Fintan O’Toole: Would Ukrainians still feel welcome if they were not white and Christian?

It’s a blustery June morning and I’m walking along the southern shore of Galway Bay to buy the paper and some milk in the local shop. There are other people up and about: small groups of teenage girls on bikes, an elderly woman in a headscarf leaning into the wind, a middle-aged man talking and gesticulating into his mobile phone, a young family sitting on a bench drinking coffee.

And every single one of them is Ukrainian — all the voices, all the faces. The hotel on the seafront has become a centre of refuge.

Beside the entrance, someone has raised the flag of County Clare. The colours are yellow and blue — the same as those of Ukraine. It’s a tacitly eloquent way of saying: you’re with us now, you belong here.

This is all very moving to see. And such sights are familiar to communities all over Ireland, where individual volunteers and local schools and churches and GAA clubs and health centres are doing everything they can to create a sense of sanctuary, to make people fleeing the brutality of invasion feel that they have reached a place of greater safety.

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Many of the mobile phone calls that fill the Irish air with the dense sounds of Ukrainian are, we know, to sons and grandsons and brothers and husbands who have had to stay and fight. Sometimes, as you pass, you can hear a snatch of a voice from the other end, perhaps even from the frontline, the undertone of another Europe, another world.

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Irish people have accepted that this is the way it should be, that as human beings we are connected to the victims of inhumanity. If refuge is the one thing we can give them, it should be given willingly and warmly.

And yet, encountering this large number of Ukrainians in a small Irish village, I could not help wondering how all of this would feel if they were not white and Christian. It is not an idle question: official attitudes to refugees from the war in Ukraine are starkly more benign than they would be if those people were fleeing wars in Africa or the Middle East.

There was a telling moment last week when the Aontú TD Peadar Tóibín obtained figures showing that 153 Ukrainians have been admitted this year into the direct provision system for asylum seekers. He called this “shocking” and the term was widely taken up by headline writers.

Though this was clearly not Tóibín’s intention, the broader implication was that the shock lies merely in the fact that these particular refugees are Ukrainian. There would be nothing shocking about people being placed in direct provision if they were fleeing violence in Afghanistan, Syria or Tigray. That would just be normal.

“Normal” has meant, for the general run of asylum seekers, being put in centres, not being allowed to work and being given weekly “pocket money” that was fixed for a very long time at €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child. It is now €38.80 per adult and €29.80 per child. Ukrainian refugees, on the other hand, are allowed to work and have full access to the social welfare system.

Direct provision is now officially acknowledged to be unacceptable, but a record 11,689 people, including nearly 2,800 children, are living within the system, an increase of more than 40 per cent on this time last year.

The official explanation for the disparity in the treatment of refugees from different conflicts relies on notions of place and time. It suggests a principle of proximity.

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As the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, James Browne, explained to the Dáil, refugees want to be close to home. Therefore, it is right that sanctuary for people fleeing from Syria or Afghanistan “has largely been provided to them by their closest neighbours”.

Likewise, apparently, we in Ireland qualify as being next door to the Ukrainians: “It is the same for the people fleeing Ukraine who are clearly strongly patriotic people. This time, however, we in Europe are their closest neighbours. We are stepping up to support them in the same way Jordan, Lebanon and other countries have for their neighbours.”

It would take 44 hours to drive from Mariupol in Ukraine to Dublin. It would take 54 hours to drive from Aleppo in Syria. Both cities have been brutally bombed by Vladimir Putin. Civilians have fled in huge numbers from both.

Why does that 10-hour difference place Mariupol in our neighbourhood, while Aleppo is outside it? If fleeing Syrians should be cared for in Jordan, why should Ukrainian refugees not have to stay in Poland?

The answer is in that phrase “we in Europe”. It is being European that makes Ukrainian refugees our neighbours and obliges us to welcome them.

But for some people is European not a code word, a cipher for white and culturally Christian? After all, being European did not give Jews who were fleeing Nazi persecution any rights to enter Ireland — they were still regarded as too alien to be admitted.

The other official justification for the glaring disparities in the treatment of refugees is rooted in an idea of time: the Ukrainians are here temporarily and therefore can be given much more freedom and support.

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In a legal sense, this is true. These refugees are being admitted to Ireland under the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive.

But this creates a particularly weird anomaly. If a Ukrainian who has fled to Ireland now decides to seek permanent refugee status, he or she will immediately lose the right to work, access to social welfare payments and the right to international travel.

Aspirations to permanent settlement will be severely punished. If you are not “temporary”, you are demoted in status to join the ranks of the poor souls trapped in asylum limbo.

But the obvious truth is that the longer the war drags on, the more Ukrainians will put down roots in Ireland. Kids are going to school here. Adults are getting jobs. Families are, one would hope, beginning to make friends. Some people, at least, will want to settle here.

And what is wrong with that? We’re seeing all over the country that communities can very quickly get used to people who have come from far away, that strangers can become familiar faces.

It’s all a matter of what story the State tells. Some refugees — especially those with dark skin — have been treated implicitly as a threat, whose every move and motive must be treated with suspicion. The presence of others is framed positively as evidence of our capacity for compassion and our sense of obligation to suffering fellow humans.

If you start with the first set of assumptions, what follows is a narrative of “swamping” — too many of “them” crowding “us” out. If you start with the second, you discover the great capacity for decency and sympathy in every community.