Banned from the land that made us refugees ...

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies"

‘Thousands Are Sailing’, The Pogues


Between 1847 and 1850, a hundred ‘coffin’ ships sailed out from Galway Bay. The people who made it onto those ships were desperately impoverished and full of fear, and yet they saw themselves as hugely fortunate compared to those who were forced to stay behind.

They were the equivalent of today’s Syrian or Iraqi refugees. Their land had been stolen, the crops had failed, and they dreamed of new lives far removed from the conflict and turmoil which raged across their homeland.

Many were less fortunate, such as little Celia Griffin, aged six, from Connemara. Celia never had a chance in life and was found lying on the side of a road, just one of hundreds of thousands to die of starvation.

The ships were destined for the ‘New World’.                    

Not much empathy for the children of Syria
in President Donald Trump's USA

Poor country people from villages and townlands across the West of Ireland, many of whom could barely muster a word of English between them, sailed across the western ocean in search of a chance in life which had been denied them under the British Empire.

I think about those people most weeks when I bring foreign English students on a walking tour of Galway. I think of how forgotten they were for decades in Galway City, their point of embarkation.

It was only when a returned emigrant, the late Mark Kennedy, kicked up a fuss that the city and region honoured them with a wonderful Famine Memorial Park which opened eight years ago.

For many, the collective memories are still too painful … of poverty, of families torn apart, of the pain of long-term emigration. Most of those who made it to the other side – many died during the lengthy crossing – never got the opportunity to go home and visit their loved-ones again.

The Irish fugitives were near the bottom of the barrel in 19th century America. As they flocked into the Bronx, Hell’s Kitchen, or South Boston, it would have been unthinkable to imagine how their lives would have turned out if they had been denied entry at the US border.

Had the US president taken a hardline on emigration, had there been 19th century equivalents of Donald Trump and his “extreme vetting”, then countless Irish would have been turned back as soon as they reached the east coast of America.

They wouldn’t have had enough food to survive the return journey and, if they did, the numbers who died in the Great Famine would have been vastly higher.

Given our terrible history, it was shocking to wake up this weekend to discover that “extreme vetting” – bordering on fascism – has now been introduced just an hour’s drive south of where those coffin ships departed from Galway Bay.

Last October marked the 15th anniversary of Shannon Airport’s complicity in the US ‘war on terror’
At the stroke of a president’s pen, Muslims from seven countries have been banned from entering the US.

Marking 15 years of Shannon Airport's use
as a US military base last October

Persecuted in their own country and no longer welcome at the end of an arduous journey, Syrians refugees in 2017 have quite a lot in common with the Irish who escaped from the discrimination and hardship imposed by the British Empire.

The Irish died in their thousands on coffin ships in the 1840s and now Syrians are dying on makeshift boats as they make their way across the Mediterranean.

Back then, the Irish were seen as a threat, deeply unpopular, rebellious spirits, who could not be trusted on the streets of New York or Boston.

Today, Muslims are the new “enemies”, even though, strangely enough, Saudi Arabia (who provided the vast majority of the 9/11 bombers) is not on Trump’s list of seven banned countries.

Amazing, too, how Yemen is on the list, considering it has been bombed to bits by US “ally” Saudi Arabia over the past two years. Yemen is on the verge of famine, but any Yemeni who turns up at a US border will be deported and sent back home.

The targeting of an entire race, nation, or religion has brought up understandable comparisons with 1930s Germany.

Back then, good people were afraid to speak out while their Jewish neighbours were being forced to wear yellow stars to make them more identifiable in a growing climate of hatred and intolerance.

Given our own troubled history, it’s incredible to think that racial profiling is now taking place on Irish soil.

The US ‘pre-clearance’ at Shannon was supposed to make travelling easier when it was introduced in 2009, but now it could lead to people being discriminated against for no other reason than their country of birth.

It is unthinkable to imagine the kind of hostility a Yemeni or Syrian would have to deal with if he or she was to try to board a flight to the US at Shannon.

Imagine, the land where hundreds of thousands of people were made refugees is now about to let a powerful nation, motivated by xenophobia and fear, discriminate against refugees on Irish soil.

Of course, Irish people have already been turning a blind eye to what’s being going on at Shannon Airport for the past 15 years.

President Donald Trump's anti-Muslim measure has
caused huge controversy in Irealnd

Last July, for example, 85 civilians – among them almost a dozen children – lost their lives in a bombing in a small Syrian village.

Combatants had targeted a village in Northern Syria which had been held by Islamic State (IS) or Daesh fighters.

The combatants or “terrorists” who carried out this attack on Tokhar stop almost daily in Shannon to refuel their aircraft.

The terrorists were US soldiers. But there was no minute’s silence, no protest, and the bombing did not even merit a mention on BBC or RTE news.

People in Ireland or the UK only found out about it thanks to RT, the Russian channel, and Britain’s Channel 4.

How can we care about the loss of innocent lives when we are not even told about them by many segments of our media?

Most of us just shrug when we hear that over 2.5 million US soldiers have landed in ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001.

We didn’t protest when US soldiers who pass through Shannon murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Syria over the past decade.

We didn’t protest when planes carrying munitions, helicopters, and even deadly chemical weapons to aid the Israeli occupation of Palestine passed through Shannon.

We didn’t protest when prisoners were renditioned through Shannon on their way to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

Mind you, we can’t be sure about that one … because not one person in authority in Ireland has ever searched a US military plane during 15 years of Shannon’s use as a military base.

But surely, finally, it’s time to protest now. Is it acceptable that people in uniforms standing in Co Clare can now prevent people from getting onto a ‘plane on the basis of their nationality alone?

The Americans have made a mockery of international law by effectively turning a civilian airport into a military base. Now they want to discriminate against refugees before they even leave Ireland.

In light of our own terrible history, can Irish people really stand idly by when we hear that racial profiling has become a fact of life just an hour south of where the ‘coffin’ ships once set sail from Galway Bay?


Shannonwatch, who have monitored the US military use of ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport for the past 15 years, have organised a protest at the airport this coming Thursday (6pm)

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The less we know, the easier it is to hate ...

The less we know about each other, the easier it is to hate. And did you ever get the impression that, for all our technological advances over the past few decades, we live in increasingly intolerant times?

Last week, it seemed that a third of the people I knew on Facebook turned their profile photos blue, white, and red in sympathy with the victims of the terrible terrorist atrocities in Paris the previous weekend.

Of course they had every right to do so, they were horrified by the images they'd seen on their TV screens.

But why sympathise with victims in one place, and not another? Those who wondered why Sky News don’t broadcast 24/7 from bombed out cities and towns in Syria, Palestine, or Afghanistan were told that people have a right to sympathise with terrorism victims in Paris, simply because they live closer to us.

US troops in Shannon: How many of us ever ask what destruction they cause?

And it’s true. The Irish do have more connections with the French than we do with people in Palestine, Iraq, or Syria. But we do the people in those countries a great disservice by airbrushing them out of our lives, when our own governments in the West play a big part in their troubles.

We let airplanes fly through our airports on their way to bomb them, we sell arms to despotic tyrants who abuse them, we turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, and then we wonder why some of them have an irrational hatred for people in our part of the world.

We didn’t see Sky News outside the Afghan hospital bombed by the US last month, but the channel spent an entire week broadcasting from Paris, interviewing victims, who had gruesome stories to tell about how a night out at a rock concert, a football match, or a restaurant turned into a nightmare in which 130 innocent people lost their lives.

Significant elements of the media make it clear that some lives are more important than others. Whether due to geography, inconvenience, or simple editorial policy, Sky never showed us interviews with the victims of the Beirut terror attacks which claimed 43 lives just 24 hours before the Paris attacks.

A suburban neighbourhood full of ordinary people became a "Hezbollah stronghold".

A few weeks earlier it was “politically inconvenient” to dwell on the bombing, by US forces, of the Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) hospital which claimed 30 lives. It wasn’t an act of terror, it was “human error” we were told. And it doesn’t rest easily with our narrative about who the good and the bad guys are.

So the victims of bombings in Afghanistan or Beirut never make it onto our TV screens and we don’t play their national anthems to honour their dead at our football games.

We say it “could have been us” when we talk about Paris or London, but never consider that ordinary people in far more troubled places are also trying to just get on with their lives.

Perhaps some of the refugees fleeing Syria are ISIS terrorists, hell-bent on causing havoc across Europe. But the vast majority are ordinary people who are escaping horrible lives in war zones. No father or mother puts a toddler into an unsafe boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea unless they are fleeing genuine horror.

Selective viewing renders a joke of objectivity. When 2,200 people were murdered in Gaza last summer, it was hard to find a reporter in the UK or Ireland – apart from Jon Snow on Channel 4 and a few others – who was willing to travel to the enclave and gather heart-breaking stories from the survivors.

So we didn’t get exposed to their grief, in the same way as we’ve been horrified by the loss of so many innocent lives in Paris.

It’s been horrible to go on social media in recent months and to see all the Islamophobic bile being spread about the thousands of refugees who are seeking new lives in Europe as an escape from the war-torn Middle East.

We didn't hear about the French air raids on Syrian towns back in September and few make a connection between European intervention in that strife-torn region and the terrorism on our own doorstep. But how could they not be related?

So the people who set off suicide bombs in Paris are a threat to civilisation, but the people who drop bombs on Syria and Iraq with no risk to their own personal safety are hardly ever highlighted by the media.

They don't strap on suicide vests outside crowded theatres, they press a button well out of reach of their victims.

Since 9/11, Muslims are blamed for the misdeeds of a tiny minority of extremists in a way which would have been absurd if the same criteria were applied to the Irish during the IRA bombings in the UK in the 1970s.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but you’d never think that if you read through the comments on some social media sites. I’ve seen people call on their Governments to “nuke the bastards” as though wiping out the entire population of some cities or regions would eliminate the threat posed by terrorists, instead of creating a whole new generation of jihadists.

It is in the interests of the extremists on both sides that ignorance should prevail.

And it takes some degree of ignorance and extremism to believe that a place in paradise awaits those who shoot young rock fans in a crowded theatre on a Friday night.

When we go to Egypt, Morocco, Jordon or Tunisia on holidays, we get to enjoy fun times with ordinary, decent Muslims. The interactions work both ways – they get jobs in the tourism industry and to see that not all Westerners are as decadent or arrogant as they’ve been portrayed in their own biased media.

When we stop travelling – which is understandable in the wake of suicide bombings – our Governments can stoke up hatred against the Muslim world and continue to justify the sale of arms to regimes which have no regard for human rights.

We have seen this type of ignorance in Ireland for too long. When Catholics and Protestants attend different schools, play different games, support different sports teams, and even work in different places, it’s too easy to build up an irrational hatred for each other.

But it’s also in the Catholic Church’s own interest to keep children of different faiths apart from the moment they attend school.

Technology has changed our lives so much in recent years. We can now record or watch the news on our mobile phones 24/7. We can be connected no matter where we are, day or night.

But if we continue to put barriers between ourselves and ‘other’ civilisations we continue to be as ignorant about each other as Muslims and Christians were a thousand years ago, during the Crusades.

When our media only highlight terrible loss of life in Paris, New York, or London, rather than atrocities which take place around the world with far more regularity, they add to the false perception that there is some sort of Holy War going on between “us” and “them”.

Protesting against US troops in Shannon

Most people, whether they live in Paris or Beirut, only want peaceful, happy lives. But you’d never think that innocent lives in Beirut matter much if you relied on the likes of Sky News for your information about what’s happening in the world.

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