‘We’ve got problems in Ireland. But this is different’: The migrant crisis hits home

Janette in Tipperary has a couple of spare rooms.

Helen in Donegal has two mobile homes and a polytunnel.

Mary in Cork has spare beds and would also really love to cook some meals.

Most of all, they all have big hearts – just like all the other people, from all over the country, who by lunchtime on Friday had pledged an extraordinary number of beds for refugees: 6,640 and rising fast.

The tipping point came on Wednesday, after the photograph emerged showing the corpse of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who had fled Syria with his family, washed up on a beach near Bodrum in Turkey.

Since then, an ad-hoc citizen's campaign has emerged with people engaging with their neighbours and community leaders about what they can do to help; with local and national politicians about what they want them to do on behalf of Ireland; and with activist websites, such as Uplift.ie.

Mary, who does not want her surname published but has given all her details to Uplift, is battling against her own sense of helplessness.

“I came home last night,” she says, “and I went into my [17-year-old] daughter and said to her ‘how would you feel if we took in two refugees?’ and she said ‘when you put it like that, yes, why not?’

“So. That’s what I can do.”

Mary continues: “I just feel like my heart is breaking. I’m here cooking for my daughter and putting things into the freezer and thinking, ‘God, if only I was closer, I could do something’. I feel very helpless. This is just too big, [but] I can’t disregard it and push it away any longer.”

She wishes the Naval Service could, instead of landing rescued refugees in Italy, magic them to Cobh. “I would be down there, happy to take two or three people for a few months.”

The same spirit has galvanised Helen Hancock in Raphoe, Co Donegal, who is involved in her community through a breastfeeding group. Through the Work Away scheme (workaway.info), Helen has allowed strangers to come and live with her and her husband Ian, helping them restore old buildings.

“The way I see it,” she says, “this is a perfect opportunity to open our door. We have an old clachan that we’ve been doing up here and we grow our own vegetables. We have two touring caravans [and] they could easily house two families.”

Like Mary, Helen is also infused with the idea that if everyone does a little, a lot can be achieved.

“I’m not somebody you’ll see out protesting on the street, but I can do something about this,” she says. “Something needs to change, and I can do something about it. So let’s try.”

Safe for children

Janette Bourke

lives in the countryside near Thurles, Co Tipperary. When she looks out at her large back garden, she can envisage Syrian children playing there with her two boys, aged two and eight. “I can see them, running around out there – playing, happy.”

She says she knows “we’ve got problems in Ireland. But this is different. I’m trying to identify what I can do. I don’t have a lot of financial resources. But I have a home, two spare rooms, two beds and a lot of love, care and security to give.

“That would be my contribution, along with calling on the Government to do more. We must do this.”

The Irish State has coped with refugee emergencies in the past, as retired Regimental Sgt-Maj Tommy Owens of the Defence Forces knows better than many.

As a 12-year-old, Tommy and his family (parents, five brothers and two sisters) were forced in the early 1970s to leave their home in the Creggan estate on the western side of Derry city because of the Troubles.

“We were all brought down to Bridgend just outside Derry [across the border in Donegal], to where the Defence Forces were waiting,” recalls Tommy. From Bridgend, they were taken to Finner Camp near Ballyshannon.

“We were fed and looked after for the night and then went to Custume Barracks [in Athlone], and then Coolmoney Camp [in the Glen of Imaal in Wicklow]. Most families stayed there for a month or so, but I went back to Derry with my father to check out the home.”

Perhaps because of that early encounter with the Army (“We were really well looked after”), Tommy enlisted as an adult and had a successful 34-year career with 4 Field Artillery. He also became an expert in refugees and internally displaced persons, and taught on the subject at the United Nations training school in the Curragh.

Tommy, who lives now in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, reckons the infrastructure is there for an intake of substantial numbers of refugees.

“We do have a lot of places in Ireland,” he says. “A lot of barracks have been closed and are now used for nothing; for instance the barracks here in Mullingar.”

The barracks used to provide accommodation for troops assembling for overseas missions.

“The year before it was closed in 2012 or 2013,” he says, “a lot of money was put into Mullingar – a new roof, new windows, new heating – and a lot of work was done to the accommodation. There was a lot of work done too in Longford [barracks] before it closed.”

Tommy reckons that Mullingar, with catering and sanitation already in place, could be brought up to scratch by the Defence Forces “within a couple of weeks if tasked by the Government”.

Closed barracks could accommodate “200 or 300 people there easily”, he maintains and, he locals “would be very welcoming of that. It’s in constant conversation because we’re all seeing it on TV.”

Bureaucracy right

If a decision is taken to accept substantial numbers, as Minister for Justice

Frances Fitzgerald

indicated was likely, a key ingredient for success will be getting the bureaucracy right, according to the UN’s special representative on international migration,

Peter Sutherland

.

“It’s very important not just to take in additional numbers,” he says, “but have speedy adjudication to determine their status – refugee or economic migrant. Is someone escaping from persecution or are they not?”

The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean, he says, are fleeing war. In Syria now, “everybody it at risk”.

Today, Mary will bring spare clothes to a drop point in Cork. Many other people will go to what are, in effect, solidarity gatherings, including one at 1pm at the Famine memorial in Dublin, on the quay at the International Financial Services Centre.

At uplift.ie, by early Friday afternoon, almost 32,000 people had signed a petition asking the Taoiseach Enda Kenny to allow into Ireland not hundreds, but thousands of refugees.

And the bed pledges are still rolling in.