Dispatches from a reluctantly multicultural country

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland

Since the famine of the 1840s Ireland has been a net exporter of economic migrants, who have settled round the world in search of a better life. Now immigrants from the world have arrived to do the same in booming Ireland.
by Colin Murphy

As the rest of Ireland was sheltering from the sleet and hail on a stormy St Patrick’s night, or huddling into the pubs for one of the biggest nights of drinking in the year, the burghers of a small seaside village on the west coast were heading to a newly-built hotel for its charity opening function. The four-star luxury hotel, built by a local property developer, is 400 metres from end to end. It boasts “extra-spacious bedrooms”, a “superb dining experience”, a jacuzzi tub in the bridal suite and a “leisure and wellness centre”.

Some of the Polish labourers who built the hotel were accommodated on site in mobile homes, with erratic water and electricity supplies. Up to six men shared one caravan. A site canteen provided free soup daily at lunchtime, though if the workers wanted vegetables in the soup, they had to contribute to a fund to buy them. We spoke to five workers who told us this. According to the developer John Murphy (not his real name), that’s all “rubbish”.

Mariusz Kopczak, a carpenter, was one of those workers. He worked approximately 78 hours a week for a total of $598, at an hourly rate of $8 which was two-thirds of the minimum wage in Ireland and less than half of the legally-binding construction industry rate. Kopczak worked from 7pm to 6am seven days a week on the night shift; when he worked by day, his hours were 8am to 6pm Monday to Saturday, but he only did eight hours on Sunday. In four months on the site, he had one day off, caused by an injury to his toe.

John Murphy said he paid the workers $18 an hour “with their benefits and all that taken into consideration”. That is still less than the legally-binding industry rate, for workers with at least 12 months of experience in construction. He said those benefits included accommodation and the use of his vans, with diesel provided. But the Polish workers “weren’t carrying their own weight” and some were stealing diesel from the site at night. “There’s payslips here if they want them,” he said. “If they were being paid as badly as that, why didn’t they leave?”

Kopczak did leave, and is now looking for other work in Dublin.

John Murphy has also a large number of houses for sale on a nearby site, starting at $658,000, but it’s slow work selling them. With all the hassle about workers and their papers, he sounds disillusioned: “I don’t need this grief.” He’s thinking of going back to being “a small building company” as he was before.

In the meantime his new hotel has to be finished. When we visited an affable employee told us there were some “hiccups” during the building and it’s not quite ready yet. But the Guinness taps were working, and the leather couches in the immense lounge were sumptuous. We were offered a room at the bargain rate of $80 per person sharing, though they couldn’t provide breakfast in the morning.

* * *

The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O’Donoghue, made a speech at the recent conference of the Irish Hotels Federation, and gave them a stern warning about migrant workers.

“The friendliness of the Irish people and the welcome for the visitor is legendary,” he said. “But life is changing . . . Visitors to many of our hotels and restaurants, especially in the cities, meet fewer Irish staff. If meeting Irish people is one of the things that visitors look forward to and they do not have that experience, they may well feel somewhat disappointed . . .There is that intangible Irish ‘thing’ — wit or ‘craic’ or the potential to be surprised by humorous insights or exchanges — that legend almost demands should be part of the Irish experience. That is hard to manufacture.”

* * *

Adnan Mohammedi has taken the stitches out of his mouth. He had allowed a doctor to cut them earlier in the week, but he had left the ends of thick black twine hanging from his lips, a sign that his hunger strike was not over.

But his strike is over for now. He has been cheered by the support he has received, from lawyers, journalists and politicians, and is trying to build himself up again, to fight on. He sewed his lips up 14 days before; this was a few days after he received a letter from the Department of Justice’s refugee applications office saying he had been refused asylum.

Mohammedi said he had fled being arrested in Iran for being an active member of the banned Komala party. The party offends the government because it is secular, socialist and Kurdish. According to Amnesty International, conviction for membership can carry the death penalty.

The Justice official wrote that Mohammedi had not provided “any concrete or provable evidence of connections to the [Komala] party”. His lawyers had provided copies of emails and faxes from Komala representatives acknowledging Mohammedi’s work for the party. One of these, the official wrote, “appears to be a faxed copy” and so had “no real evidentiary or probative value”.

Mohammedi gave me these documents, when I visited him on the first day of his hunger strike. There was a telephone number for the “representative abroad” of Komala, based in Sweden. I telephoned and spoke to the representative, Jafar Ilkhani. He told me he did not know Mohammedi personally, but that previously he had contacted the party’s office in Kurdistan, and they had confirmed that Mohammedi had been doing “covert political work” for them in Iran, and had been persecuted as a result.

There was no indication in the documents in Mohammedi’s file that the Justice official had made any attempt, even a five-minute phone call, to contact Komala.

Mohammedi seems to have made two factual mistakes in his interview for asylum, although there is a lack of clarity in the record of the interview which is probably due to difficulties in translation. Asked the number of people on the Komala party’s central committee, he gave the number on the party’s politburo. Asked whether it was necessary to pay membership dues, he said no, but the Komala website says fees are payable.

When this was put to him, Mohammedi said he had not paid fees, but perhaps the friend who joined him up had paid them for him. The Department of Justice official wrote that these were “credibility flaws” which went to “the heart of his claim” for asylum.

* * *

An immigration lawyer explains how officials hearing asylum interviews use “trap questions”. A common one is to ask the asylum seeker “do you think your life will be different in Ireland?” and “what is different here?” The asylum seeker says everything is different: the buses, the streets, the shops, the schools. Then the official accuses the seeker of coming to Ireland for economic reasons. Another lawyer complains about the quality of translation. He once had to stop a French-English interpreter because the translation was so bad. And most lawyers do not speak Farsi, Yoruba or Lingala.

* * *

Some of the Polish workers that didn’t live on the hotel site rented flats in the nearby town. We visit four of them, after work one evening, in their flat in a complex that also houses the local Citizens Advice Bureau. “Good for the theory”, says my trade union companion. “Not so good for the practice.”

The flat is immaculate, with the builders’ boots at the door and the men padding around in socks and slippers. Polish satellite television; a photo of a baby on the fridge; black tea and cakes for us. Do they speak any English, I ask? “Small,” they all agree. They have been in Ireland a year. My companion, a Polish organiser with Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU, translates.

Sebastian, who has left John Murphy’s company, has a wife and daughter in Poland. His wife is expecting their second child, a product of one of his quarterly visits home. How long will he stay here? “That is difficult to answer. I want to make money for building a house in Poland.”

Most of the workers at the site were recruited directly in Poland by a local who had contact with the Irish construction company.

“The problem with the site is that the majority of the workers don’t speak English very well and so they have difficulty in finding another job”, says Tadek (not his real name, as he is still working there). Tadek stayed at the job even after some of his friends, including Sebastian, found better-paid work locally. Why? “I met the union and I believed that we can change the conditions of work. But I’ve seen that the other workers don’t want to change. They don’t want to stick together, they want to stick to this job. For them, this is sufficient money. They want to hold their job and get money at the end of the week.”

Tadek has just been offered another job and he’s leaving soon. He hopes to bring his wife and two children to Ireland, but his wife is needed in Poland to care for his mother, who is ill. He has a 22-year-old son who is finishing his studies in IT programming and speaks English. He hopes his son will join him soon.

* * *

Pat Rabbitte leads the Labour party, which hopes to form a government with the right-of-centre Fine Gael after the next election, in May or June this year. Rabbitte, who comes from a hard left and trade union background, has sought these apparently strange bedfellows in an attempt to displace the centrist Fianna Fail party from government after 10 years of uninterrupted power.

He has spoken about the “displacement” of Irish workers by immigrant labour. “Displacement is going on in the meat factories and it is going on in the hospitality industry and it is going on in the building industry. There are 40 million or so Poles, after all, so it is an issue we have to have a look at.”

* * *

The Sunday World, the best-selling Irish newspaper, 12 November, 2006, page one exclusive by Paul Williams, crime correspondent.


“The widow of shot traveller ‘Frog’ Ward is pleading with Justice Minister Michael McDowell not to kick her new toyboy husband out of —Ireland. Mother of 11 Marie Ward (42) is hoping for a second chance at happiness with an African asylum seeker half her age. But 24-year-old Ghanaian Adam Abakker could still be kicked out of the country. His case has gone forward to Minister McDowell on a list of non-EU nationals who have wed EU citizens. But the Sunday World has learnt immigration officials are alarmed at the number of similar weddings in recent months.”

Some facts about this case.

The 24-year-old man is from Sudan, not Ghana. His name is Abubaker Idris Adam, not Adam Abakker. He is a Fur from Darfur, which he fled following Janjaweed militia attacks in 2003.

His wife, Marie Ward, is an Irish Traveller. She was previously married to John “Frog” Ward, a convicted criminal who was shot dead in 2004 by a farmer, Padraig Nally, who had found Ward in his yard. Ward was unarmed. Nally injured Ward, reloaded his gun and, as Ward tried to flee, followed him and shot him again, fatally, at close range. Nally then picked up Ward’s body and dumped it in a field across the road.

Nally became a cause celebre in rural Ireland and in the media. He was tried for murder, convicted of manslaughter, and then acquitted in a retrial.

* * *

McDowell, the minister for justice, recently explained the thinking behind his proposal to give himself a veto over migrant marriages. “The Irish constitution places a very, very strong value on marriage. And parties to a marriage have what the constitution describes as ‘inalienable rights’ by virtue of their marital status. And the courts are bound to take that into account in making decisions as to whether you are or are not entitled to remain in Ireland. And certain short term residents in Ireland should not be given the opportunity to radically improve their position simply by entering into a marriage having come to Ireland . . . Even with an Irish citizen. Because we can’t have a situation where people can simply just enter into a marriage for the purpose of radically altering their position in Irish law.”

* * *

A few days after the tourism minister’s speech to the hotel industry, the relentlessly upbeat Irish president, Mary McAleese, gave a lecture in London on migration and multiculturalism.

“Schools, workplaces and communities have become confluences of cultures, languages, cuisines, ethnicities, faiths,” she said. “Our country, with its richly textured cultural heritage, its empathy for the emigrant and its legendary welcome, is already the sowing the seeds of a fascinating future.”

* * *

I drive to the West, and beside me, Barnaba Dorda, my companion, the Polish trade union official, makes and takes calls on his mobile, all in Polish. A self-employed tradesman working in a small Irish town calls him. This man was working on a construction site, being paid the minimum wage, far less than any Irish tradesman would accept for the same work, and less than the legally-binding construction industry rates. But he’s been let go. The contractor has found a Romanian to work for less. The immigrants who displaced Irish workers are now being displaced themselves.

* * *

A meeting with a group of young Africans, male and female, in a community hall in suburban Dublin, shortly before St Valentine’s Day. My question is: how do they meet young Irish people? They answer in Dublin idiom, in broad Irish accents with African lilts, and roar laughing with recognition at each other’s observations.

Abraham: “I find Irish girls really attractive, they’re drop dead gorgeous, I have to give them that. But for our case, trying to be in a relationship with Irish girls, it’s kind of impossible. I’m not saying they’re too demanding, but we have curfews imposed in [our] hostels. We have limited funds – the benefits we get, $20 a week, you can’t even bring a girl out to the movies, ’cause you’d be broke by the end of the night. The only cheap thing around here is to get a cuppa.”

Zainab: “It’s hard for me to go out with an Irish guy. You know what they talk about? You’re, like, going out with him, and the first thing, he’s like, ‘I’m horny’. What the hell is that? That’s a complete put off, you don’t want to talk to them any more, you just go, ‘what do you see me as, like a sex toy or something?’ It’s just so ridiculous, no respect or nothing. They go to clubs, and [they’ve] just met somebody, and [they] just start kissing. What the hell is that? I would really like to meet a very good Irish guy, but the culture is too different, they way they have relationships is just too different to the way we see relationships. No matter how educated they are. I don’t know why they are all the same like that.”

* * *

Michael McDowell lost his seat in parliament in 1997 and spent the next two years out of politics, during which time he wrote occasional articles for the Sunday Independent. Immigration was a favourite theme.

“[I] pointed out that the department’s policy on immigration and aliens was racially prejudiced . . . Black and coloured people are treated differently by our immigration service. If an Irish woman marries a black man, he will be treated very differently from a white spouse. He will be routinely halted at airports. He will probably experience great difficulty in securing the right to reside here.

“For a ‘grand little country’ that spent the 19th and 20th centuries exporting millions of economic migrants, we are in a poor position indeed to criticise those in the third world who seek to flee from abject poverty.”

* * *

It is a four-hour drive from Dublin to the Polish workers. By the time we’ve met them in their flat after work, it’s 10 pm, and we stop for some belated dinner in a local Chinese restaurant before the return journey. It is the Tuesday just after the long weekend for St Patrick’s day and we are the only people in the restaurant.

The waiter, Brian, idles to chat. He is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and comes from ethnic Chinese stock. He’s been here a few years and has no plans to go home. “I want to broaden my horizons. I have much more of Europe to see. Especially Poland.”

He greets Barnaba in Polish. “I have many Polish friends. One of them has gone back, he invited me to visit him. Is it very cold there?”

* * *

There are just a few of us in the audience, upstairs at the St Andrews Lane attic studio theatre for a revival of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, a play about Irish labourers in 1970s London. This is a genre in Irish theatre: plays about emigrant men, impoverished, bitter, lonely, alcoholic, violent, nostalgic, loyal, patriotic. In this play the men gather in the back room of their local pub to celebrate the wake of a compatriot.

They are loud-mouthed, abrasive and funny, and as they drink, the layers of self-deception fall away. Jap, overbrimming with false confidence, says they should return to Ireland to start over. Git disabuses him: “We’ll be as much strange fish over there as we were, an’ we settin’ foot off’a the boat here for the first time,” says Git.

The line is written in a thick Irish brogue but spoken with a heavy Nigerian lilt; this production is by an African-Irish theatre company, Arambe Productions.

(“Arambe” is coined from a Yoruba saying “ara m be ti mo fe da”, meaning “there are wonders that I want to perform”, and the Swahili word “harambee” meaning “work together”.)

The actors are all Nigerian; one is Irish-born of Nigerian parents. There is no attempt to imitate Irish accents; when the men burst into drunken song, Nigerian rhythms replace the Irish. It becomes a Nigerian play about the public rituals of mourning and the big man image of the emigrant. The climax reveals that the dead man had killed himself in despair at his impoverishment in a foreign country.

* * *

Shixue Hou, 24, from China, was recently jailed for two months for failing to produce valid immigration documents to the police. According to a court report in the Irish Independent, Hou had remained in Ireland after his 18-month student visa expired in 2003, worked in a restaurant and then started his own restaurant.

A local businessman gave evidence that Hou was of good character and said he had advised Hou to set up his own business when he discovered how badly paid Hou was in the restaurant. There was also evidence that Hou had applied for Irish citizenship, was not a burden on the state, paid taxes and did not draw welfare.

Lebanese-born Judge Desmond Zaidan said Hou “was playing with the system and taking advantage of the hospitality the state had extended to him. This appears to be common with the Chinese. They come in on a student visa, overstay their welcome and then disappear into the black economy until the state catches up with them.”

Judge Zaidan recently jailed four Pakistani men for similar offences, including working without an employment permit. The men had chosen to “use human trafficking” to come to Ireland, he said. “The trafficking of human beings is unacceptable, especially those that are vulnerable. I have no doubt that they are here from Bangladesh, a poor country, to earn money. The route they took can only fuel and support the exploitation of human beings.”

He sentenced them each to a month in prison.

* * *

There are more dog wardens in Ireland than labour inspectors. Source: Jack O’Connor, head of the SIPTU union.

* * *

From the New York Times on 17 March 2007, which was St Patrick’s Day.

“Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, at the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, said that he hopes the US Congress will embrace President Bush’s immigration proposal that would affect illegal Irish immigrants in the United States.

“ ‘The resolution of this issue would mean enormous amounts to so many Irish men and women,’ Ahern said of the 50,000 to 70,000 illegal Irish immigrants in the United States. ‘I fervently hope that they will, in the not too distant future, be able to step away from the shadows and into the sunshine of this great country’.

“Bush also nudged Congress to pass his guest worker programme for immigrants. ‘Irish Americans remind us of our heritage as a nation of immigrants and our duty to remain a welcoming society,’ Bush said.”

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