade now, Muslim separatists have been battling Thai Government forces in three of the nation’s southern provinces, but those hostilities have never reached the islanders on the Andaman Sea.

The warmth we experienced at that festival – even though we could have felt completely out of place – got us to thinking about people like Donald Trump and the irrational fear of the Muslim world they are trying to spread across the globe.

People like Trump don't want us to visit Koh Lanta or Malaysia, to see that ordinary Muslims are just like us, with hopes and dreams for peaceful, happy lives. That doesn't fit the current narrative.

A few days later, at the end of a fantastic holiday, I found myself back in wet and dreary Dublin only to be told that a new Islamophobic group called Pegida was about to hold their first public meeting in Ireland.

I was too jet-lagged to attend the counter-demonstration as I made my way home to Galway, but it was awful to think that people with racist or even fascist ideas were assembling in the capital of my country.

Ireland, more than any other country, has sent so many of its people away to live all across the globe and now people want to close our borders to troubled people who are fleeing persecution and slaughter in countries such as Syria and Iraq.

Thankfully, very few turned up to support the extremists' cause on Saturday.

I’ve seen the images of the clashes on social media and it’s clear that the fascists were put in their place.

The few who turned up were even chased by anti-fascists into a two euro store, as a large crowd chanted "Fascist scum off our streets".

For me, racism is based on ignorance.

The welcome my friend and I experienced from local Muslims on Koh Lanta last week was in complete contrast to the Islamophobia which seems to be sweeping across Europe and the US at the moment.

Instead of blaming the refugees for our nations’ ills, we should ask why our leaders are bombing the hell out of their countries and why so many have been displaced from their lands.

It’s a pity that the demonstration in Dublin ended in violence and that the Gardai drew their batons on the protesters.

It would be better if children could be brought along to an anti-fascist rally and that people could celebrate diversity in peace, harmony, and with a sense of fun.

Just as the lovely people on a Thai island made us feel so welcome 10,000kms from home.

The violence was regrettable. But at least the Islamophobes got the message that they are not wanted in this of all nations, the one which has exported so many of its people through good and bad times.

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