How pupil-power brings McDowell to book

Will the events of this week prove to be a turning point in public and political attitudes to deportation, asks Paul Cullen

Olukunle Elukanlo got lucky. Hundreds had gone before him, people without a name, or people with a name but no friends, all of them deported back to Nigeria. Gone, forgotten, history, after their brief sojourns in Ireland.

However, Olukunle (Kunle) had a mobile phone and the confidence instilled in him by some years of Irish education. He had mates, too, back in Palmerstown, Dublin, where he had spent three years at the community school until he was deported last week.

His friends mobilised effectively on his behalf, protesting spontaneously outside the Dáil on the day after he was deported.

Fringe left and anti-racist groups rushed to help, as could be expected, and Opposition parties made political capital with the usual noises.

So far, so predictable. In the past, small-scale campaigns had helped to stave off deportation for a few asylum-seekers but none had succeeded in having a deportee returned to the country. This didn't look any different.

Then something strange started to happen. The students kept banging away, showing a surprising level of media savvy. Parents and teachers turned out on their demonstrations. The public, more accustomed to youthful apathy towards politics, was intrigued.

The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, who had signed the orders that led to the deportations of Kunle and 34 others, wasn't for turning. In last Tuesday's adjournment debate in the Dáil, however, he didn't seem to be on top of his game, prompting Opposition deputies to claim he hadn't read Kunle's file before deporting him.

But it was Holy Week, a traditional time for religious reflection and national self-examination, and a quiet one for the media. The only Government TD in the Palmerstown area, John Curran, made sympathetic noises as constituents put him under increasing pressure. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, made a rare but crucial intervention.

And so McDowell - of all people - buckled. Three days on, he effectively ate his adjournment speech, admitted he was wrong and agreed to let Kunle back on a six-month visa. Given the publicity and the phlegmatic nature of the asylum system, it's unlikely the 20-year-old will have to get on any more aircraft to Lagos for a very, very long time.

So where does this leave McDowell's "I stand by the asylum system" speech of Tuesday night, and his assertion that "part and parcel of fairness and effectiveness [ in the system] is that deportations must take place"?

The Minister insisted his change of mind was a "once-off" but as every pressure group knows, a politician's once-off decision is often followed by another once-off decision. Now the clamour is on to have others who were on last week's deportation flight returned - from whole families deported from Castleblayney to mothers split from their children in Athlone. Another deported Leaving Cert student has popped up and no doubt more will follow.

The Nature of the cat-and-mouse game played over immigration is that any exemptions or concessions offered in any Western country are bound to stimulate their own demand. If McDowell were to let only left-handed, high-IQ 10-year-olds stay, he would suddenly find himself besieged by just that category of people, such is the desperation of people to make a better life in the West. But as the Minister told the Dáil before his volte face, it would be "indefensible" not to deport good students while sending back the less academically gifted.

"The same applies to athletic prowess and participation in church activities. I cannot discriminate against those who are less gifted or on grounds of religious activity."

So it isn't a beauty pageant, but the trouble for McDowell is that people don't think that way. They respond sympathetically to tales of good citizens, hard workers, cuddly children; they are indifferent to or ignorant of the fate of nameless, faceless, unintegrated "statistics".

Besides, he has now discriminated. As Peter O'Mahony of the Refugee Council points out: "It now seems that having a strong case is of little value in itself unless the applicant has been lucky enough to get the backing of a politician with influence to lobby for leave to remain."

The asylum wars pit two directly conflicting protagonists against one another. On the one hand, the securocrats of the Department of Justice point to the need to control our borders, and to protect the "integrity" of the asylum process by deporting failed applicants. They tend to talk in the abstract, and their heads spin with numbers, graphs, regulations and the minutiae of international conventions.

In the opposing corner, members of the anti-deportation lobby personalise their appeals; they talk of gifted young non-nationals, students torn from their books, and mothers sundered from their children. They relay the stories given by asylum-seekers as fact, even when these accounts have failed to convince those processing the applications. In a small voice, they say they accept the need for deportations, but they always plead against the particular deportation in question.

Most of us veer from one view to the other. We want to be humane, hospitable, generous, and we respond sympathetically when presented with individual cases. We are not completely comfortable with our new-found wealth and we are still conscious of our own history of emigration.

Yet we also respond positively to claims that the asylum process is being abused. We are fearful of the rapid changes which are happening in our country, of which the arrival of thousands of Nigerians, Romanians and other asylum-seekers is only one facet. We want less immigration, but are unwilling to do the low-paid work that immigrants do. We also want fewer asylum-seekers, but squirm when presented with the brutal facts of deportation.

Anyone who disputes these latter views has forgotten the thumping majority by which voters approved the restriction of citizenship rights for the Irish-born children of non-nationals last year. They are also ignoring the anti-immigrant chatter on radio phone-in shows, where the so-called silent majority can vent its spleen without fear of identification by the liberal left.

McDowell is painted as the bad guy in the asylum debate, but his policies are little different from those of his predecessor, John O'Donoghue. The processing of asylum applications and appeals is a far more streamlined and efficient operation than it was a few years ago; it has its critics, but many observers accept the overall fairness of the process.

For those whose applications are rejected, there is still the possibility of being granted humanitarian leave to remain. It is here that McDowell has taken a tough line; last year, only 75 failed asylum-seekers were successful at this stage; eight times as many were deported.

It is this failure by the Minister to use the flexibility available to him that led law professor William Binchy to call for "an infusion of humanity" into McDowell's thinking. Ultimately, too, it led to the political blunder of sending a student back to Nigeria, just three months before his Leaving Cert.