Sir, - Recently, a student in one of the schools I visited on behalf of the Irish Refugee Council asked me why we have refugees in Ireland. I tried to explain the implications for Ireland, a colonised nation, now in a trading bloc with European colonisers whose general misrule has left most of the world and particularly Africa unhinged. I wondered if I was correct in my explanations. Reading that excellent article by Vincent Browne (Opinion, October 20th), erased my doubts.
The alarm bells regarding immigrants and refugees were ringing loud and clear towards the end of the last decade. The then EU commissioner, Jacques Delors, warned member states that if they didn't want immigrants and refugees in Europe they should invest in those areas of the world where people were moving from. At that time there were an estimated 110 million immigrants moving towards perceived areas of wealth in Western Europe. Unofficially, there were over 30 million refugees running from European wars fought in their regions, maintained by European military equipment.
It seems that EU members did not hear the alarm. A trickle of humanity now has become a torrent. The inevitable, tired solution of last week's Tampere meeting was security. It seems the only thing people can learn from history is that people never learn anything from history.
Immigrants follow investment. Much of their nation's wealth has been channelled via the international stock markets into the Irish and other European Union economies.
These refugees and immigrants now arriving in Ireland are in much the same condition in which our people have been arriving on distant shores for the past century. It's strange, but true, that they are experiencing much the same discriminating slogans that Irish immigrants experienced in the past and in some instances still do.
The finger-printing of refugees and immigrants in Ireland is not going to stop them coming. Neither is dispersal throughout the country. I wonder how we would feel if the one million Irish nationals living abroad were fingerprinted in those countries in which they now dwell?
There is need for effective preparation in local communities before refugees are assigned there. Ireland claims that Irish immigrants were an asset to those countries they migrated to. Are we prepared to say the same about the immigrants that are arriving in Ireland today?
The present numbers of refugees and immigrants in the global village is but the tip of a human iceberg. The Third World is being Haitianised at a rapid pace and the village television screen is telling people that life is better elsewhere. Ireland is part of elsewhere. - Yours, etc.,
Fr Bobby Gilmore, Dalgan Park, Navan, Co Meath.