Una Mullally: Empathy fuels Ireland’s welcome for Ukrainians

By the end of this month, there will be about 50,000 refugees from Ukraine in Ireland. In this time of huge need, people in Ireland are helping in quiet ways that have a huge impact.

I recently had lunch with a friend who spoke about the adjustment their family is making with a Ukrainian woman and her son now living with them. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve ended up in conversation with who casually mentioned their actions when the Russian invasion of Ukraine was raised: housing two teenage boys who came here unaccompanied and trying to sort out their education opportunities; or driving from Ireland to Poland in a van when Ukraine was invaded to help however they could; or someone sorting out a local school for a little boy now living with his mother and grandmother in their house; or finding a job for a young woman who had just landed in Dublin from Ukraine; or dropping around cakes and buns to a community centre where refugees were sleeping; or buying up baby supplies in a supermarket and leaving them into a newly opened Ukrainian charity shop; or a landlord forsaking rental income from an apartment so a Ukrainian family catapulted from their lives could live in it for free.

During this cost-of-living and housing crisis, when there are understandable grievances and divisions in Irish society between those with wealth and those without, it’s clear that many with means are pulling their weight too.

There are many inefficiencies when it comes to the speed with which refugees are being housed. Nearly everyone who has offered a room or a home has a story about waiting for a call from the Red Cross weeks and months later. But when I watched the pictures on the news from Dublin Airport, with officials processing refugees, I thought about how everything we traverse in life is often preparation for what’s to come. Countless civil servants spent the pandemic implementing new systems across distribution of medicine, dissemination of information and complex administration. It’s clear those organisational skills have been put to use again in this refugee crisis, with the State organising housing supports, education supports, job supports, and all of the other things needed. Nobody is grateful for the pandemic, but everyone comes out of a crisis learning something.

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To say, in a blanket sort of way, that refugees are treated differently in Ireland on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, is true. This also disregards the help that many people give to refugees who have come from countries other than Ukraine; the free English language classes, the transport to football matches, the men’s sheds, the women’s groups, the Christmas gift drives, the collections for period products, baby clothes and toys, the cooking groups, the fundraisers, the protests and campaigning to end the direct provision system. It is unforgivable, given our legacy of institutionalising people, that the State has acted so slowly to dismantle direct provision. But one of the things about direct provision is not just how it locks people in and away from society, it’s how it also locks the rest of us out of it. Its intentional opacity denies us the opportunity to help in ways we want to. And yet, people still do, and many more still want to.

Ireland’s contemporary social cohesion is not based on some fantasy of might, jingoism or deluded nationalism. It is based on empathy. The care extended to people contains a generational and ancestral memory of the constant cycles of mass emigration we have been made endure.

A refugee crisis we speak little about now, involved refugees on our own island, who fled violence in the North from 1969 onwards. They made their way to Kilworth in Cork, or Finner Camp in Donegal, or Coolmoney Camp in Wicklow, or Gormanstown, where today, temporary accommodation has been set up again for those fleeing war. There were refugees in Templemore, in a convent in Sligo, in hospitals and schools in Dublin city. Less than a decade later, Ireland welcomed refugees from Vietnam. Once again, communities in Donegal – which played a significant role in the northern refugee crisis – offered their help. Communities in Gartan and Arranmore Island offered to accommodate refugees. In Connemara, 50 tonnes of turf was cut and loaded onto Galway hookers and auctioned at Kinvara to raise money for Unicef and Concern.

I recently went for a picnic in a park with a friend who had organised with Ukrainian women to help them develop some kind of social network, to practise English, to have an afternoon out where for maybe even a minute or two some fun could be had. As we sat on blankets sharing food, I wondered how I would feel if I was sitting in a park in Kyiv, torn from my home, my family, my friends, my country, small-talking with strangers.

In this crisis, there is the macro and the micro. The macro is the overarching systemic struggle for one small country like Ireland to help as many people as we can. But it’s the micro – the selfless acts of individuals and communities – that will help the macro. So to everyone taking up that civic and human responsibility, fair play.