Irish Now Confront the Other Side of Immigration

July 8, 2000

Irish Now Confront the Other Side of Immigration

By SARAH LYALL

Derek Spries for The New York Times

Two Nigerians who have applied for asylum in Ireland chatted on Main Street in the small town of Birr.

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IRR, Ireland -- It is hard to find anyone in this busy little town with a specific complaint about the 70-odd strangers who abruptly arrived last fall from places like Chechnya and Nigeria. But that does not mean the town wants them here.
"Maybe we're ignorant, but the only colored person you'd ever see before was someone back from England," said a 45-year-old carpenter who refused to give his name, saying that the issue was too fraught and that Birr, with only 4,000 or so people, was too small.
"It's not that we're biased," he said, trying to explain why he had not spoken to any of the newcomers, who are living here at government expense while their applications for political asylum are being considered. "It's just that we don't know what to make of these black people. We don't understand them. We're, maybe, afraid of them."
For the last decade, Ireland's membership in the European Union has helped fuel an economic boom, transforming an isolated, desperately poor economy into the proud success that calls itself the Celtic Tiger.
But the boom has brought another European dividend: waves of unwanted newcomers, most of them seeking employment and refuge from politically unstable, war-ravaged areas of Africa and Europe.
And now Ireland, with its history of sending its citizens abroad in search of better lives, has become something it never would have imagined: a magnet for the dispossessed. "This is the real world catching up to us," said Piaras MacEinri, director of the Irish Center for Migration Studies at University College, Cork. "It's not just about refugees. It's about Ireland no longer being a small, white place of emigrants."
By now the Irish are all too familiar with the prejudice and hardships their countrymen suffered over the centuries as they searched for work abroad. It is hard-wired into their sense of themselves.
That is why people like Ned Lawton become so angry when they hear the common complaint, voiced in Birr and elsewhere, that the refugees are here simply to take advantage of Ireland's newfound wealth, not to flee persecution at home.
"In the 1980's when you saw a headline about illegal immigrants, you'd assume the article was talking about Irish immigrants in New York," said Mr. Lawton, a spokesman for the Irish Refugee Council. "This is all a bit rich, coming from us, particularly now that we have a booming economy."
Europe is awash in refugees these days, but Ireland, more than its Continental cousins, has been forced by the rush of events to make up its asylum policy as it goes along.
In 1992 only 39 people applied for asylum in Ireland. In 1999 there were 7,724. Now 1,000 are applying every month, a number that sounds inconsequential until you consider Ireland's relatively tiny size, less than half the size of North Carolina.
With only 3.6 million residents, the country drew more asylum seekers as a percentage of its population last year than any other European country except Austria and Belgium. Most of the new arrivals have gravitated to an already overwhelmed Dublin, forcing the government to scramble for places to put them.
A proposal to build floating detention centers, or "flotels," foundered when port after port found new objections to raise. The current plan is to build some 4,000 housing units where the refugees can live for the 18 months or so it generally takes to process their applications.
In the meantime the Nigerians, Congolese, Romanians, Chechens and Poles living in the Maltings guesthouse, a private rooming house at one end of Birr, are beneficiaries, if that is the right word, of the government's current program of dispersing the asylum seekers around the country, even in rural areas ill equipped to handle them and even less prepared to welcome them.
Compounding the problem, for the refugees and the residents, is the government's decision to forbid asylum seekers to work while their cases are being considered.
"You're having a situation where people are being dispersed, but social services are not dispersed with them," Mr. MacEinri said. "Local government is in a poor state, and we're not really giving it any extra money."
In Birr the program has stirred up a stew of feelings, many of them negative, about where the country is going. Residents say they cannot square the fact that the asylum seekers are living rent-free -- with their meals taken care of and 15 pounds ($18) a week in spending money besides -- with the knowledge that there are still Irish people living on the streets of Dublin.
"They keep to themselves," admitted a 23-year-old man, walking past the Maltings on his way home from work and speaking on condition that his name and occupation not be disclosed. "But most people aren't happy with them. They're living the life of luxury."
Another man, who is in his 50's and runs a tractor-trailer business, stood next to a construction site and said he thought Ireland was taking on more than it could handle. Birr, too.
People tend to know each other here. Smack in the middle of Ireland, the town has several bustling streets of small stores and pubs and makes its living from a handful of factories around its edges and from the tourists who drive through, looking for Birr Castle.
Before the newcomers came, the man said, he had rarely -- if ever -- seen more than one dark-skinned person at a time.
"I turned against them completely when I saw them begging in restaurants," he said. He did not know whom he had seen. "Either Romanians or Nigerians," he said. "We don't know the difference. They're all the same. They're all black, and we've never been used to colored people here."
On the other side of the cultural divide are people like Dorcas Balogun, 25. For Mrs. Balogun, a Muslim who fled Nigeria with her husband when both of his parents were killed by Christians who then came looking for them, her exile to Birr has meant long days of idleness, with too much time to fret about the future.
While she waits for her application to be processed -- and only a tiny percentage of Nigerians who applied for asylum in Ireland last year had their applications accepted -- she has had scarcely a conversation, let alone a shared meal, with an actual Irish person.
"Mostly I just sit around the house all day," she said, the house being the two-bedroom apartment she and her husband share with another Nigerian couple. Sometimes they take the long bus ride into Dublin, but they do not feel comfortable walking around.
"It's not too bad," her husband, Adele, said. "But sometimes, when you go out to take some air, they look at you and say: 'Black people -- what are you doing in Ireland? Go back to your country.' "
Some townspeople have reached out. Maeve Garry, who runs the Maltings with her husband, has made several trips to Dublin to buy African food. The Rev. Tony Cahir, the priest at St. Brendan's, the Roman Catholic church in Birr, organized a minivan trip to visit a neighboring town. He also gave refugees used radios and tape recorders donated by his parishioners.
And when he sees the refugees walking past his house on their way to the tiny local library, where they tend to gather, he goes out of his way to greet them.
"If there was somebody passing by, I'd introduce them and say, 'This is Jimmy from Nigeria,' " he said.
Father Cahir said the community had reacted as well as could be expected. "Honestly, I'd say that the attitude has been a positive one," he said. "There has been wonderment, questioning, people asking who these people are, what is going to happen. But then people realized that they were here waiting for a decision from the government, and they saw that there's been absolutely no trouble."
But his optimism does not erase the anger simmering beneath the surface around the country, particularly in the places ordered to accept people they do not want. So far, almost 1,500 refugees are living in small communities outside Dublin.
In the town of Kildare, the outraged Chamber of Commerce has sued to block the arrival of 400 refugees, pointing out that the town had already taken in 300 from Kosovo. And in tiny Clogheen, in County Tipperary, an empty hostel that was being refurbished to house 40 asylum seekers was set on fire.
"We would have liked to consult a lot more, but you have to understand our predicament," said Alan Mulligan, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, explaining the government's policy of dispersing the refugees. "The vast majority -- 90 percent -- were staying in Dublin, and we just didn't have the accommodation for them."
Meanwhile, a country that was so homogeneous until the mid-1990's that the Rough Guide travel book described its residents as having a "uniquely naïve brand of racism," is trying as best as it can to figure out what to do next.
"The government accepts its obligation to asylum seekers under international law," Mr. Mulligan said. "Racism will not be tolerated. But no government can go into any village and force people to like each other."

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