IRELAND
By Donal O’Kelly
Donal O’Kelly
Donal O’Kelly is an Irish writer and performer currently writing a creative non-fiction book about the origins of Ireland’s 25-year-old system of Direct Provision of accommodation for people seeking international refuge.
July 25, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Giuseppe Milo - Three irish cows. Flickr.
Let me start with, like An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire in Mo Scéal Féin, the Irish text book for the Intermediate Certificate in the 1970s, with one of my first memories. An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire recounted a scary meeting with a cross goose down the lane from his house when he was three. I remember the roaring cattle herded down the North Circular Road in Dublin, from the market in Prussia Street to the Birkenhead cattle boat, when I was about three.
The smell of cow dung was ever-present in Phibsborough in 1960s Dublin. There was a brown coating of shite down the middle of the North Circular, squashed by cars, buses and vans when the cattle were gone on their way. In 1952, a government-commissioned study on economic development from the New York firm Stacy May opened with the line “In the Irish economy, cattle is king”.[i] It was a smart-ass nod to the catch-phrase “cotton is king”, coined almost a century earlier by swaggering South Carolina slave-holding Congressman James Hammond,[ii] a pithy reference to the enormous impact the enslavement-based US cotton industry had from the 1820s on rich-world industrial development. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants were familiar with the impoverished conditions of working in the cotton-mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, a contrived British spjn-off benefit of the forced labour of millions of enslaved Blacks in the southern United States, that has really only been officially admitted in the past few years. Among them was Michael Davitt from Straide in Mayo, later leader of the Land League, who lost an arm as a child worker in the cotton mills after the family were evicted and their home legally ‘tumbled’ by state agents in 1847. In Hammond’s electoral base of Charleston South Carolina, one-eighth of the population was Irish in 1820, at the start of King Cotton’s reign. The Irish emigrants, like the short-horn dual purpose cow, had been herded to the boat for England (or anywhere) by economic circumstances and for political refuge, including from genocidal starvation 1847-1849 through British government policy that reduced the population of Ireland by one-quarter.
Where were the lowing cattle of Doyle’s Corner coming from? They came from the big rancher fattening farms in nearby counties like Meath, Westmeath and Offaly to the Dublin cattle market. Where did they come from before that? They came from the poorer parts of Ireland, where small farmers didn’t have enough land to feed cattle beyond one year old. They had to be sold to someone who had the land to fatten them. Pauric Colum’s poem A Drover, published in the Anthology of Irish verse in 1922, is a lyrical description of the process, incisive in its own way, opening with the lines:-
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.
When Fianna Fáil came to power under De Valera in 1932 they carried the weight of many small farmers’ hopes of escape from dire poverty. The Economic War 1932-38, when Britain imposed tariffs on Irish imports scuppered that hope (diverting Irish export favoured-nation efforts to Germany for Hitler’s accession to power in 1933). The wartime arrangement with Britain, like turning on a tap of willing and desperate human labour for more than 250,000 Irish to work as economic migrants in vital armaments and industrial, road and airstrip sites throughout Britain, provided postal orders of salvation back home to destitute farming families. The British Ministry of Labour set up a disinfecting, delousing and transport centre in Dublin that fast-tracked labour to where it was needed for the war effort in the UK within 24 hours. There was no choice involved and no negotiation, the prospective labourer was legitimised only by the work visa handed to him or her on arrival at destination. Republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell wrote in the literary magazine The Bell in 1941: ‘There should be only one attitude towards the migrant – to smooth his going and coming, and make his journey cheap.’[iii]
In 1947, with Churchill out of power and no longer positioned to penalise Ireland for wartime neutrality, the ready cheap labour channel from Ireland to Britain intensified, with the Irish enjoying favoured status over potential workers from British colonies who possessed darker skin pigment. The Irish government, at the request of the Labour-led British government, delayed declaring Ireland a republic until after passage of the 1948 British Nationality Act, lest white-led dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would take Ireland’s lead and leave the British Commonwealth, as Ireland did in April 1949.
The UK Nationality Act of 1948,[iv] drafted when British imperialism was falling apart, is a supreme example of racialised legislation without mentioning skin colour, a skill perfected by the British policy making elite since the mid 17th century.[v] The vicious trans-Atlantic slave trade fuelled for more than two centuries the British industrial revolution, while policy making elites such as Sir William Petty forcibly suggested that Ireland should be literally a vast cattle ranch for feeding Britain’s industrial workforce. In 1685, in his A Treatise of Ireland, commissioned by King James II, he proposed the transportation of a million people from Ireland to the UK, where they would live ‘in more elegant company and variety of entertainments’, leaving 300,000 behind as herdsmen and dairywomen to help ‘breed and feed six million of beefes of 3-years-old a piece’. This was designed after what Petty framed as five hundred years that had made Ireland ‘for the most part, a diminution and a burthen, not an advantage, to England.’[vi]
The reduction to national ranch advised by Petty largely came to pass. I heard the frightened bovine roars and saw the dripping snouts and the horns low between the Mater and Mountjoy when I was three, with my mother’s tense grip on my hand as the scutter splashed onto the slippy granite kerb.
De Valera, far from lifting the pressure on small farmers, in 1947 placed a cap of 25 acres on the land available for farmer support – at least 30 acres was needed to viably raise cattle beyond one year old. So Colum’s drovers were still driving young heifers to be fattened and herded down to the boats when I was three.
Decades later, they shipped the live cattle exports to Libya instead of Birkenhead, in HGVs instead of by shank’s mare along the North Circular. In the 1980s, Libyan refugees were destined to be surreptitiously carpetbagged and deported home rather than be granted refugee status or even leave to remain. “Get real” said the policy making elites, “cattle barons have billions riding on this live cattle trade with Gaddafi, and we’re not going to jeopardise it for some poor divil’s human rights.” That was until that poor divil was Marey Gutrani, who came to Ireland on a student visa in 1983. That was the year Taoiseach Charlie Haughey visited Tripoli and met Gaddafi, with the pair reaching agreement on live exports, which led to Libya becoming Ireland’s single biggest market for cattle. This peaked at €90m a year in the early 1990s.[vii] In 1992 Marey Gutrani, after 18 months in Mountjoy and Wheatfield prisons, managed to pursue his case to be recognised as a refugee according to UN definition right up to the Supreme Court, where Stacy May’s 1952 report summary prevailed: “in Ireland, cattle is king.” At the direction of the executive and with the connivance of the judiciary and the apparent disinterest of the legislature, the Irish state would parcel up and deliver Gutrani to Baldonnel Aerodrome, to be despatched at the behest of Ireland’s economic interests to their favoured live cattle buyer, Gaddafi’s Libya.[viii] But he resisted. He refused to buckle under. He fought off the deportation crew. He defied Stacy May ‘cattle is king’ smart-assery. He insisted on being a human with rights.
At the time, successive Irish governments had not even bothered to ratify the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, signed by Ireland in 1956. So a refugee had no legal backup except a document called the Von Arnim Letter, signed in 1985 by a mid-rank Department of Justice civil servant and the head of the UNHCR London office, which proved in many cases not worth the paper it was written on. This state of affairs wasn’t rectified until 2000 in a raft of legislative and regulatory measures, including the introduction of the Direct Provision system of accommodation for asylum seekers.
*
Come on up Henry Street in Dublin city centre with me, past the side door of the GPO where my da used to work, past Woolworths on the left hand side, the hawkers are shouting their wares, ‘Fifty pence the bunch of bananas’, ‘get the last of the Cheeky Charlies’, and there’s Dunnes Stores on the right hand side. It’s just after nine o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 19th July 1984, and inside the store a woman with two Outspan grapefruits in her basket is approaching the tills. She doesn’t know that the shop workers’ trade union, IDATU (Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union) passed a motion the previous Saturday that their members would refuse to handle South African produce on account of the apartheid regime in power there. She plonks her basket down at 21-year-old Mary Manning’s till. Mary tells her that because of an instruction from her union, she’s unable to register the sale of South African goods.[ix]
Within a half an hour, Mary Manning and nine colleagues were out on the footpath. The Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike would last almost three years, culminating in a ban on the import of South African agricultural goods to Ireland, and eventually in the EU. When Nelson Mandela came to Ireland in June 1990 after his release from prison, the first people he wanted to meet were the ten Dunnes Stores strikers, all in their teens or early twenties when they stood in solidarity with the oppressed black people of South Africa.
On Saturday 20 July 2024 Mary Manning, forty years later, stood on a platform in Dublin for the Palestine solidarity demonstration outside Dáil Éireann, calling for boycott of Israeli produce in protest against the apartheid regime genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, ongoing for more than nine months.
I was near the back of the crowd of 40,000, holding a banner for Leitrim Palestine Support Group. Holding it with me was a young man from Gaza, we’ll call him Hassan. He wasn’t holding it for any particular reason, he was just lending a hand. We got talking. Hassan came to Ireland last September on a student visa and began his studies. He had to apply for refugee status when the Israeli army carpet-bombed Gaza and invaded with ground forces. For his application to be processed, he had to move into Direct Provision accommodation. The Irish government simultaneously announced they would no longer guarantee accommodation for single male international protection applicants.[x] This was in direct contravention of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention Ireland has signed like almost every state.
He was “lucky” to be placed in a twenty-four bed dormitory in the Red Cow Hotel at Ireland’s most famous roundabout in the west of Dublin city. There are currently more than 2,000 homeless international protection applicants, mostly in the Dublin region, offered tents to sleep in, but nowhere to pitch them that is both safe and legal. And new Taoiseach Simon Harris even indicated tents would not be provided anymore. There are regular highly-publicised ‘clearances’ of tents from the banks of the Grand Canal, near the International Protection Office.[xi] Journalists counted the number of tents pitched every morning and dutifully published them, like recording stock levels, or crime levels. The reasons for pitching there are obvious:- you can stick tent-pegs into a grassy bank, it’s softer to sleep on than concrete and there is safety in pitching next to others. This was construed as “shanty towns” by the local residents association.[xii] New applicants don’t know the recent history, with their gifted tent bundled in their arms, yet political leaders tend to infer there is a conspiracy by single male asylum seekers to subvert by cunning tent-pitching local government bye-laws.
Last week eight tents were slashed and thrown into the River Liffey at midnight at City Quay.[xiii] The fifteen occupants fled to Pearse Street Garda Station for their safety. Hassan has been in the 24-bed dorm at Red Cow for seven months. It’s reminiscent of the workhouse governmental philosophy enshrined in the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838. For six months, Hassan was forbidden to work. Up until 2017, Ireland, uniquely in the EU, imposed a work ban on asylum seekers. Then the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the ban unconstitutional. Those thousands of people who endured enforced idleness in overcrowded conditions often for many years were not offered the prospect of any reparation. Hassan’s refugee legal aid solicitor damped down his inquiries about the delay in processing with a perfunctory “Gaza is not a priority of the IPO”. This upset Hassan very much. Perhaps trauma-training is not a priority for over-burdened refugee law solicitors. Over 100,000 Ukrainians were assumed to be refugees when they fled Russian bombardment in 2022, and were granted the fast-track procedure of temporary protection, with full right to work. The world has seen the relentless bombardment of Gaza, now being downplayed by the rich world media, yet refugee status is questioned. On Monday 22 July (yesterday at time of writing) 81 people were killed in an Israeli bombing in Khan Younis[xiv], but it’s not even mentioned on the BBC website. Hassan cannot get home whether he wants to or not; Israel has sealed Gaza. Why is he waiting interminably to be quizzed to attain refugee status?
*
For four consecutive nights, 15th to 18th July 2024, the former Crown Ireland paint headquarters in the sprawling suburb of Coolock on Dublin’s northside was set ablaze as people protested against the renovation of the plant for accommodating 500 international protection applicants.[xv] It has become a familiar sight to see men (and women) posing as protectors of community rights by opposing the accommodation of international protection seekers. ‘Refugee scammers’ has become a catch-phrase.
A few years after I saw and heard and smelt the fearful cattle shuffling down the North Circular, I was brought toa remote part of County Cavan every Sunday by my friend’s family across the road. It was his father’s home place. His father was a butcher who ran a small shop in Cabra. He collected the meat from the abattoir on Blackhorse Avenue in his car, sometimes with two of us in the back beside the stiffening ribbed half-carcases. I can still get that faintly sweet smell of raw dead meat in my nostrils. Once I was locked in the freezer among the dangling beasts for a joke. Maybe I was forgotten about, I was there a long time. Like Ghassan Kanafani’s men in the sun, I didn’t shout for help, afraid that would be considered bold and I would be scolded. Conditioning, you see. It was so gorgeously warm when I was let out with goose-pimples all over. Cabra never looked so bright. When the Seven Towers shopping centre (each named after a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation) was built in Ballymun for the half-centenary in 1966, he leased a unit there. Soon after that, he had herds of young cattle placed in a field beyond Coolock, near the Crown Paints factory. I was brought to see what he called “the land”. The tiled roofs of the newly-built Kilbarrack estates loomed over the hedge in the distance. He’d made the journey from small farm to north County Dublin grazier. The endless demand for live cattle from Libya had to be met by reliable supply. He was a great man for reciting ballads such as James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Cathal Mór of the Wine-Red Hand’ and could quote Longfellow at length, died a great success at a good age and was buried in an impressive tomb beside the bishops, between O’Connell and Parnell inside the main gate of Glasnevin Cemetery.
A drover won’t pass by the Grand Canal tents with his cattle smelling of wet hills of the west, no Irish young person will queue to be deloused for a weekly wage in Peterborough, but maybe their shades can be felt by Hassan among the twenty-four people sleeping in one long room in the Red Cow. “We are the masters of this house” is the catch-phrase of Israeli Justice Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The dehumanising of Palestinians to lessness is a requisite of Israeli Zionist expansion. Every Israeli political leader since the foundation of the state and before has proclaimed some version of it, his or her particular flavour of supremacism. It all goes back to slavery. It all goes back to Aristotle, Plato and the derivative philosophies driving extractivist economics (including agriculture) since the conception of capitalist expansion in the 15th century and the impetus given by the “Age of Discovery” and the consequent Atlantic slave trade.
Everything in life is predicated on a fundamental binary: approval of enslavement or opposition to enslavement. This division became clear to all of humanity during the later stages of the American Civil War 1861-65. In the early 1960s boxes of Devlin’s sweet cigarettes contained US Civil War picture-cards to mark the centenary. The miniature cigarettes were made of candy, and you stuck them in your gob and pretended you were smoking tobacco (slave-grown for centuries) like every adult you saw. Aged seven I knew the names of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, I knew of the siege of Atlanta, the Battle of Gettysburg, the blue and grey uniforms, the Howitzer cannon-guns, but .. there were no slaves in any of the pictures, no black soldiers recruited from free blacks, no reference whatsoever to the historical fact that the recruitment of black troops in 1862 was the swing factor that won the war for the northern Union side[xvi], and restrained Britain and France from siding with the slave-holding Confederates, as they were set to do, led by UK Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, one of the most expansive landowners in Ireland.
If we don’t know history, we can’t learn from history, and if we can’t learn from history, we will repeat history’s mistakes. But it’s not mistaken activity by the perpetrators of injustice and profiteers from decisions made by carefully-chosen policy making elites of previous times. It was and is their deliberate informed choice. We must devise a way of arranging ourselves as a species so that no dominance is achieved by a ring-fenced entity calling itself “we”, as in “we the people” the opening phrase of the 1787 United States Constitution that, while acknowledging its much-heralded wide bestowal of franchise comparative to European states at the time, studiously and strategically ignored and suppressed the legalised permanent captivity and forced labour of an enormous section of the population – black slaves.
There is no way to take racism out of the issue of international protection and accommodation of asylum seekers, no matter how much the righteous local opponents of accommodation centres, and their political grandstanders, proclaim otherwise. History will insist we eventually, as a species, own up to historical facts and acknowledge the fostered inequality that results in the discriminatory distribution of wealth, generated by capitalist enterprise historically based on legally-structured enslavement, in today’s world.[xvii] That is not to deny or downplay the class discrimination within European states and economic entities worldwide, but also to recognise the abuse of white working-class poverty and capitalist exploitation by white supremacist ideologues throughout the past two centuries. Freed black slaves were not the adversary of impoverished white Irish housemaids and low-paid labourers, though thousands of lynching victims, forgotten and erased, remind those willing to search of the strange fruit once hanging from southern trees.[xviii]
The most fanatical, strategic architects of the ring-fenced ‘we’ human history has had the misfortune to behold, from British imperialism to American slavery and Jim Crow disenfranchisement, to European colonial exploitation of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Carribbean, have framed our handed-down canon of historical narrative, whether we like it or not. Geography is not the only arbiter of communality; shared and comparative experience and real rooted common understanding build communities across borders, and in the future, all going well, because water and air knows no borders, offers a vision of progress unimagined by policy makers since the so-called enlightenment that has given us the current mess of dominance, selfishness and brutality. It must not last. We must resist despair. We owe it to the excluded to imagine, to listen, to learn, to engage. ‘It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions’[xix].
[i] Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 8/2/2022 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/08/02/fintan-otoole-the-old-irish-way-of-doing-things-must-become-extinct-or-else-we-will/
[ii] James Henry Hammond, “Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,” Washington, D. C., 1858 [Often referred to as the “Cotton is King” Speech]
[iii] Clair Wills’ That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War (Faber, 2007) exposes much neglected information on the exodus of Irish labour to wartime Britain.
[iv] Kathleen Paul’s Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-War Era contains vital information about the efforts of Britain’s policy making elite to keep Britain white, and Ireland’s role in that effort. “.. eventual accommodation of the Irish was based on economic and political factors, but an additional factor also influenced the decision – an unspoken context of demographic acceptability. Thus the public defence of Ireland’s unusual position rested on the “specially close relationship” arising from “ties of kinship” and the “ties of blood, history and intermingling of peoples which bound Eire to the older countries of the Commonwealth.” (18 Nov 1948, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 5th ser., CAB128/13 CM74(48), v. 458, c. 1414)
Likewise, an internal (Foreign Office) justification outlined the “historical, racial and geographic links” that bound the two countries together. (FO371/76369 G.W .Furlonge, 21 Jan 1949)
[v] Up to the American Declaration of Independence 1776 the British policy making elite let the colonial legislatures devise and impose the Black Codes, a cast-iron web of legal measures that ran the bespoke racialised slaveholder regimes in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Maryland, as their individual state ruling elites dictated. From 1783 they continued to enact ever more gross regulations penalising slaves for a wide range of infractions, such as being in groups of more than four without permission of their owner, until the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution 1865 brought the Civil War to an end.
[vi] For description of Petty’s A Treatise on Ireland (1685) see Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, Conor McCabe, pages 64-65. Sir William Petty’s text A Treatise on Ireland available on https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hull-the-economic-writings-of-sir-william-petty-vol-1
[vii] Fiach Kelly, Irish Independent 21/10/2011 https://www.independent.ie/world-news/dictator-sent-arms-to-ira-and-was-supporter-of-haughey-26784290.html
[viii] As placed on the Seanad record by Senator Dan Neville 10/11/1993 https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1993-11-10/10/
[ix] Mary Manning, Striking Back: The Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker, with Sinead O’Brien, The Collins Press, 2017, p.14-15.
[x]RTE 4/12/2023 “32 international protection applicants were not offered State-provided accommodation when they presented to the International Protection Office.“ “the Department of Integration said it can no longer provide accommodation to all international protection applicants due to a severe shortage.” https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1204/1420023-international-protection-applicants-ireland/
[xi] Irish Times 30/5/2024 Grand Canal: asylum seekers’ tents cleared in latest operation https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/05/30/latest-clearance-of-migrants-tents-along-grand-canal-gets-under-way/
[xii] RTE 4/5/2024 Don’t allow ‘shanty towns’ to develop, urges residents’ group https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2024/0504/1447397-residents-tents/
[xiii] RTE 17/7/2024 Tents sheltering asylum seekers attacked in Dublin https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0717/1460324-tents-dublin-attack/
[xiv] Al Jazeera 23/7/2024 Israel war on Gaza live: At least 81 killed in Israeli blitz on Khan Younis https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/7/23/israel-war-on-gaza-live-scores-killed-in-new-israeli-blitz-on-khan-younis
[xv] Irish Times 21/7/2024 Coolock unrest: Fourth fire at former Crown Paints factory https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2024/07/21/coolock-unrest-fourth-fire-at-former-crown-paints-factory/
[xvi] I had no idea of this until I read Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. DuBois (1935) about a year ago, Its sub-title is AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880. it’s available online and I would recommend it to anyone eager to get to grips with the US Civil War and its aftermath that shaped much of the modern world we inhabit.
[xvii] Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1939) is, I discovered to my shock a couple of years ago, required reading to get a handle on how British industrial prosperity was predicated on its leadership role in the Atlantic slave trade for more than a century.
[xviii] An extract from At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Philip Dray (2002) focuses on W. E. B. DuBois’ contemporary account of the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan Georgia in 1899, published online by the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/atthehandsofpersonsunknown.htm
[xix] ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’, Sven Lindqvist, The New Press, 1996
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Giuseppe Milo - Three irish cows. Flickr.
Let me start with, like An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire in Mo Scéal Féin, the Irish text book for the Intermediate Certificate in the 1970s, with one of my first memories. An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire recounted a scary meeting with a cross goose down the lane from his house when he was three. I remember the roaring cattle herded down the North Circular Road in Dublin, from the market in Prussia Street to the Birkenhead cattle boat, when I was about three.
The smell of cow dung was ever-present in Phibsborough in 1960s Dublin. There was a brown coating of shite down the middle of the North Circular, squashed by cars, buses and vans when the cattle were gone on their way. In 1952, a government-commissioned study on economic development from the New York firm Stacy May opened with the line “In the Irish economy, cattle is king”.[i] It was a smart-ass nod to the catch-phrase “cotton is king”, coined almost a century earlier by swaggering South Carolina slave-holding Congressman James Hammond,[ii] a pithy reference to the enormous impact the enslavement-based US cotton industry had from the 1820s on rich-world industrial development. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants were familiar with the impoverished conditions of working in the cotton-mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, a contrived British spjn-off benefit of the forced labour of millions of enslaved Blacks in the southern United States, that has really only been officially admitted in the past few years. Among them was Michael Davitt from Straide in Mayo, later leader of the Land League, who lost an arm as a child worker in the cotton mills after the family were evicted and their home legally ‘tumbled’ by state agents in 1847. In Hammond’s electoral base of Charleston South Carolina, one-eighth of the population was Irish in 1820, at the start of King Cotton’s reign. The Irish emigrants, like the short-horn dual purpose cow, had been herded to the boat for England (or anywhere) by economic circumstances and for political refuge, including from genocidal starvation 1847-1849 through British government policy that reduced the population of Ireland by one-quarter.
Where were the lowing cattle of Doyle’s Corner coming from? They came from the big rancher fattening farms in nearby counties like Meath, Westmeath and Offaly to the Dublin cattle market. Where did they come from before that? They came from the poorer parts of Ireland, where small farmers didn’t have enough land to feed cattle beyond one year old. They had to be sold to someone who had the land to fatten them. Pauric Colum’s poem A Drover, published in the Anthology of Irish verse in 1922, is a lyrical description of the process, incisive in its own way, opening with the lines:-
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.
When Fianna Fáil came to power under De Valera in 1932 they carried the weight of many small farmers’ hopes of escape from dire poverty. The Economic War 1932-38, when Britain imposed tariffs on Irish imports scuppered that hope (diverting Irish export favoured-nation efforts to Germany for Hitler’s accession to power in 1933). The wartime arrangement with Britain, like turning on a tap of willing and desperate human labour for more than 250,000 Irish to work as economic migrants in vital armaments and industrial, road and airstrip sites throughout Britain, provided postal orders of salvation back home to destitute farming families. The British Ministry of Labour set up a disinfecting, delousing and transport centre in Dublin that fast-tracked labour to where it was needed for the war effort in the UK within 24 hours. There was no choice involved and no negotiation, the prospective labourer was legitimised only by the work visa handed to him or her on arrival at destination. Republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell wrote in the literary magazine The Bell in 1941: ‘There should be only one attitude towards the migrant – to smooth his going and coming, and make his journey cheap.’[iii]
In 1947, with Churchill out of power and no longer positioned to penalise Ireland for wartime neutrality, the ready cheap labour channel from Ireland to Britain intensified, with the Irish enjoying favoured status over potential workers from British colonies who possessed darker skin pigment. The Irish government, at the request of the Labour-led British government, delayed declaring Ireland a republic until after passage of the 1948 British Nationality Act, lest white-led dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would take Ireland’s lead and leave the British Commonwealth, as Ireland did in April 1949.
The UK Nationality Act of 1948,[iv] drafted when British imperialism was falling apart, is a supreme example of racialised legislation without mentioning skin colour, a skill perfected by the British policy making elite since the mid 17th century.[v] The vicious trans-Atlantic slave trade fuelled for more than two centuries the British industrial revolution, while policy making elites such as Sir William Petty forcibly suggested that Ireland should be literally a vast cattle ranch for feeding Britain’s industrial workforce. In 1685, in his A Treatise of Ireland, commissioned by King James II, he proposed the transportation of a million people from Ireland to the UK, where they would live ‘in more elegant company and variety of entertainments’, leaving 300,000 behind as herdsmen and dairywomen to help ‘breed and feed six million of beefes of 3-years-old a piece’. This was designed after what Petty framed as five hundred years that had made Ireland ‘for the most part, a diminution and a burthen, not an advantage, to England.’[vi]
The reduction to national ranch advised by Petty largely came to pass. I heard the frightened bovine roars and saw the dripping snouts and the horns low between the Mater and Mountjoy when I was three, with my mother’s tense grip on my hand as the scutter splashed onto the slippy granite kerb.
De Valera, far from lifting the pressure on small farmers, in 1947 placed a cap of 25 acres on the land available for farmer support – at least 30 acres was needed to viably raise cattle beyond one year old. So Colum’s drovers were still driving young heifers to be fattened and herded down to the boats when I was three.
Decades later, they shipped the live cattle exports to Libya instead of Birkenhead, in HGVs instead of by shank’s mare along the North Circular. In the 1980s, Libyan refugees were destined to be surreptitiously carpetbagged and deported home rather than be granted refugee status or even leave to remain. “Get real” said the policy making elites, “cattle barons have billions riding on this live cattle trade with Gaddafi, and we’re not going to jeopardise it for some poor divil’s human rights.” That was until that poor divil was Marey Gutrani, who came to Ireland on a student visa in 1983. That was the year Taoiseach Charlie Haughey visited Tripoli and met Gaddafi, with the pair reaching agreement on live exports, which led to Libya becoming Ireland’s single biggest market for cattle. This peaked at €90m a year in the early 1990s.[vii] In 1992 Marey Gutrani, after 18 months in Mountjoy and Wheatfield prisons, managed to pursue his case to be recognised as a refugee according to UN definition right up to the Supreme Court, where Stacy May’s 1952 report summary prevailed: “in Ireland, cattle is king.” At the direction of the executive and with the connivance of the judiciary and the apparent disinterest of the legislature, the Irish state would parcel up and deliver Gutrani to Baldonnel Aerodrome, to be despatched at the behest of Ireland’s economic interests to their favoured live cattle buyer, Gaddafi’s Libya.[viii] But he resisted. He refused to buckle under. He fought off the deportation crew. He defied Stacy May ‘cattle is king’ smart-assery. He insisted on being a human with rights.
At the time, successive Irish governments had not even bothered to ratify the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, signed by Ireland in 1956. So a refugee had no legal backup except a document called the Von Arnim Letter, signed in 1985 by a mid-rank Department of Justice civil servant and the head of the UNHCR London office, which proved in many cases not worth the paper it was written on. This state of affairs wasn’t rectified until 2000 in a raft of legislative and regulatory measures, including the introduction of the Direct Provision system of accommodation for asylum seekers.
*
Come on up Henry Street in Dublin city centre with me, past the side door of the GPO where my da used to work, past Woolworths on the left hand side, the hawkers are shouting their wares, ‘Fifty pence the bunch of bananas’, ‘get the last of the Cheeky Charlies’, and there’s Dunnes Stores on the right hand side. It’s just after nine o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 19th July 1984, and inside the store a woman with two Outspan grapefruits in her basket is approaching the tills. She doesn’t know that the shop workers’ trade union, IDATU (Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union) passed a motion the previous Saturday that their members would refuse to handle South African produce on account of the apartheid regime in power there. She plonks her basket down at 21-year-old Mary Manning’s till. Mary tells her that because of an instruction from her union, she’s unable to register the sale of South African goods.[ix]
Within a half an hour, Mary Manning and nine colleagues were out on the footpath. The Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike would last almost three years, culminating in a ban on the import of South African agricultural goods to Ireland, and eventually in the EU. When Nelson Mandela came to Ireland in June 1990 after his release from prison, the first people he wanted to meet were the ten Dunnes Stores strikers, all in their teens or early twenties when they stood in solidarity with the oppressed black people of South Africa.
On Saturday 20 July 2024 Mary Manning, forty years later, stood on a platform in Dublin for the Palestine solidarity demonstration outside Dáil Éireann, calling for boycott of Israeli produce in protest against the apartheid regime genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, ongoing for more than nine months.
I was near the back of the crowd of 40,000, holding a banner for Leitrim Palestine Support Group. Holding it with me was a young man from Gaza, we’ll call him Hassan. He wasn’t holding it for any particular reason, he was just lending a hand. We got talking. Hassan came to Ireland last September on a student visa and began his studies. He had to apply for refugee status when the Israeli army carpet-bombed Gaza and invaded with ground forces. For his application to be processed, he had to move into Direct Provision accommodation. The Irish government simultaneously announced they would no longer guarantee accommodation for single male international protection applicants.[x] This was in direct contravention of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention Ireland has signed like almost every state.
He was “lucky” to be placed in a twenty-four bed dormitory in the Red Cow Hotel at Ireland’s most famous roundabout in the west of Dublin city. There are currently more than 2,000 homeless international protection applicants, mostly in the Dublin region, offered tents to sleep in, but nowhere to pitch them that is both safe and legal. And new Taoiseach Simon Harris even indicated tents would not be provided anymore. There are regular highly-publicised ‘clearances’ of tents from the banks of the Grand Canal, near the International Protection Office.[xi] Journalists counted the number of tents pitched every morning and dutifully published them, like recording stock levels, or crime levels. The reasons for pitching there are obvious:- you can stick tent-pegs into a grassy bank, it’s softer to sleep on than concrete and there is safety in pitching next to others. This was construed as “shanty towns” by the local residents association.[xii] New applicants don’t know the recent history, with their gifted tent bundled in their arms, yet political leaders tend to infer there is a conspiracy by single male asylum seekers to subvert by cunning tent-pitching local government bye-laws.
Last week eight tents were slashed and thrown into the River Liffey at midnight at City Quay.[xiii] The fifteen occupants fled to Pearse Street Garda Station for their safety. Hassan has been in the 24-bed dorm at Red Cow for seven months. It’s reminiscent of the workhouse governmental philosophy enshrined in the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838. For six months, Hassan was forbidden to work. Up until 2017, Ireland, uniquely in the EU, imposed a work ban on asylum seekers. Then the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the ban unconstitutional. Those thousands of people who endured enforced idleness in overcrowded conditions often for many years were not offered the prospect of any reparation. Hassan’s refugee legal aid solicitor damped down his inquiries about the delay in processing with a perfunctory “Gaza is not a priority of the IPO”. This upset Hassan very much. Perhaps trauma-training is not a priority for over-burdened refugee law solicitors. Over 100,000 Ukrainians were assumed to be refugees when they fled Russian bombardment in 2022, and were granted the fast-track procedure of temporary protection, with full right to work. The world has seen the relentless bombardment of Gaza, now being downplayed by the rich world media, yet refugee status is questioned. On Monday 22 July (yesterday at time of writing) 81 people were killed in an Israeli bombing in Khan Younis[xiv], but it’s not even mentioned on the BBC website. Hassan cannot get home whether he wants to or not; Israel has sealed Gaza. Why is he waiting interminably to be quizzed to attain refugee status?
*
For four consecutive nights, 15th to 18th July 2024, the former Crown Ireland paint headquarters in the sprawling suburb of Coolock on Dublin’s northside was set ablaze as people protested against the renovation of the plant for accommodating 500 international protection applicants.[xv] It has become a familiar sight to see men (and women) posing as protectors of community rights by opposing the accommodation of international protection seekers. ‘Refugee scammers’ has become a catch-phrase.
A few years after I saw and heard and smelt the fearful cattle shuffling down the North Circular, I was brought toa remote part of County Cavan every Sunday by my friend’s family across the road. It was his father’s home place. His father was a butcher who ran a small shop in Cabra. He collected the meat from the abattoir on Blackhorse Avenue in his car, sometimes with two of us in the back beside the stiffening ribbed half-carcases. I can still get that faintly sweet smell of raw dead meat in my nostrils. Once I was locked in the freezer among the dangling beasts for a joke. Maybe I was forgotten about, I was there a long time. Like Ghassan Kanafani’s men in the sun, I didn’t shout for help, afraid that would be considered bold and I would be scolded. Conditioning, you see. It was so gorgeously warm when I was let out with goose-pimples all over. Cabra never looked so bright. When the Seven Towers shopping centre (each named after a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation) was built in Ballymun for the half-centenary in 1966, he leased a unit there. Soon after that, he had herds of young cattle placed in a field beyond Coolock, near the Crown Paints factory. I was brought to see what he called “the land”. The tiled roofs of the newly-built Kilbarrack estates loomed over the hedge in the distance. He’d made the journey from small farm to north County Dublin grazier. The endless demand for live cattle from Libya had to be met by reliable supply. He was a great man for reciting ballads such as James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Cathal Mór of the Wine-Red Hand’ and could quote Longfellow at length, died a great success at a good age and was buried in an impressive tomb beside the bishops, between O’Connell and Parnell inside the main gate of Glasnevin Cemetery.
A drover won’t pass by the Grand Canal tents with his cattle smelling of wet hills of the west, no Irish young person will queue to be deloused for a weekly wage in Peterborough, but maybe their shades can be felt by Hassan among the twenty-four people sleeping in one long room in the Red Cow. “We are the masters of this house” is the catch-phrase of Israeli Justice Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The dehumanising of Palestinians to lessness is a requisite of Israeli Zionist expansion. Every Israeli political leader since the foundation of the state and before has proclaimed some version of it, his or her particular flavour of supremacism. It all goes back to slavery. It all goes back to Aristotle, Plato and the derivative philosophies driving extractivist economics (including agriculture) since the conception of capitalist expansion in the 15th century and the impetus given by the “Age of Discovery” and the consequent Atlantic slave trade.
Everything in life is predicated on a fundamental binary: approval of enslavement or opposition to enslavement. This division became clear to all of humanity during the later stages of the American Civil War 1861-65. In the early 1960s boxes of Devlin’s sweet cigarettes contained US Civil War picture-cards to mark the centenary. The miniature cigarettes were made of candy, and you stuck them in your gob and pretended you were smoking tobacco (slave-grown for centuries) like every adult you saw. Aged seven I knew the names of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, I knew of the siege of Atlanta, the Battle of Gettysburg, the blue and grey uniforms, the Howitzer cannon-guns, but .. there were no slaves in any of the pictures, no black soldiers recruited from free blacks, no reference whatsoever to the historical fact that the recruitment of black troops in 1862 was the swing factor that won the war for the northern Union side[xvi], and restrained Britain and France from siding with the slave-holding Confederates, as they were set to do, led by UK Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, one of the most expansive landowners in Ireland.
If we don’t know history, we can’t learn from history, and if we can’t learn from history, we will repeat history’s mistakes. But it’s not mistaken activity by the perpetrators of injustice and profiteers from decisions made by carefully-chosen policy making elites of previous times. It was and is their deliberate informed choice. We must devise a way of arranging ourselves as a species so that no dominance is achieved by a ring-fenced entity calling itself “we”, as in “we the people” the opening phrase of the 1787 United States Constitution that, while acknowledging its much-heralded wide bestowal of franchise comparative to European states at the time, studiously and strategically ignored and suppressed the legalised permanent captivity and forced labour of an enormous section of the population – black slaves.
There is no way to take racism out of the issue of international protection and accommodation of asylum seekers, no matter how much the righteous local opponents of accommodation centres, and their political grandstanders, proclaim otherwise. History will insist we eventually, as a species, own up to historical facts and acknowledge the fostered inequality that results in the discriminatory distribution of wealth, generated by capitalist enterprise historically based on legally-structured enslavement, in today’s world.[xvii] That is not to deny or downplay the class discrimination within European states and economic entities worldwide, but also to recognise the abuse of white working-class poverty and capitalist exploitation by white supremacist ideologues throughout the past two centuries. Freed black slaves were not the adversary of impoverished white Irish housemaids and low-paid labourers, though thousands of lynching victims, forgotten and erased, remind those willing to search of the strange fruit once hanging from southern trees.[xviii]
The most fanatical, strategic architects of the ring-fenced ‘we’ human history has had the misfortune to behold, from British imperialism to American slavery and Jim Crow disenfranchisement, to European colonial exploitation of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Carribbean, have framed our handed-down canon of historical narrative, whether we like it or not. Geography is not the only arbiter of communality; shared and comparative experience and real rooted common understanding build communities across borders, and in the future, all going well, because water and air knows no borders, offers a vision of progress unimagined by policy makers since the so-called enlightenment that has given us the current mess of dominance, selfishness and brutality. It must not last. We must resist despair. We owe it to the excluded to imagine, to listen, to learn, to engage. ‘It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions’[xix].
[i] Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 8/2/2022 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/08/02/fintan-otoole-the-old-irish-way-of-doing-things-must-become-extinct-or-else-we-will/
[ii] James Henry Hammond, “Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,” Washington, D. C., 1858 [Often referred to as the “Cotton is King” Speech]
[iii] Clair Wills’ That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War (Faber, 2007) exposes much neglected information on the exodus of Irish labour to wartime Britain.
[iv] Kathleen Paul’s Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-War Era contains vital information about the efforts of Britain’s policy making elite to keep Britain white, and Ireland’s role in that effort. “.. eventual accommodation of the Irish was based on economic and political factors, but an additional factor also influenced the decision – an unspoken context of demographic acceptability. Thus the public defence of Ireland’s unusual position rested on the “specially close relationship” arising from “ties of kinship” and the “ties of blood, history and intermingling of peoples which bound Eire to the older countries of the Commonwealth.” (18 Nov 1948, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 5th ser., CAB128/13 CM74(48), v. 458, c. 1414)
Likewise, an internal (Foreign Office) justification outlined the “historical, racial and geographic links” that bound the two countries together. (FO371/76369 G.W .Furlonge, 21 Jan 1949)
[v] Up to the American Declaration of Independence 1776 the British policy making elite let the colonial legislatures devise and impose the Black Codes, a cast-iron web of legal measures that ran the bespoke racialised slaveholder regimes in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Maryland, as their individual state ruling elites dictated. From 1783 they continued to enact ever more gross regulations penalising slaves for a wide range of infractions, such as being in groups of more than four without permission of their owner, until the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution 1865 brought the Civil War to an end.
[vi] For description of Petty’s A Treatise on Ireland (1685) see Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, Conor McCabe, pages 64-65. Sir William Petty’s text A Treatise on Ireland available on https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hull-the-economic-writings-of-sir-william-petty-vol-1
[vii] Fiach Kelly, Irish Independent 21/10/2011 https://www.independent.ie/world-news/dictator-sent-arms-to-ira-and-was-supporter-of-haughey-26784290.html
[viii] As placed on the Seanad record by Senator Dan Neville 10/11/1993 https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1993-11-10/10/
[ix] Mary Manning, Striking Back: The Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker, with Sinead O’Brien, The Collins Press, 2017, p.14-15.
[x]RTE 4/12/2023 “32 international protection applicants were not offered State-provided accommodation when they presented to the International Protection Office.“ “the Department of Integration said it can no longer provide accommodation to all international protection applicants due to a severe shortage.” https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1204/1420023-international-protection-applicants-ireland/
[xi] Irish Times 30/5/2024 Grand Canal: asylum seekers’ tents cleared in latest operation https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/05/30/latest-clearance-of-migrants-tents-along-grand-canal-gets-under-way/
[xii] RTE 4/5/2024 Don’t allow ‘shanty towns’ to develop, urges residents’ group https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2024/0504/1447397-residents-tents/
[xiii] RTE 17/7/2024 Tents sheltering asylum seekers attacked in Dublin https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0717/1460324-tents-dublin-attack/
[xiv] Al Jazeera 23/7/2024 Israel war on Gaza live: At least 81 killed in Israeli blitz on Khan Younis https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/7/23/israel-war-on-gaza-live-scores-killed-in-new-israeli-blitz-on-khan-younis
[xv] Irish Times 21/7/2024 Coolock unrest: Fourth fire at former Crown Paints factory https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2024/07/21/coolock-unrest-fourth-fire-at-former-crown-paints-factory/
[xvi] I had no idea of this until I read Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. DuBois (1935) about a year ago, Its sub-title is AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880. it’s available online and I would recommend it to anyone eager to get to grips with the US Civil War and its aftermath that shaped much of the modern world we inhabit.
[xvii] Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1939) is, I discovered to my shock a couple of years ago, required reading to get a handle on how British industrial prosperity was predicated on its leadership role in the Atlantic slave trade for more than a century.
[xviii] An extract from At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Philip Dray (2002) focuses on W. E. B. DuBois’ contemporary account of the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan Georgia in 1899, published online by the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/atthehandsofpersonsunknown.htm
[xix] ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’, Sven Lindqvist, The New Press, 1996
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Donal O’Kelly
Donal O’Kelly is an Irish writer and performer currently writing a creative non-fiction book about the origins of Ireland’s 25-year-old system of Direct Provision of accommodation for people seeking international refuge.
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