Ireland
Since December 1994 Ireland has been ruled by a coalition comprising
Fine Gael (FG, United Ireland Party), the Labour Party and the Democratic
Left (DL), headed by John Bruton. Other major parties include Fianna Fáil
(FF, Republican Party) and the Progressive Democrats (PD). During 1996 the
government was beset by a series of political crises, the latest of which
involved monies paid to government ministers by Ben Dunne, former head of
the Dunnes Stores chain. The next general election is scheduled for 1997.
Ireland held the presidency of the European Union (EU) in the second half
of 1996. It was another highly successful year for the Irish economy. Growth
is estimated to have been in excess of 7 per cent, and inflation was below
2 per cent. Interest rates were low and the government's deficit was well
below 2 per cent of gross domestic product. Although rates of unemployment
fell to 12.5 per cent, the problem of long-term unemployment remains.
There was little progress in the Northern Ireland peace process in 1996.
In January, senator George Mitchell's international body published a report
on arms decommissioning, a process seen previously to hamper peace talks.
The British government reacted by running elections for the "Northern
Ireland Forum for Peace and Reconciliation". Sinn Féin (Ourselves
Alone, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army) won 15.5 per cent
of the seats. In February the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ended its seventeen-month
cease-fire with bombings in the UK and continental Europe. Violence during
the Protestant Orangemen's summer marching season rendered several hundred
families homeless in the biggest single episode of demographic realignment
in twenty-five years. Before Christmas, Loyalist paramilitary organizations
called a de facto end to their cease-fire. Sectarian hatred between
Catholics and Protestants seemed more intense than in the year preceding
the cease-fire.
Jews have lived in Ireland since the seventeenth century, but the majority
arrived, mainly from Lithuania, in the 1880s. By the early twentieth century,
the Jewish community in Ireland numbered some 4,000-in Dublin, Cork and
Limerick. Many subsequently emigrated to the UK, Israel and the USA.
In 1904, in Limerick, Father John Creagh, a priest of the Redemptorist order,
incited the local population against "blood-sucking" Jewish money-lenders
and travelling pedlars. His sermons brought about a two-year trade boycott
of Jewish businesses, which was accompanied by intimidation, abuse, harassment
and beatings (although there were no fatalities) and resulted in the almost
total departure of the 150-strong Limerick Jewish community.
The issue of the Limerick "pogrom" resurfaced three times in more
recent years, when various individuals sought to justify it. In 1965 there
was correspondence following a television programme on the incident by Radio
Telefis Éirean (RTE), the national broadcasting agency. In 1970,
there was a further controversy when the then lord mayor of Limerick, Stephen
Coughlan, declared his support for Father Creagh's "defending the impoverished
Limerick population against the exploitative Jews". The issue flared
up again in 1984, with the Jews being defended mainly by left-wing politicians.
Only in 1990 did Limerick seek to make amends to its Jews by restoring the
city's Jewish cemetery.
In the Republican movement at the turn of the century, Arthur Griffith,
the founder of Sinn Féin, published antisemitic articles in the nationalist
paper the United Irishman . In 1943, Oliver J. Flanagan, a Dáil
(house of representatives) member for the Fine Gael party, aroused little
protest when he proposed to the house to "rout the Jews out of this
country".
Attempts to settle Jewish refugees in neut-ral Ireland before, during and
after the Second World War met with consistent government opposition. There
is no wartime evidence that Prime Minister Eamon de Valera uttered any condemnation
of German atrocities. In 1939, de Valera, in a recorded discussion with
Eduard Hempel, a German minister in Eire, agreed that Nazi procedures against
the Jews "must primarily be explained by the behaviour of the Jews
after the First World War".
Historian Dermot Keogh pointed out that the "high number of visa refusals
by the department of justice had tragic consequences. The Irish must live
with that guilt." In 1991 a claim by writer and former Labour cabinet
minister Conor Cruise O'Brien that Ireland's 4,000 Jews would have been
handed over to the Nazis had Germany won the war was the subject of much
controversy.
With no race-relations legislation enacted in Ireland until 1989, the National
Socialist Irish Workers' Party (NSIWP) had been active distributing neo-Nazi
literature, illegal elsewhere in Europe, until the late 1980s. The NSIWP
also printed its own publications, including business-type cards with Holocaust-denial,
neo-Nazi, antisemitic and anti-Traveller slogans, a monthly magazine and
pamphlets. The NSIWP may have been responsible for a series of attacks on
a Jewish butcher's shop in Dublin in 1986. The party has not been heard
of since.
The Refugee Act became law in June 1996, extending the Geneva Convention
definition of a refugee to include a person at risk of persecution by reason
of gender, sexual orientation or membership of a trade union, and including
a more generous and flexible approach to the understanding of "family"
for the purposes of family reunification. As yet, the government has not
specified how legal aid to asylum-seekers and refugees will be administered
under the act.
In recent years Ireland has developed from an out-migration country to an
in-migration one. During 1996, several organizations were active in promoting
awareness about ethnic minorities in the country: the Irish Refugee Council,
the Cities Anti-Racism Project (CARP) and the Platform Against Racism.
The government's refugee agency looks after refugees from Vietnam and Bosnia.
So far, some 600 Bosnian refugees, mostly Muslims, have arrived in Ireland.
Many of the Bosnians and Vietnamese have entered Ireland on the basis of
family reunification. According to the Irish Refugee Council, some 1,200
asylum-seekers arrived in 1996, an increase of some 255 per cent over 1995.
Of these, twelve received recognition or humanitarian leave to remain, and
ten were rejected (their cases are currently the subject of appeals, but
the appeals process has a two-year backlog). None was deported. Asylum-seekers
without income are entitled to welfare and rental allowances and to free
medical service, but have no right to work. Recognized refugees are entitled
to work and to welfare allowances and education grants in the same way as
Irish citizens.
Although Ireland has the lowest incidence of urban racist violence in Europe,
during 1996 the Irish Refugee Council and CARP reported a distinct growth
in the frequency of racially motivated incidents in the greater Dublin area.
Those reported included: verbal abuse; physical violence; discriminatory
door policies in pubs and clubs; intimidation in the local community; racist
graffiti; the distribution of racist material; and biased media reporting.
There are an estimated 23,000 Irish Travellers. They are an indigenous pre-Celtic
nomadic people who suffer discrimination in social and economic spheres
and are targets of frequent racist verbal and physical abuse, including
racist reporting in the print media, usually in relation to the erection
of halting sites around urban areas. The infant and adult mortality rates
of Travellers are twice those of the general population, which has been
blamed on their inadequate accommodation and poor living conditions.
Complaints under the Incitement to Hatred Act were lodged by several people,
and supported by Irish Travellers, against a journalist, Mary Ellen Synon,
whose article published in the Sunday Independent referred to the
criminal behaviour of all Travellers, following a spate of crimes in the
west of Ireland.
The department of equality and law reform has finished preparing the Equal
Status Bill, prohibiting in non-employment areas discrimination on grounds
of gender, race and ethnic origin, including membership of the Travelling
community. The Equal Status Bill, along with the Employment Equality Bill,
will be the first measure taken against racial discrimination in the Republic
of Ireland if enacted.
There were no reports of antisemitic incidents recorded by either the Gardai (police) or the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland in 1996.
In February the Irish Times reported that following the RTE 1 broadcast of a television documentary, Dear Daughter, which investigated the abuse of orphans by Irish nuns of the Sisters of Mercy order, the documentary's producer, Louis Lentin, received antisemitic telephone calls.
A sociological study of racism in Ireland, Prejudice in Ireland Revisited
, was published in 1996. The study compares material from two national
surveys on Irish attitudes and beliefs about race and ethnicity (1972/3
and 1988/9). It appears from comparison of these studies, which sampled
2,300 and 1,000 respondents respectively, that ethnic prejudice in Ireland
has increased over the decades. However, the author of the study, Micheál
Mac Gréil, draws a distinction between "racialism" and
"ethnocentrism". Therefore, while he remarks on a decline in anti-black
racialism, he records an increase in "ethnocentrism". The study
also found that the 1988/9 respondents held much stronger anti-Traveller
attitudes than in the earlier survey.
In the same study, a separate section on antisemitism recorded an overall
decline in antisemitism between 1972/3 and 1988/9, subject to regional variation.
While Dubliners and younger people were less likely to express antisemitic
attitudes than in 1972/3, outside Dublin respondents were significantly
more antisemitic.
The questions posed in the two surveys fall into the following categories:
Jews in positions of responsibility; Jewish-Christian relations; money matters
stereotypes; and social distance towards Jews. The figures quoted below
in parentheses show percentages from the 1972/3 study.
In the first category, "Jews in positions of responsibility",
findings showed that 36 per cent (42) felt it was "not good to have
many Jews in positions of responsibility in business"; 22 per cent
(22) believed Jews to be ruthless when dealing with Christians; and 16 per
cent (29) that "Jews do not take a proper interest in community problems
and government". However, the number of people who agreed with the
statement "We should encourage Irish Jews as much as anyone else to
take up positions of importance in Irish society" significantly dropped
in the sixteen years between the two studies: from 85 per cent of respondents
in 1972/3 to 70 per cent in 1989.
As regards Jewish-Christian relations, 12 per cent of respondents in 1989
believed that "Jews are a bad influence on Christian culture and civilization"
and 20 per cent that "Jews as a people are to be blamed for the crucifixion
of Christ". In this case there is little difference between the results
of the two studies.
As for "money matters stereotypes", 33 per cent (57) thought Jewish
power and control of money was far out of proportion to the number of Jews
and 25 per cent (49) believed that "Jews are behind the money lending
rackets".
Throughout the 1989 study there are high percentages of "don't know"
answers to questions. This could suggest a development in attitudes and
a state of flux in beliefs.
Although there were complaints lodged under the Prohibition to Incitement of Racial Hatred Act in 1996, there were no prosecutions.
In 1996, although there was an increase in racial discrimination against
asylum-seekers, refugees and Irish Travellers, this was in some way counterbalanced
by the enactment of the Refugee Act as well as other anti-racist initiatives.
While asylum-seekers, non-Irish nationals and Travellers experienced racial
harrassment, there were no recorded incidents of antisemitic harassment.
When it surfaces, antisemitism in Ireland is largely expressed through verbal
abuse.
© JPR 1997