In less than a decade, Gort has established itself as a hub for Ireland's Brazilians, who make up around one-third of the town's population. Now, with immigration policies changing and the economy slowing, many Brazilians are choosing repatriation - but can Gort survive without them, asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent
ALL THREE ARE sitting in the half-light of the musty downstairs living room, in woolly hats and earth-stained jeans, waiting for another day to pass. It's early afternoon but the curtains are drawn and the place is quiet apart from the breezy Brazilian news anchor on the TV in the corner.
Antonio Carlos Oliveira introduces himself from under the duvet on the double bed; the other two men, Ivan Alves and Sebastien Francisco de Souza, are in the armchairs. There's a couch draped in paint-spattered overalls, a wardrobe and an empty fridge against the fireplace, and the lime-green walls would be bare were it not for a few prints and the row of decorative whiskey bottles hanging from nails above the hearth.
It's been a slow week, says Antonio, a former truck driver from Goiás in south central Brazil. Some mornings, a farmer or a builder will pull up at the town square and take on a few of the men for some tiling or a paint job. But today they were back in front of the TV at 10am. "In the mornings we stand at the square, or sometimes we go to Kilcolgan and stand there, trying to get a job. If we don't get anything, we come back here. This week, we haven't got anything."
Antonio, an easy-going, talkative man, had a full-time job as a labourer for his first two years in Ireland, but around this time last year he was let go and joined the men who gather on the town square every morning with a backpack and a packed lunch. Now, two days' work counts as a good week.
"In 2005, it was very good, I worked every day, but once I lost my job things got more complicated, day by day," he says. "For the rent this week, I have no money yet."
What little they make goes towards the cost of getting by: €50 for rent, €25 a week for food. When the last electricity bill came, it was so high that they had to borrow and pull together every last cent they could find.
"When that happens, we go to a friend and ask for money. I owe this man's brother €50," says Antonio, pointing to Ivan. "We all owe each other money."
Ivan is the quietest of the three, a gentle, bespectacled man who talks ruefully about the wife and three children he left at home in Goiás almost a year ago in the hope of supporting them from afar. It hasn't turned out as planned. One of the steadiest jobs he had was at a car-wash business in Galway city, but after three months' work the owner handed over €200 and told him not to come back. And without his papers or a word of English, what could he do but take it and leave?
Then there was the accident that cost him two months' work, he tells me, lifting his right hand to reveal a jagged purple slit along the inside of his right forefinger. He talks about the day he cut through the tendon with a hedge trimmer, and how lucky he was not to have lost it. The others nod gravely without looking up: a lucky man, Ivan.
For all these stories, Antonio, Ivan and Sebastien have already begun to slip into the past tense when talking about Ireland. Within a few months, they should be back in Goiás, Sebastien to find the wife he had when he left but hasn't spoken to for months ("I laugh instead of crying"), the others to find some lorry-driving work and reunite with families.
Along with an increasing number of their compatriots in the west of Ireland, they are applying for a repatriation programme run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and they hope to be given a return date before July. They were reminded of the programme at an Easter Sunday public meeting organised by Brazilians in Gort, where Isaias Silva, a local interpreter and point man for the Brazilians, explained that the IOM offered help to undocumented migrants who wanted to return home but didn't have the means. Silva was expecting a few to be curious, but so far more than 100 have expressed an interest.
"Sometimes four or five people come to me a day, bringing all the papers they need to go back," he says.
Even before the meeting, take-up of the scheme among Brazilians had been increasing, according to Doug Cubie, senior programme coordinator at IOM Dublin. "In the last 18 months, it's gone from Brazilians not actually being in the top five nationalities of people who are returning under our programmes, to last year being over 40 per cent of all our returnees from Ireland," he says.
The typical applicant is a relatively recently arrived man who speaks no English and hasn't been able to find a regular job. Even allowing for the possibility that not all of those taking up IOM's offer have the same troubles - some could be homesick or may have planned to return with their savings anyway - Silva suggests the high take-up reflects a broader trend brought on by a straitened local labour market, particularly in construction. While many of the settled Brazilians are thriving - car ownership in the community has leapt in the past year or two, and a small number have even bought houses - the newer arrivals are feeling the squeeze.
"We have a decrease in the Brazilian population here - that's very clear," Silva remarks.
ONE INDICATOR IS the sudden availability of rented houses where before rooms were so scarce (at one point, Brazilians were estimated to be occupying 80 per cent of the town's rented accommodation). Another is the significant decline in the numbers of local court hearings requiring an interpreter. "You can see the slowdown in construction . . . I have a friend who works in a very big company around here. He's a carpenter, there for seven years, full-time. His colleague was fired, and he only works two or three days now," Silva says.
A slowing local and national economy is one reason for the levelling off of Brazilian numbers in Gort, as it is for the apparent calming of the immigration flow across the country (see panel). Another is the recent tightening of controls at ports of entry.
Before 2004, it was quite easy for a Brazilian to enter the Republic on holiday, but since the accession of 10 new states to the European Union that year, the door has been closing gradually. Even though they don't need a visa to come here, as many as one in three Brazilians are being turned away because immigration officials suspect that they intend to stay. Today, trying to get in is seen as a foolhardy and costly risk, considering that the trip can't be made without at least €2,000 to cover flights and cash to be shown to gardaí.
In the past decade, Gort has established itself as a hub for Ireland's Brazilians, where newcomers arrive before fanning out to neighbouring towns and counties. A community that traces its roots no further back than 1999, when the first group of workers arrived from Goiás to fill labour shortages at the (now closed) Duffy's meat plant, today comprises about one-third of the south Co Galway town's population. The Brazilian footprint is everywhere: in the food shops, in the money transfer offices, in the hairdressers and schools.
Last year I visited Anápolis, a low-rise, Cork-sized city a few hours south of Brasilia, where the economy has grown sixfold since 1998, partly as a result of remittances from its emigrants. In Vila Fabril, the suburb with the closest links to Ireland, where coffee plantations and fields of soy and bananas run to the horizon, Gort is talked about as if it were a neighbouring townland, and the trappings of Irish money could hardly stand out more.
The older houses are uniformly ramshackle, mostly two-room shacks built with bare brick and corrugated iron roofs held down by slabs of concrete. Their wooden doors are warped, and in places there are opaque sheets of metal where the windows should be. But, among them, every fourth or fifth house is new, elaborately decorated and freshly painted in loud reds, yellows and greens. The more extravagant of these are adorned with steel gates, intercoms, satellite dishes and a new car in the garage. Extreme poverty and conspicuous wealth stand side by side, each symbol of the latter stamped with an Irish postmark and paid for by men who would never have heard of Ireland before going to live there. One newly built house was painted in the colours of the Irish flag.
Gort is to Vila Fabril what Springfield, Massachusetts, was to the Blasket Islands. But just like the undocumented Irish in the US, daily life for those without a work permit in Gort and neighbouring towns plays to a rhythm set by stress and fear. One woman explains that, like most, she has been paying taxes since she arrived six years ago, but cannot think of claiming rent relief. If she were to lose her job, all benefits would be closed off to her. And then there's the fear of falling ill: her friend tells me she spent three days in hospital in Galway last year and had to pay €1,600 when she was discharged.
But by far the greatest loss is the freedom to come and go. Years ago, it was popular among the Brazilians to return home for the unbearable Irish winter, but these days leaving the country is too great a risk. When Gardenia Cristina Gimenez's father died in late 2006, she couldn't go home for his funeral because she didn't have a valid work permit at the time. When her mother came to visit shortly afterwards, she was turned back by immigration officials at Dublin airport.
Gort has gained more than cultural wealth from its diversity. Although some shops on the square have had to close in the past year, the town has been one of the fastest-growing in the country, with a 50 per cent population rise in each of the last two censuses. New housing estates have sprung up on its boundaries, and some shops rely on the immigrants for three-quarters of their business.
"The business people need them. If the Brazilians left Gort tomorrow, the place would collapse," says Frank Murray, a Portuguese-speaker who works closely with the Brazilians.
This state of affairs is a paradox remarked upon quite often by business people, politicians and other locals. For years, Brazilians were allowed into Ireland virtually unhindered. They worked, put down roots, paid taxes and sustained local economies. There are children such as Leonardo, who has a Gort accent and no memory of Brazil, and who is known in these parts as the 11-year-old who hurls with the under-14s.
And yet, with a shift in policy, they live in fear of a State which allowed them in to begin with but which doesn't, strictly speaking, recognise their presence.
"[ The State] can turn a blind eye. You don't come down heavy on them, you let them work away, prop up the economy. And the minute you want, you can come down heavy on them. So you've got it both ways. And then the Government can say, 'we didn't know they were here'," says Murray.
But back on Crowe Street, none of this concerns Antonio and friends any more. Their thoughts are already elsewhere, Ivan's on his wife and children, Sebastien's on the wife he hopes to retrieve. Antonio is in no rush to make plans though. He'll wait until he gets home to Goiás and see how things lie.
"I will go to the river near my place and relax, maybe drive a truck again. I'm 54. I don't want any more adventures."
MOVING ON: MIGRATION CHANGES DIRECTION
IS THE EASING of the migration flow into Gort part
of a broader trend? Fr Piotr Galus, chaplain to the Polish
community in Cork, says it has been noticeable since late last year
that more people are going home than are coming in.
Meanwhile, Kate Donnelly, of Mayo Intercultural Action, says she has observed a decline in the immigrant population in Kiltimagh. Similar reports can be heard in many other towns and villages in the west alone, including Ennis, Tralee, Loughrea and Galway.
In general, the immigrant population remains high, but official figures tally with the recent anecdotal evidence.
Applications for asylum reached a 10-year low last year, while figures compiled by the Department of Social and Family Affairs show that in 2007 almost 129,000 people from those countries that joined the EU in 2004 were issued with PPS numbers - a fall (when newly enrolled Romania and Bulgaria are excluded) of more than 25,000 on the 2006 total.
The trend has continued this year, with the number of people from the EU's newer members who came to Ireland for the first time last month (5,472) amounting to about half the total for the same month in either of the last two years. Fás estimates that net migration will decline from 72,000 in 2007 to 38,000 this year.
Fewer Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Czechs appear to be arriving, then, but there is also evidence indicating that more people are returning home. After analysing data on inward migration in the year ending April 2007, the Central Statistics Office in December published figures showing that Ireland's emigration rate was actually at the highest level since 1990. The biggest increase was among 25- to 44-year-olds, with a significant rise (from 800 in 2005 to 7,000 in 2007) in people moving to the EU's 12 newest members. We don't know their nationalities, but it's a fair assumption that some were returning home.
And of course there's a more familiar trend, as John Moylan, the chair of Gort's Chamber of Commerce, points out. "There's an awful lot of people going to London and Australia for work," he says. "I could count 20 guys off the top of my head, and they're not Brazilians. You can see it in the GAA club - an awful lot of guys working in London. They've got the Olympics in London, so they're going over for the building work."